By Melissa Balmer
Copyright © 2006, Seduction Insider, www.seductioninsider.com.
So what does integrity have to do with no longer having bad dates? Why is it that often most blind dates are bad dates? Everything, absolutely everything – but first you’ve got to decide what the heck you want to accomplish with your dating life in the first place. This, of course, sounds obvious, but surprisingly very few people actually sit down and figure it out. Why? Here at Seduction Insider we believe a lot of it has to do with our obsession with the “Hollywood Love Myth,” that idea we have that without any real effort on our part someday, somehow, we’ll look across a crowded room and our eyes will lock with the man of our dreams and together the two of us will live happily ever after.
Unfortunately this doesn’t happen very often. What does happens for most of us is that we stumble through love lives that are a mixture of lustful crushes with men who break our hearts, or whose heart’s we break, nice guys that don’t quite do it for us but we don’t know why, and truly awful terrible dates with jerks that are only funny in hind site – a good six months later.
So we’ve got to get specific. It’s no use saying, “Oh, I just want some nice normal guy to be in a committed relationship with.” But when nice and normal turns up on our blind dates we turn our noses up because he doesn’t thrill us physically, he has terrible taste in music, and he doesn’t like our cat.
And we’ve got to let go of our fear of scarcity. There is no scarcity of single men. The number of single people in this country is fast closing in on the number of married people for the first time in our history – but you’d never know that by the way the media carries on. So sure, if you live in a small town there may be a scarcity of single men exactly your age available, but if you’re either willing to look outside your age box, or willing to travel in your quest, the opportunities are vast and plentiful.
Getting Specific
So many of us think “growing up” and becoming responsible means putting away our true desires, when really “growing up” and becoming responsible means getting in touch with just what those true desires are anyway. It’s time to get down to the very heart of the matter about what turns you on in men in the following six categories:
Mentally
Physically
Emotionally
Morally
Spiritually
Materially
Sometimes when we open ourselves to asking this question our mind comes up totally blank. It’s just too vast. So instead you can ask yourself:
“What don’t I want in these categories?”
For example, you may know that you just don’t want to go out with another “stingy” man materially ever again, or you may know that you never again want to date a man who’s irresponsible with his finances. You may be very clear that you never want to date another man who’s emotionally “needy,” or on the other side emotionally “detached.”
Whenever possible write out your “wants” and “don’t wants” in a journal or notebook. Once you start on this journey you’ll find that life will start bringing you examples to consider. You’ll be out to dinner with friends and the way a husband behaves to his wife will set your teeth on edge, or conversely, you’ll be watching a movie where the male star acts in a way towards his leading lady that touches your heart and moves you and you’ll think, “That’s exactly the way I want to feel.”
What This Has To Do With Real Life
Here’s the deal – the clearer you get on both what you want and don’t want in a romantic relationship with a man the easier it is to say “thanks, but no thanks” to spending time with men that you won’t and don’t enjoy. When we’re not sure what we want we say “yes” to invitations out of loneliness, boredom and pressure from friends and family to comply with their romantic ideals for us. We accept dates with men with whom we feel no connection, no chemistry and their manner of talking to us annoys us right off the bat – but we give in because they had the guts to call us up. We go on outings with men that we know in advance we won’t like, because we think we should be more open minded.
We should be more open minded – but always to that which really works for us, which touches our heart, which fires our libidos about men in general and the kind of romantic relationship we’d truly like to make happen.
Saying “no” doesn’t close doors for us when we know in our gut a guy just isn’t right for us, saying “no” leaves space for the right man to come in.
But what if we’re still not clear?
Dating For Information
Dating for information means that we go out into the dating world with the specific goal of finding out what we like and want. If we’ve had a series of failed relationships with a particular type of man we open ourselves up to dating the opposite sort of men just to see what we can learn. If we’ve only dated artists we open ourselves up to dating businessmen, if we’ve only dated polished salesmen we open ourselves to dating an entrepreneur, or even a tradesman. If we’ve only dated men older than ourselves we open ourselves up to dating men our age or even younger and vice versa.
We move forward into “dating for information” not with the idea of filling a void in our lives, or getting rid of loneliness, but in order to go on a voyage of self discovery. We don’t go into these dates to “land” a guy, we go into the dates to learn about ourselves – being very clear with ourselves that we wanted to stay connected to what we feel like the entire time, asking ourselves things like:
How does the way he communicates with me make me feel?
How do I feel about him physically, what’s going on with my body?
How do I feel about his morals and ethics? Do they mesh well with mine?
At the end of each date, no matter how it went, we’re richer with information about ourselves and the sort of men we’re really drawn to.
If the date went well we have the opportunity to say “yes” to the next one, if it didn’t we can happily say “thanks, but no thanks” to this man, or any others like him who cross our paths again and we’ll truly be on the path of “no more bad dates.”
