Valentine’s Day can be a challenging day for single people. But it can become a day of hope — if we resolve to ignore the bankrupt dating advice foisted upon us, and finally align our search for love with the tools of real intimacy. The following three suggestions may fly in the face of almost everything you’ve learned about dating — but they lead to real love.
Around the world, single people are taught that the the search for love is a race against time; a numbers game that favors the young and beautiful. That they must become more witty, charming and sexy, if they ever hope to find love and build a family.
Through mass media, they’re presented with a never ending stream of air-brushed, over-romanticized images of love. Then, they are invited to an endless banquet of new ways to meet — almost all of which are dehumanizing. At the end of the day, this soulless approach doesn’t lead to love. It leads to insecurity and desperation.
Why is it doomed to fail?
• It diminishes our sense of worth
• It makes us colder, less kind, more jaded. In service of our passionate goal, partnership, we throw our humanity — and that of our date — right under the bus.
• It converys an attitude of desperation, which leads us to make bad choices
• It instills fear and insecurity, which makes us judgmental of ourselves and others.
• It creates an unhealthy pressure to find “the one”
Instead of helping us embrace our authentic self, the singles world teaches us to avoid authenticity — in ourselves and in the people we date. Like those ugly fun-house mirrors, singles culture flashes distorted, haunting images at us — images of our own flaws and inadequacies, and of the inadequacies of the people we date. The solution is not to find our self-esteem within the walls of that hall of mirrors. It is to get out, and to find a better path.
Read more: PsychologyToday
