Almost eleven months has passed since I embarked on dating after not having done so for more than a decade. Thinking about my paramour's previous salient dating advice, I pondered what I had learned this past groundbreaking year. What advice would I give a seasoned woman who is ready to date again?
-Enjoy the process, even though it will have certain moments of devastating pain (and sometimes out of nowhere). Reawakening is a nice term for a slap across the face, a kick in the ass, or getting resuscitated. It means coming head to head with all of your obstacles-all those unresolved bad memories, poor judgments, stupefying decisions, entrenched resentments, nursed hurts, and other emotional issues getting regurgitated. Sometimes it feels like the biggest PTSD battle is with yourself over approval, control, and intimacy-all the time you are questioning whether it is him or you.
-Realize your support system may be invested in you not changing. Family and friends say they want the best for you but the longer one has been out of the dating scene, the more you become intertwined in their lives. In my case, my older women friends were especially 'concerned' about what I was doing, why I was doing it, and why I just couldn't be okay with being without a companion. Of course, this was done lovingly but it made me aware for the first time in years how powerful support systems affect the course of a potential relationship. I ended up declaring to my friends that I appreciated their concern but that I was going to continue to date, be sexual, and seek the possibility of having a male companion in my life.
-Decide how you are going to handle the demands technology puts your relationship. The hardest adjustment for me in this process was coming to terms with how much electronic communication has replaced good manners, polite behavior, and kindness with written bravado, callousness, and piercing personal attacks. And I am talking about myself here. Many times communicating primarily through this electronic jungle has brought out the worst in me and I am ashamed of things I have written in anger. Being raised pre-information age, looking someone in the eye and touching one another while actually discussing the problem was the way to diffuse escalating conflicts. With virtual communication comes more emotionally detached behavior. How easy it is to forget there is a person on the other end. The only good news is I've become adept at writing apologies.
-While trying to figure your way through the maze of defining your relationship, look at the behavior more than the language, both yours and his. We all lie to ourselves and others about what we're thinking and feeling, but most behavior is unconscious and revealing. Even if you're dead to the verbiage, your friends won't be. They'll be the first to give you feedback how your or your suitor's behavior is inconsistent with what is being said.
-Be patient with yourself, find solace and support where you can, and embrace that deconstructing and reconstructing takes time. And remember, the older one is time itself becomes a challenge. There's a lot of weighing and measuring in this process because no one is ever truly ready. More often than not the universe puts you front and center with your deepest fears causing you to question why even change. Thus change, even when welcomed, is anxiety producing. A friend of mine has joked I am going through adult onset puberty. Indeed, that is what is feels like sometimes-a hormonal firestorm of emotional and rational oppositions.
So, why put yourself through this? Something in me wants to believe it's possible to gain great benefit from being an intimate relationship with a man. If you're like me, you want to experience, for once in your life, a good male/female relationship. It's always easier to be cynical and jaded but far more courageous to face one's vulnerabilities. Does great risk reap great rewards? We'll see....
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