Everyone spends a huge amount of their lives, tantalized by love, either by looking for it, trying to keep it, or trying to get over it. We have more opportunities to meet people, we have more disposable income, more leisure time than any generation before yet finding love seems so elusive to so many.
Martha Beck writing for Oprah.com (Living, November 2007) notes that today’s dating game is based on the concepts of scheming, flattering, and playing hard to get. These behaviours are all based on a model of love-seeking where the idea of romantic pursuit is a type of predation, a hunting experience – the goal of which is to capture. The predatory model of dating has even infiltrated the words we use. The kind of question you will most likely be met with when you next meet up with your friends is “Did you pull last night?” You might have also heard people talking about ‘dressing to kill.’
The current and very popular dating advice you find is based on this philosophy of “hunting” and there are a myriad of books and websites and online forums that claim to teach you and give you tips on how to successfully ‘hunt’. You can attend courses on ‘how to flirt,’ you can read the books that tell women how to manipulate men (who are supposedly from Mars) and they tell men how to manipulate women (who are supposedly from Venus) and there is never ending stream of information on “how to have better sex.”
“No dating, thanks, just sex” seems to be the modern attitude that Karen Arnold came across as she studied the dating culture of young new Zealand women. Writing for the Sunday Star Time (02 March 2008), she concluded that the dating culture is dead and instead young New Zealand women are regularly getting drunk and cruising around in parks looking for men to have sex with. "There's a new kind of mating,” she says, “where ritual sex is the point of entry into the relationship. . . There's no dating culture any more."
The modern dating advice reminds me of the zillions of popular diet books that claim to be the solution to losing weight while at the same time obesity is on the rise! What I hope you realise by now is that diets don’t work. And that is the secret behind the diet industry. Because they don’t work, people have to keep coming back for more and new and better diets. The dieting industry is making hundreds and millions off something that doesn’t work. As my personal trainer once said to me, “it is the only industry that is making millions because it doesn’t work!”
I don’t think it is difficult to see how the popular dating industry, like the dieting industry, doesn’t work either. One only needs to look at the divorce statistics, look at the relationships of people you know, look at your own relationship history, look at the number of people on dating websites. Just listen to how many conversations take place everyday about how people are fed up, frustrated with not being able to find happy and fulfilling relationships!
So not only is all this popular dating advice not really working but, in case you had not noticed, when it doesn’t work for you, then you must be the problem, not the product. There is a benefit, however, in you coming to this conclusion that something is wrong with you. The benefit, unfortunately isn’t for you, it’s for the dating industry. You see when you feel crap, because something didn’t work for you as it ‘should’ have, you are compelled to go back and try again because quite frankly, who likes feeling like something is wrong with ‘me’? So you go back and convince yourself that this new dating theory or this new love guru, will be the one that works for you because when it does work, you will have proved to yourself that you are, in fact, ok! The love and dating industry is the winner, you the customer are the loser.
Einstein is credited for defining ‘insanity’ as “doing more of the same and expecting a different outcome.” Don’t you think it’s about time we see all the modern hype about how to date, how to find the love of your life and ‘live happily ever after’ for what it really is? It’s about fuelling a lucrative industry – it’s not about what works in the real world for real people!!
Following Einstein’s theory then, isn’t it about time we rethink the dating game? Isn’t about time we realise the current model isn’t working. And isn’t it about time we start doing something different?
As Martha Beck concludes, “In my experience, the way of thinking that leads to successful relationships is altogether different. It’s focused on the idea that the way to find love is to become so much yourself that you find others of your own kind, with whom you can share this freedom.”
In my experience, too, as a psychologist and coach and in my own personal experience I have found that the formula for happy, successful relationships is: Create a successful relationship with yourself Create a successful and fulfilling life and You will attract successful, fulfilling and happy relationships – you will be the chooser not the chaser!
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