Four ways to make dating easier

Easier said than done but still

I am so hilarious for thinking that I have some sort of expertise in this matter after dating for like literally a month. But I like being hilarious, so here we go.

1- Dating is easier when I have no expectations.

It is easier for me to have no expectations because I am still subscribed to the concept of marriage, where I benefit from the emotional support and social credit I get as a result of being married. Because I already get some degree of support from my marriage, everything else becomes extra. A bonus.

I find that most people approach dating as some sort of bar exam. You feel like you need to study for it and perform very well and meet some criteria. This makes sense because, again, so many of us are subscribed to the institution of compulsory monogamy, where we believe that it is important for us to have social status and privilege arising out of participating in that institution. To that end, we look for “the one,” which requires us to pull out our checklist of things that we want in a human being.

Most people will fail to meet your checklist.

Even if you find someone who feels like “the one,” they will probably fail your checklist so abysmally that you will start questioning either the checklist or your love for this person.

This is because feelings cannot be manufactured. To say that you can find love through a checklist is like saying that you can accept yourself after you have accomplished certain things. Which is…a common thing a lot of us do. Which is why we love checklists.

I invite you to throw your checklist out the window. When we attempt to relate to the other person with the intent to discover rather than to evaluate, we end up arriving at fun surprises rather than un-fun judgments about the other person.

This doesn’t mean that we stop having non-negotiables. For example, I will not date a flagrant white-supremacist. Not just because of that one factoid but because there is a whole set of ideas and values that come with that identity that I am just not ready to ignore to relate to that person specifically in the realm of dating.

We are allowed to have preferences without making it mean that the other person is somehow bad for not falling within our preferences.

Most importantly, we are allowed to change our mind about these preferences. Or change our mind about anything else. When we have no expectations of ourselves, it’s easier to have no expectations of other people.

2- It’s ok to be both confident and insecure at the same time. Because fucking everybody is.

Confident vs. insecure is another false binary. We cannot help but be confident about the parts of ourselves we are sure about because we’ve had practice. Just like we will feel confident about things we have prepared extensively for. But we will also be insecure in some ways because we cannot possibly practice being confident about every single part of ourselves.

For example, I am confident about some parts of my uniqueness, especially in the way I think. That is the kind of work I do day in and day out. I am very insecure about how I look. Even if I may have gotten some practice in to appreciate my physical appearance, I have also been disproportionately exposed to all the ways I am physically deficient and the ways that relates to my sense of self-worth.

None of this is a problem for me. It simply is my truth at the moment. At some point, likely earlier on, I express my insecurity to the people I am interested in because it’s just easier to communicate that than pretend that I am confident in ways that I am actually not. It’s how they get to know the broken parts of me. I find this to be a practice of full and informed consent. I want them to know me because informed consent is important to me.

We typically try to hide certain parts of us because we don’t like rejection. But most of the time, when we reject the broken parts of ourselves so that we can be accepted by others, the rejection we experience by others when they eventually discover those parts of us will be even more difficult to experience.

Often times we go there because that is just part of the human experience. We go to difficult places. Whatever the case, the question for you here is- what is more important to me: accepting myself and being witnessed in that acceptance, or hiding myself and being witnessed in a way that feels incomplete?

3- However fucked up you think the other person is, remember how fucked up you are, too.

I notice a lot of people looking for “red flags.” I noticed myself doing this for a hot minute, especially when I thought things were too good to be true. When I did this, I saw that the ways the other person was “not good enough” in my eyes were really how I was making the other person responsible for my experience of the relationship.

For example, Dan and I have disagreements about raising our children. I *could* say that his methods are more “inferior” and make him responsible for how I feel about his approach to parenting. But my feelings about his parenting are not his responsibility. The question for me here is- where are my feelings coming from, and how do I want to respond to it?

My uncomfortable feelings around Dan’s approach comes from my need to be right and my lack of trust in his and my kids’ ability to experience their own uncomfortable emotions. Then I get to ask myself the question: how do I want to expand my capacity to trust them?

Similar in dating. Where am I needing someone to change their behavior to make me feel differently about the relationship?

This doesn’t mean that, when a problem arises between two people in a relationship, we need to just hold onto our thoughts and stew on it on our own. It means that we ask ourselves the hard questions on where our emotions are coming from so that we can respond to it truthfully. That may mean communicating a discomfort or a hurt to the other person so that you can become co-conspirators in creating a safer space for the relationship. Or it may mean distracting yourself from the problem for a minute by going to a pumpkin patch to clear your mind. It can mean anything.

So in the end, it’s not really about how “fucked up” we are but rather, how human we are and how different we each are in our approaches to any relationship.

When you find yourself in a pickle about a “red flag,” I invite you to ask yourself: what would truthful responsibility do?

4- Be aware of your assumptions.

We are wired to make assumptions about the other person based on what we notice immediately about them and the things they say and do. It is how our internalized biases manifest themselves.

When we are aware of the assumptions we make about the other person, it is easier to change our minds about it because we realize that those assumptions arose out of an illusion to begin with.

Here are the questions I invite you to ask as you notice your assumptions:

• What is something that I think is true but is actually an assumption?

• Do I want to dismantle this assumption, and what kind of work goes into dismantling it? Am I available for that work?

• What is this assumption telling me about what needs to be true in the world? Is there a different paradigm I want to re-orient myself towards?

• If I held this person in high regard, how would I choose to relate to this person in spite of these assumptions?

Sometimes, we are not available to answer any of these questions. Sometimes we just want to be disappointed. Sometimes we just want to be angry. Whatever is going on in our bodies, we pay attention to that first. If there was no right or wrong way to approach the assumptions we are making about other people, how would we respond to those assumptions?

-

If you think about it, these points apply to most of our relationships even outside the dating world. At the end, it is how we decide to regard the other person in a way that attempts to see the human being behind the labels and rules we are used to operating under.

I decide to be curious about the human being because these labels and rules keep me from the fun surprises that I get to experience of the ever-evolving human being.

We often keep ourselves from curiosity because we don’t want to be disappointed. But what if disappointment is simply a benchmark for how much you decided to give your curiosity a chance?

That is what I decide to do. I give my curiosity a chance and decide that I am capable of handling the consequences of heartbreak and disappointment. Because then at least I will have heard my heart beat.

I think this work is especially needed now when we have a hard time grasping that there is any heart left in the world. This is why your heart, right now, especially matters.

What would your heartbeat do?

**

You can find more of me at angela-han.com.