We can get so picky that we forget how much agency Dating vs Relationship Mindset. We actually have when it comes to finding a connection with someone who’s a good fit for us.
This week, you’ll learn how to find just that.
How has this week’s video shifted the way you look at dating? I’ll be reading the comments, so I’d love to know your thoughts!
When we constantly almost applaud the fact that, “I’m just too picky. My problem is I’m too picky,” if we’re not careful it becomes another way of saying, “I’m kind of a judgmental asshole.
Well it’s interesting, Steve, there is an article on the BBC that talks about Lovinga the idea that people aren’t actually as picky in reality as they think they are when describing who they would date. Research shows hidden biases. We will actually give people a chance even if they don’t quite meet our criteria.
I think that’s interesting because dating apps no doubt make us much more picky than we are in reality. And I think anyone can run this experiment. If you imagine going on a dating app and how you swipe through. People so liberally in such a kind of laissez-faire fashion. And then consider how you are if you’re at a party and someone introduces you to someone.
Dating vs Relationship Mindset
Or they’re a couple of inches under the height that you’ve decided you want for yourself. And that becomes a reason not to choose someone. And that’s what’s really interesting. Is that perfect partners aren’t picked in the margins. If you met someone. Who is a couple of inches under what you thought you wanted the person’s height to be, and they ended up being so many amazing things in a relationship, and you had an amazing time with them, and chemistry, and whatever, the chances at that point of you walking away because. They’re not quite the right height or the height that you’d predetermined was important, it’s almost never going to happen.
Or I would argue, if it does happen. Then you’ve got to start looking inward and saying, “OK. What’s happening with me that I am treating my love life like a thing to be optimized instead of finding someone. Who is an amazing partner? If I find a fantastic partner. What’s going on with me that I am optimizing in this way, that I’m still telling myself it’s not quite right because. They don’t have this thing or that thing?”
The Partnership
One of the phrases this article uses is, “It’s not about the partner you choose, but the partnership you build.” Which I think is extraordinarily important. Now, I don’t think that you can just choose any partner. We have to choose a partner with the right stuff, and then look at the partnership Lovinga.Com we’re building with them and see if the partnership is one that is meeting our needs, if the partnership is one that can make us happy. But that’s a very different thing from spending our whole lives optimizing in terms of the partner. It says here in this article Steve, “Maybe it’s not that helpful to search and search for a partner who looks good on paper, but it is helpful once dating someone to look for early signs that the relationship is turning out to be healthy and supportive.”
That I think is a real shift away from whether someone meets all of the criteria we thought we wanted. Some of which are hangovers from. When we were young and had this shopping. List of unimportant things that someone had to be, and we never. Actually revisited that list to see how many of them were important. Now, I do think that the person we come across in life. That is going to make us happy has to be our version of special or a version of special that really appeals to us. But the idea that we are going to objectively optimize to the point. Where the decision is just made for us by fate, or feeling, or destiny, or whatever you want to call it, is a really, really destructive notion because it removes agency from us as people.
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Agency in decision making, whether it’s a person, or a career, or a place you want to live. Agency is saying, “I have a role to play in choosing something and making it spectacular.” My job is not to travel the world and then when I just feel, “This is the place I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life.” Dating vs Relationship Mindset and settle there. It removes any agency from us. And it’s making a decision . . .
I think this is a very missed point in so many things, and I’m not the first one to say it. But making a decision, exercising that agency, is something that imbues a situation with meaning. That you chose that thing, that career, that place to live. That person, and then decided to go all-in on it, there’s beauty in that. That is the thing that imbues it with so much meaning.
