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#473 - Sometimes Things Don't Go As Planned

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Have you ever met someone online, had some great phone calls, and then when you finally meet, nothing? Or maybe a friend you'd developed feelings for flatly turned you down when you asked for a date, no discussion, no explanation?

You'd pictured how it was supposed to go. It didn't go that way. Welcome to dating.

Our ability to picture things, events, and conversations is incredible. It's also generally unreliable. They say 95% of what you worry about never comes to pass. Our imaginations paint a very rosy picture or a very distressing one, and rarely is either one reality. That cuts both ways. The disappointment you're bracing for is usually smaller than you think. So is the fairy tale.

The problem I see with so many people in the world of dating, myself included, is unrealistic expectations of how it's supposed to work. When I was going through my divorce, I told myself that within nine months I'd be with my soul mate, living happily ever after.

What I didn't understand yet was all the grieving and healing still ahead of me. Nobody explained that there are real mental, emotional, and sometimes physical hurdles to work through first, and that hitting them isn't a sign anything is wrong.

Looking back, most of that time was spent recalibrating my life. I had to sit with whether I'd done enough to save my marriage. Then I had to rediscover myself. We all make adjustments to who we are inside a marriage. We get used to someone in our space every day, someone to account for and be accountable to. As you unwind from that, you have to figure out which of those changes you actually like, and how much of the real you needs to come back.

As a general rule, it takes at least a year to find some sense of self again, and about a month of adjustment for every year you were married before you're really ready to date. I've shared that with hundreds of newly single people. Almost every one of them argued with me and said they were ready to date from day one. The most common excuse was that they'd been separated for three years and had done all their emotional work in that time. The fact is, the real work starts when the divorce decree is signed. And almost every one of them came back a year later and said, "Rick, you were right."

I don't tell you that to pat myself on the back. I tell you because I've lived it, and because the hurdle is the point, not a detour from it. There's no magic wand to skip it. You can speed things up somewhat by focusing hard on taking care of yourself in that first year. Beyond that, it just takes the time it takes, and that's normal, not a setback.

It also takes time to find the right one, and it should. Your next relationship should be better than your last. My nine-month timeline for finding my soul mate was unrealistic. So is expecting the search itself to go smoothly. Frustration, discouragement, a few mismatches along the way, that's not you doing it wrong. That's what the process actually looks like for almost everyone who ends up somewhere good.

You don't have to do this alone. I've lived it, and I've taught it for more than a decade. If you're recently divorced, or you've been single for a while and something about the process keeps tripping you up, book a free Discovery Call and let's talk about what's really going on.

Blogs

#473 - Sometimes Things Don't Go As Planned

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