Flirting ¬ Dating - Contracting ¬ Expanding

This is part two of a three-part series. Part 1 is called Double Blind.

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This was my early experience of dating. It's one of powerful contraction.

What was not obvious from the start was that dating turned me into both actor and critic.

I worried about whether I was likeable enough, attractive enough, sexually adequate or socially smooth.

This evaluation anxiety made me hyper-aware of how I was coming across, which ironically made me come across less naturally.

I started performing rather than connecting.

And underneath all that sat raw vulnerability itself.

Even when I managed to get past the initial performance phase, letting someone truly know me felt risky.

What if they saw the parts of me I kept hidden? What if I needed them and they couldn't handle it or walked away?

What if surrendering control meant losing myself or getting hurt?

These fears made me keep emotional guardrails up even while I was pretending to let my guard down.

Trust was its own problem but connected to everything else.

It was the fundamental question of whether someone was safe.

Would they stay? Would they be honest? Would they care when things got difficult?

When I didn't trust myself to handle disappointment, trusting someone else became nearly impossible.

But I was blind to this.

I kept score of how much they wanted me versus how much I wanted them, checking for inconsistencies in their stories, monitoring signs they might pull away.

Sometimes things would go well: a compliment, a returned intensity, a hug or an invitation to go somewhere.

The neurochemical fog would sweep in to leave me high and confident.

Then the fog would lift and the anxiety came rushing back.

So I ended up oscillating between wanting closeness and building exits. Sometimes in the same day.

It was exhausting precisely because my nervous system was treating romantic uncertainty the same way it treated physical threat.

That history doesn't have to resonate with everyone but I suspect some of you are nodding.

We are hilarious.

The good news is we can learn another pattern.

There is a way out of this maze we didn't build or choose.

Expansion. The opening out into a new pattern.

The key change for me was learning that safety is in my body, not in my mind.

That if I lay down on a bed, closed my eyes and massaged my chest or whole body, I could bring myself back to safety through my breath.

I could remind my nervous system that I was safe.

Sometimes in five minutes I could slow the swirling debris of anxieties and bring myself to emotional regulation.

Some days are harder.

Part of this process was very gently allowing myself to feel the fear in my body.

To gently let all of the emotions surface, be felt and drain away.

When it became too much I would flee back to my heart for grounding.

Another key was trusting my future self.

I don't have to solve every problem or imagined potential problem right now.

My future self is quite capable of handling that. In fact, my future self is always more capable. How do I know?

I look backwards at all the quirky, flawed, funny, vulnerable, loveable, foolish versions of myself and find this one more capable.

That's always been the trajectory. Always more capable.

Yet when I look forward I somehow convince myself that the future me won't be able to cope.

I'm a magician, an easily deluded one.

Another key was understanding that no matter what the outcome was, I would be able to handle it or cope with it.

Whether this flirting, dating, mating game succeeded or exploded in my face, I would be OK.

That I have coped with every single disaster, disappointment, catastrophe and misery from my birth up until this moment.

Yet I attempt to convince myself that I would not be able to cope with this one.

God, we are funny. And cool and ridiculous, brave and afraid, capable and falling apart in a roller coaster of complexity.

By far the biggest shift was the understanding of love not as a commodity to be traded but as a state of being.

I am love. It is the core of my being. I was born as love.

And while there may be some dirt and scars on that original sparking jewel in my chest, it remains beautiful, bright, warm and whole.

The suggestion that it could be broken or damaged is a misunderstanding delivered from outside.

This internal source of love is not an argument against interdependence, tenderness or needing another human to hold or be held.

It is an argument against self-abandonment and emotional scarcity I learn in childhood.

This did not mean I no longer needed people. It meant no one person was the sole keeper of my worth, safety or permission to exist.

Once the shift came, the concept of love as a commodity began to dissolve.

I have an unlimited supply of love inside my chest. So do you. I just never knew it, never felt it or saw it.

But once you do, the anxiety around the flirting, dating, mating game becomes less avalanche and more trickle.

Anxiety doesn't go away.

It just stopped overpowering my psyche and sat on the edge, occasionally catastrophising until I gently put it in its place.

The last outcome of this change in seeing, feeling, experiencing love is profound.

If you are love, and you most certainly are, even if you don't yet feel it, then you don't have to chase so hard.

The grip is softened.

The game is more relaxed because safety, certainty in the deeper self and resilience to any outcome soothe the fears and allow a new kind of vulnerability.

This leaves us with one task. Discover love within ourselves.

To investigate this possibility with enthusiasm and an open mind.

Could it be true that the love we spend our lives begging for is already alive inside us?

What would we exchange for such a liberation?

The belief that another person must choose us before we can choose ourselves?

How much of this life is spent chasing what may already be present inside us?

How would our lives look from this radically changed perspective?

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Perhaps you think this idea is radical. But it's neither new nor entirely mine.

I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.

Even after all this time The sun never says to the earth, “You owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.

Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living in better conditions.
— Hafez

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.
— Rumi

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person;
it is an attitude, an orientation of character
which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole,
not toward one “object” of love.
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Love gives naught but itself
and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
— Kahlil Gibran, “On Love”, The Prophet

Love is a state of Being.
Your love is not outside; it is deep within you.
You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you.
It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.
— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over,
and uniting with another …
it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen,
to become something in her/himself,
to become world,
to become world for her/himself for another's sake.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Love is the very physical structure of the universe.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

So now I have brought some of you to the edge of a potent idea.

That you could potentially be love itself.

Most of you will ask:
How do I make this leap?
How do I discover if (or that) this is true?

That will be part three. The Ground Of Our Being