Intellectual Foreplay Question of the Week: How do your beliefs get in your way of what you want?
Love Tip of the Week: You can look for the dirt, or you can look for the gold. It all depends on which one you want to find.
What do they want?
Eve,
I do not get many responses to the emails I send. The online profiles always say "looking for honesty, romance, a gentleman,” but that is not what they want. I feel they want to be lied to, treated like crap, and a cheap piece of trash. What has happened to the romance, opening of doors, flowers, a phone call? What has happened to morals, a first kiss being fun? I was out of the dating game for a long time, and am lost. The open and honest approach isn’t working. Being a gentleman doesn’t work. What am I to do? Where are there descent women that want to go to dinner, see some sites, talk, and get to know each other? Where is the anticipation and enjoyment of the "first Kiss"? It is easier to go out in public, and take a complete stranger to bed then it is to have a conversation, and being of morals, that is not the path. I don’t know the rules of dating anymore. Please tell me, what has happened?
Thanks.
Aloha,
Wow, where to begin with such an impassioned letter! First of all, do you really believe that all women want to be “lied to, treated like crap and like a cheap piece of trash?” All women, or just a handful that you have encountered? Or was it just one? Did she really want to be treated like crap or did she just not have the skills to get what she truly wanted? Ask yourself, is what I just said true? How is that belief impacting me, and my ability to date?
What I am driving at here is that often people have a tendency to take one or two experiences and generalize it to all people who have something in common like race, religion, sexual preference or gender. That is how racism and chauvinist tendencies develop. You meet one or two people who are white, black, Hawaiian, Filipino, Tongan—whatever—who do something stupid and you apply the judgment that all people of that race are that way. Poof—racism is instilled.
In your case, you meet a handful of women who behave a certain way, you judge them and you then judge all women by that experience. Then, you get a bad attitude because of the negative belief you have taken on. You try to date, but you are looking at women as if they are insane or sleazy (by your standard). Since your mind’s job is to validate it’s beliefs, all you see is the worst in people and then you write to me to ask what is wrong with them. Can you see that if you let go of your generalizations and assumptions, your whole situation would change?
Here is the deal, if you stop assessing other people with judgments of “right and wrong” and instead assess them with “right or wrong FOR YOU,” you will be able to approach the dating game with a healthier attitude. This is a treasure hunt in which you get to say, “Not here, not here, not here…here!” Rather than, “Not here, the treasure must not exist!”
Consider this, when a miner goes into a gold mine, he has to remove tons and tons of dirt and rock in order to find a single nugget of gold, but a miner never goes into the mine looking for the dirt. If you approach dating the same way, you will not only be more successful, you will be more attractive and you will enjoy the journey so much more.
If you take this a step further along your own spiritual path and ask yourself what these women have been teaching you, perhaps you will discover the gift that they have brought you in your own process of determining what matters to you most so that you will recognize and appreciate her when she shows up and, even more importantly, what qualities you need to embody—or let go of— in order to attract what you seek.
I wish you the best,
