Have you ever created an entire relationship in your head before going on a date with someone?
Unfortunately, living in our heads in this way can turn into obsessing, and render us incapable of feeling excited about anything other than seeing or hearing from that person. In other words, they occupy a space in our minds they’ve not yet earned!
This is albeit a story that will make some people go, “Wow, that’s a lot” a very common story. All of us to differing degrees have our version of this. We see someone we like, and it might be someone we see regularly, and therefore have time to consistently build up a story around, or someone we see once in a coffee shop and for that 10 minutes that we see them in the coffee shop, we are thinking about them and the kind of person they are, and what it might be like to talk to them, and where it could go. And all of this thought becomes incredibly unproductive, incredibly quickly because instead of engaging and participating in real life, it has us all of a sudden engaging in an idea of life, a future projection, a hope, a fantasy, a dream of what it could be.
sometime?” And he says, “I have a girlfriend.”
And you realize, oh my God, months, months of thinking, months of West Side Story, months of playing out this movie that never even existed, only to find out he’s in a relationship, or he is not interested, or he is leaving town next week forever. The people that get results, the people that find love faster are the people that actually go find out in real life instead of asking questions in their mind. And that means being this like stream of water that’s just flowing. You can’t be stopped. I’m just going to go find out. If I hit a rock, someone says no to me, someone says, “Oh, I’m not available.” Someone says “I’m not really interested” then we just flow around that rock and we keep going. What we don’t do is stop the stream altogether and just sit there and go, “We’re just going to chill here for a few months and fantasize.”
That is a recipe for wasted time. And your heart can repair itself. Getting a no, getting a rejection, getting your heart broken, the heart can repair, people get their heart back. The thing they never get back is their time. That is the thing that you will never ever have returned to you. So all of that time fantasizing is wasting the most precious resource you will ever have. And if you want to find love faster, you have to be willing to discard the wrong people quicker. And that means going and finding out in real life. Now, that may be disappointing to actually find out what you might have with someone, to actually find out where it could go or won’t go can be very, very disappointing.
So there’s that fear, and I think that the close cousin to that fear is a kind of disappointment in some way with real life, or a reluctance to engage with life on its terms, reluctant to be present with life. There’s some similarity between it and the person who jumps out of every relationship after six months, because every relationship never lives up to this romantic ideal they have in their head. It sort of becomes an insult to people who are married for decades and weather the storms together and go through difficult periods, and come to make peace with each other’s flaws, and they get through the hard times and the arguments, but they come out stronger. They come out these sort of war wounded veterans who love each other so much and have this badge of honor in their marriage to show for it because they’ve been through all of that. They didn’t bail.
And there are people that just always bail the moment it’s not perfect because they’d rather live with the idea of this perfect relationship in their head than participate in life on its terms. Sculpt a relationship the way that a great book is sculpted by shitty paragraphs and average writing that we work on and we make better and better by doing it. There are no points in life for winning in the fantasy world. But if we can be an active participant in life, if we can see someone and rather than live with the idea of what it could be with that person, we can go and get a yes or a no and then proceed or move on accordingly. If we can do that, then life will be kind to us in bringing us love faster. But if we stall because we become addicted to the fantasy, then we are liable to be condemned to that fantasy, to become a prisoner to it for the rest of our lives.
Stop guessing, stop assuming, stop fantasizing, stop future projecting and give yourself a new motto. Go find out. If you want to know if someone could be someone in your life, go find out. If you want to know if they’re attracted to you, go find out. If you want to know whether you could have a date with them, go find out. End the fantasy. Participate in real life. The results when you get them will be real.
Comments
Post a Comment