Something that many daters struggle with is what feels like the lather, rinse, repeat of their dating cycle. They really want to meet someone but their faith that it’s going to happen is dwindling because promising chats and dates don’t lead to a relationship. In this week’s episode of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions, I explain why our attitude to meeting people and believing that dating is like taking a relationship for a test drive is causing us to make the same mistakes time and again.

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• “I really want to meet someone” is too broad. Who do we want to meet and for what? If we’re chatting to people online, going on dates, ‘meeting’ people isn’t the problem.
• Interviewing really well. Charming, funny, saying all the right things, seemed to have so much in common, having a really good time, feel like we were connecting
• Some people pick up on discomfort, signs of incompatibility and code red alerts, and then talk themselves out of it. It’s like What if this can progress to a relationship?
• When we’ll pretty much go out with anyone who shows interest and then continue despite misgivings, that shows a lack of discernment. We care more about trying to ‘get’ a relationship than we do about co-creating a relationship with a partner we really want to be in a relationship with.

Who do you want to meet? What type of relationship do you want to have? And given where you want to end up, what do you need to look out for or how do you need to begin these interactions in order to line yourself up for potentially moving towards that kind of relationship?

• Who do you want to meet? What type of relationship do you want to have? And given where you want to end up,
• There are some people who’ve been in our life for a long time who we can’t even vouch for how emotionally available they are. Why do we convince ourselves that we know who someone is after a brief period of dating?
• The lather, rinse, repeat of a frustrating dating cycle is caused by repeatedly raising our hopes with misinformation that we’re using to make our dating decisions.
• In the job context, employers and employees understand that the first few months of the job is a probationary period before making a longer-term commitment. In dating, people mistake the early stages of dating prior to getting into a relationship for the ‘probationary period’. They think that what they experience while dating (or what they assume) is their version of trying before buying.

If you’ll override your intuition or play down your discomfort and red-flag behaviour with a veritable stranger, what will you do when you’re deeper into the relationship?

• Dating is not a means of enjoying a relationship without the ‘trappings’ of commitment because they’re two entirely different things.

Links mentioned

• The Recruiter Mindset and The Five Stages of Relationships (ep 145)
• Matching your actions with your intentions and words (ep 186)
• Efforting and dating anxiety (ep 130)
• Interest is a hypothesis (ep 160)
• Code amber and red behaviour and issues

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