I am quietly thrilled at how my life has changed since getting together with the guy in my life (otherwise known as the boyfriend), but naturally I’ve had a few moments of insecurity, and I’ve become aware that when it comes to new relationships, the person who poses the biggest threat, the biggest problems, is ourselves. Why is it that when we hold the ball of happiness, we have a tendency to to either drop it, or bounce it around like a hot potato? Fortunately, I’ve decided not to be a ‘dropper’ and hold on firmly to the ball….
I haven’t had a boyfriend for the best part of three years so it has been an eye opener adjusting to the addition to my life, yet not one moment of it has been negative, which leads me to think that how willing you are to relinquish some of your ‘Me-Time’ stems from how you view them and how much you actually want to be around them. It’s about whether you have the attitude that you are gaining so much more into your life, or whether you choose to focus on what you think you’re losing.
I’ve also come to realise that your own thoughts can be a danger to the relationship but that somewhere along the line I have become very aware of how our own behaviour, perception and attitudes can impact on a relationship. If we want to be negative, we will bring the relationship to its knees and sometimes we need to be logical rather than emotional, or coming from a paranoia tip because of past experiences. Very early in the relationship, I became perturbed when I hadn’t heard from him by a certain time as we were due to go out to a birthday party. For a little while, I got it into my head that he had decided to get drunk with his golf buddies or just plain decided that he didn’t want to go. The ‘all men are dogs’ thought took hold briefly and then something else crept in – logic and certainty.
Based on a combination of my gut feeling, logic and what I genuinely felt I knew about him even at this early stage, I knew that there was no way that he would stand me up, or change his mind, and that in actual fact, it was likely that he had fallen asleep after his big golf day. I took a deep breath, picked up the phone and dialled and after several rings he picked up, sounding groggy, confused and thinking it was 5pm, not 8.30pm! He was so apologetic and relieved that I had woken him up.
I learned a really valuable lesson that evening because it seems that there is a tendency in our relationships to project our previous experiences and our insecurities on to the current mate. A number (OK make it all) of the guys I ‘dated’ over the past few years are Mr Unavailables so it is the type of behaviour that I expect from my ‘type’. Naturally previous experiences and our insecurities are where we draw our own internal information from, but we forget that not only is the person in front of us an individual, and that the past is the past, but that sometimes we get things wrong and that ultimately if we have any common sense, after dating guys that are no good for us, we should surely be able to choose a good one and know it. This doesn’t mean that you throw judgement and caution out of the window, but if we haven’t made healthy choices in the past and have now moved ourselves forward, it makes sense to reserve judgement and at least draw from personal experience with the current mate and of course, your gut.
Your gut is your heart of hearts, that knowing feeling in the pit of your stomach and the voice of reason. Insecurity is a mix of the emotions, which can often run away with us and the voice inside our heads that doesn’t believe in you and trust the good feeling because it expects bad. It is easier said than done to trust or to believe that the man in front of you is different from the type of guy that you have been with, but we have to. The only way we can know that a man is different from your usual choices is by choosing someone that is different from our ‘type’ and making a concerted effort to break the pattern. As usual it comes back to us, because we can only rely on ourselves to put ourselves in the frame to trust by making better choices. Part of the reason why I started making different choices was because not only had I bored myself to tears with my previous ‘type’, but I had found some peace within as I had to confront my choices every day through writing for my blog and this site.
So everyday, even when I don’t see him, I’m making a concerted effort to learn how not to screw things up, because it turns out that we are more than capable of cocking things up without male interference. I can either be in a relationship with him and judge things based on him and the relationship’s merit, or I can live in the past and approach the relationship with the same beliefs and attitude that I would have with my previous type, which will mean that I might as well be going out with them instead of him. Somehow, I know what choice I’ll be making.
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