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In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk about shifting focus from looking for Mr or Ms. Right to becoming Mr or Ms. Right.
In this podcast you’ll find:
- Some people have an idealistic perspective of how love/relationship should look.
- They also have an idealized perspective of how developed they are as opposed to those they keep attracting.
- Some say that conversation is awkward for some Millennials because they haven’t built the skill of interaction without a platform like Tinder or Facebook.
- If your goal is to find someone you can love, what can you do to make that happen?
- There is a massive shift when you stop looking for Mr./Ms. Right and start focusing on becoming Mr./Ms. Right.
- If you feel like you’ve arrived but you aren’t attracting similar people, then ask yourself if you have really arrived.
- You will attract people at your level. Get accurate about where you are.
- Create a list of all of your ‘requirements’ in a spouse.
- What level of intimacy are you desiring?
- Are you matching the requirements you have for others?
- When we are younger, we tend to place physical attributes high on the list.
- As we age, we start to recognize that the nonphysical becomes essential.
- Attraction isn’t an option. It just happens to us.
- Social Sexual Imprints podcast
- Once we permit ourselves to have a broader spectrum of attraction, we start eliminating the laundry list of requirements.
- Do you allow society to influence your requirements for a partner?
- Sometimes we attract bad situations into our life.
- We get what we put out.
- If you are in a troubled relationship, what can you do to become a better person?
- Do you actually want a relationship?
- Or is your laundry list of requirements a shield against building a relationship?
- Relationships can become a mirror to all the work we haven’t been doing.
- Nothing can tell you you’ve arrived.
- There is growth that can happen within a relationship that cannot occur outside of a relationship.
- There is also growth you have to do on your own, outside a relationship.
- The work to become better versions of ourselves is always there waiting for us.
- “When I stopped looking they showed up.”
- When you stop focusing so hard on finding that person and start focusing on who you are you become attractive to others.
- Become a magnet for the person you want to attract.
- If you want to attract an empowered person you need to make sure you are empowered.
- If you want to attract someone who is physically fit, you need to match that yourself.
- Looking for a love relationship is looking for a peer relationship.
- Shift from an outcome frame to a process frame.
- Stop focusing on the outcome and focus on the process that is involved in attracting the person that is right for you.
- If you are still single and you are working on yourself, that doesn’t mean that you still have more work to do.
- Sometimes there is the concept of wrong place/wrong time.
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8 comments
I know that I still struggle with issues of self-esteem, but I also know that I’ve come a long way over the years in terms of self-acceptance and personal growth. I don’t look for a partner to “complete” me, and I know that good relationships take work. What I really have trouble with is the feeling that I’m running out of time. I’m almost 34 and I always wanted to have a child and family. That is seeming less and less likely as the years go on.
I know I still have work to do, but I always will! I just want someone I can learn, and grow, and love with.
So how do I marry the idea of being patient and working on myself, with the fear that I’m running out of time?
I’ve been doing all this self improvement to become Ms. Right, all my friends can see the change from the negative complaining “I hate myself, I only attract losers who need to be rescue when I’m the one who needs someone to rescue me from my misery of being single!” to: I’m completely happy alone and having my peace of mind, drama free life but i would appreciate someone who come to my life to enhance it and fall in love with (im 30 and I’ve never been in love, just infatuated) I’m positive I’ve learned that we attract who we are.
I entered in a relationship with a man who apparently was in the same mindset as me, I was so happy that “I arrived! I’m not attracting losers who need to be rescue anymore!!!” but of course 2 months in he started being the old me, I could literally see who I was before taking the year to myself and not dating anyone, I felt like I was reliving all the work I did with him. He started being negative, complaining, hater, hebhate himself, it was painful. He never hurted me, but i felt he was holding me back from all the work I did myself. He notice that and we decided to break up because he wants to become that person (not for me, we break up for good) he kept saying how amazing woman ive become and how he feels like a loser next to me.
I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not where I thought I was, whatvdoes this means? He is like the twin of my old self, it is as painful to see in him all the things that I didn’t like about myself and it makes me wonder why and what I am I suppose to do?
The quality of relationships, matching and levels discussions you put forward was interesting and resulted in reflecting what you meant by these terms. I think “level” is level of self-awareness or level of self-acceptance. We can’t find a rich and rewarding relationship if we don’t know who we are, in a deeper more meaningful authentic sense, outside of a developed social identity, and won’t find someone to accept us, if we don’t accept ourselves.
Regarding self-acceptance – when we are comfortable with who we are naturally this leads to living in an authentic way, aligned with what we value, prefer, approve of or believe in. This makes us socially visible in these exact ways. We will naturally then attract people who also live in these ways and value these ways of being by being recognisable and congruent – we will be these ways not only in the honeymoon period, we will be these ways all the time across situations, because it is true to who we are and how we are committed to living.
The situation we can inadvertently find ourselves in as we haphazardly grow up trying to make sense of ourselves within a context of confusion about how to be when in ambiguous social situations, social rejection and acceptance experiences is to default, to varying degrees, to acting in the world and in relationships like the person we think society or our parents, culture, religions, friends etc., wanted us to be, or we thought they wanted us to be, based on the times we were validated and affirmed for being acceptable or liked when we were those ways, or punished and rejected for being other sorts of ways. Maybe some of these ways of being are ok and others have blocked us from even working out what we think or what is aligned to who we are.
The first piece of work before looking for a partner, is to find ourselves; until this point we are set up to match with incompatible people; as we are not being ourselves in the first instance, we are just the selves that survived the social and relational experiences we had in this type of way. A relationship break-down can then indicate a break-through, as it is a realisation that the match is off, because we are off track within ourselves and have got into a poor match as a result. Working out where we were off track and why can be a step to working out who we are more clearly in that respect.
Social conditioning away from our individual self, is inevitable and can’t be avoided, we all get social training to live in the social world. Not all parents have validated individual aspects of their children sufficiently, or at all, nor has individuality been necessarily well supported during people’s school and peer experiences. We do have to integrate and incorporate social values and rules into our relational style to fit and belong socially to some extent so work with this process as a natural part of self-development. Some have more work to do than others later in life, as they have been forced to conform more absolutely or have been rejected more profoundly. Also, collectivist and individualistic cultures have different expectations that drive individual development differently.
The errors and the losses, the dissatisfactions and the conflicts in relationships, in the social contexts in which we live, all teach us how to find the balance and where we got it right and where and when we were off track on our own terms and why, and these reflections can shift and change as we grow older. As you say, it never ends at a defined point – as if at 21, for example, we get the key to adult life and emerge as a self-realised human who is complete and finished to do adulthood successfully.
This sense of who we are, and when we say we accept ourselves, what we mean by that, also needs to be flexible to enable growth beyond our limited ideas of ourselves at any time rather than rigid as a rigid definition prevents further development of potential or insights into the deeper parts of ourselves. The more serious the punishments or rejections were, the more intense the pressure to conform, the lower the support to even engage in this exploration and have it encouraged, the harder it can be for people to find themselves over their lifetimes – as they have little experience of permission or support to be themselves. We could be those people to others or be in relationship with those people at times at work, play, friendships or personal relationships.
In principle, it sounds easy in one sense, to just work on self-acceptance and being true to ourselves, however it is very challenging because we’ve all had so many experiences of non-acceptance, or confusion about acceptance, of making sense of what it is based on and have tried, failed and succeeded, in such random and difficult to work out why, ways. Along with our ignorances, limitations, and biases from life experiences, are the other people involved’s similar issues, the circumstances at the time, the generational influences, the systems we were in and the way they operate, all sorts of factors are also influencing the outcomes, some we can’t see, or even know of at the times, or had any control over regardless of what we did, when evaluating these apparent successes or failures. It is not easy to define what is meant by quality experiences in relation to our relationships with others, however I do think self-compassion and compassion for others is important when we consider the reality for us all as human beings as well as the different lives we’ve all had and the difficulties that can emerge in relationships as a result. It would be good if children were offered education and support to develop good relationships at school so they were able to enter into the adult world with more to go on, than the examples of adults around them that were also not supported to work it out other than by trial and error.
I think one thing that you both have is the shared interest in these kinds of dialogues, in this personal growth work. If the other person in a relationship is not interested in this, regardless of the work you do on yourself, it can be hard to co-create a meaningful and satisfying relationship with them. The concept of matching in this way can also include matched interest in finding oneself in the context of a personal relationship / in life and agreement that the process is about co-creating a meaningful relationship through self-discovery or sharing personal insights and awarenesses. Some people, as you say, still think the myth of falling in love is all that needs to occur – as the love myth goes – love at first sight then live happily ever after / taking on socially prescribed roles and sharing tasks of daily living. Some people think that if you have to ‘work’ on a relationship, that is evidence you are not in a good relationship or are unwilling to share their subjective experience or are not even interested in exploring it for themselves. These preferences between people regarding how to relate within relationships or how to build and maintain relationships can be barriers as well. An unmatched belief about what sustains relationships or about the relationship process, regardless of matching on levels of personal awareness or self-acceptance, is also a ‘match’ consideration. The matching in this area, will naturally lead to a quality relationship experience and the capacity for further personal development for both parties and for the relationship I would think.
My experience of dating as an INFP- I’ve mostly been attracted to men who don’t want a monogamous relationship. This has lead to me having a string of casual relationships even though what I really crave is the type of deep and intimate connection that comes from being in a pair bond relationship.
I’ve realised that I’m often drawn to ENTP’s whose Exploration process shows up as them not wanting to commit to one partner because they get so excited about meeting/exploring new partners. Hopefully as I do more and more self development work I will attract Exploration users who want the same kind of relationship as myself.
I have heard Antonia (an ENTP) mention a number of times how much she loves INFP’s (my type). I would love to hear from any ENTP’s who find themselves drawn to INFP’s. I want to understand what it is about INFP’s that is attractive to an ENTP.
This is related to the topic of ‘young people relying on technological platforms in order to talk to each other’. I was just reading an article on the topic of social isolation, and a point that someone made was, ‘you almost need an excuse to talk to your neighbors now’ like it is no longer acceptable to randomly go to someone else’s front door without a reason for it, or have someone come to yours. This thought just popped into my head – I agree with the aforementioned statement in that things seem to be like that now, but ironically this is how I met my best friend. We were both 4 at the time, and she and her two older sisters came over to my house to say hi when my family moved in. 18 years later and despite not living in the same city any more, we still visit each other when we can.
This is also how I met someone in my apartment complex. I ended up with a letter of hers in my mailbox, so I knocked on her door to give it to her. I haven’t talked to her much since then because she works night shifts and I am also terrible at reaching out to/making plans with people, but it’s comforting to know that out of all the rooms of the complex at least one of them isn’t a complete stranger.
Also funny to me is that, yes, I am a millennial, but I resist that stereotype and tried to convince myself that relying on technology is not a technique I use to communicate with people – but it is. I use Facebook and sometimes Snapchat to get in touch with friends I may not have talked to in a while. And since moving to a new city, I use Meetup to find events to get involved in to allow myself to meet people and get out of my apartment. Perhaps this access to technology has encouraged me to be even more painfully shy than I would be without.
Regarding the more relationship oriented material, my most recent past relationship was high quality, but I would not be where I am today without our mutual break-up. I finally committed myself to healthier habits (eating better and working out more) and I’m proud of the progress I have made. I became too comfortable in our relationship to successfully take charge of these things (although part of it probably is that I didn’t prioritize these items as I was in school at the time).
And something which bothers me is that people talk about the idea of falling in love like all the magic will happen once that one person is found. But love can be cultivated and grown with anyone whether this be familial love, platonic love. Love can always be created, there is not a limited amount of love in the world. In fact, that’s how long term relationships work after the honeymoon phase – you have to be conscious about how to cultivate love within and surrounding your relationship.