Dating : Change Your Rules, Change Your Life

“Life is a balance between holding on and letting go.” — Rumi

Do you often get disappointed or frustrated? Do you feel things never go your way and people don’t behave the way they should?

If you say yes to either of these questions, chances are you might be a perfectionist. One of the telltale signs of being a perfectionist is their extremely high expectations of themselves and perhaps of others, too.

Now, it’s normal to have expectations. After all, expectations are just our projections of what might happen in the future.

However, they may or may not be realistic, and I believe that our expectations are often inflated, regardless of whether we are a perfectionists or not.

What more, our expectations often show up as rules and standards we’ve set for ourselves and others, rather than projections or plans for the future.

Unfortunately, most of us aren’t aware of what those rules are, or that we even have rules in the first place.

For example, most people have rules — or a whole book of rules — on romantic relationships.

Some of these rules may include: I need to be respected, I need to feel loved and cared for, I need to spend all my time with my partner, they need to assure me of their undying love regularly, they need to remember my birthday and our anniversary, and they need to spoil me on those occasions.

The list goes on and on, and that’s why we can write a whole book about it. Some of these rules may seem important and reasonable (after all, who doesn’t want to be respected?), while others may sound a bit silly or trivial (such as wanting to be spoiled on special dates).

Regardless of the nature of our rules, the important point to remember is that we all have rules. For everything.

However, because many of us aren’t aware of our rules in the different areas of our lives (or that we even have rules in the first place), we get triggered when our rules are ignored or violated.

Also, the problem with having so many rules is that we think we have to tick off everything — or at least most things — on our wish list, before we can be happy. Or, rather, before we can give ourselves permission to be happy.

If you’ve ever sat down and made a wish list of all the qualities you want in your ideal partner, you know what I mean by having so many rules.

It’s little wonder that many of us are unhappy because we have a long list of prerequisites for our happiness.

One of my coaching clients, for example, dated a guy she met online. She was completely smitten with him. And according to her, he was perfect — intelligent, funny, thoughtful, honest, responsible, with no crazy ex in sight.

In other words, he ticked all the boxes, with one exception: he wasn’t much of a communicator.

As we dug deeper into her rules for relationship bliss, we discovered that one of her rules was that she needed to be in constant contact with her man throughout the day, 7 days a week.

For her, being in constant communication meant many things — she was important to him, he was always thinking of her, and he was serious about her and their relationship.

Driving Herself Crazy

The only problem was, he wasn’t really into keeping in touch on such a regular basis. It just wasn’t such a big deal for him, for whatever reason (Note I wasn’t coaching him, so I needed to take my client’s interpretations of his motives with a grain of salt).

Because of his lack of communication, she was driving herself crazy. She doubted everything — from his intentions, to the future of their relationship, and her own attractiveness and even self-worth.

Now, you can probably see the disconnect here between her and his rule on communication, and instead of simply accepting it for what it was, she was miserable because he didn’t follow her rule — most likely innocently.

And instead of just asking him directly or having a conversation about her concern, she was second guessing everything (and running to me to help her decipher his true intentions).

As a result, she couldn’t allow herself to enjoy all the other positive aspects of the relationship, such as his sense of humour and thoughtfulness when they were together in person.

We can have a big discussion about why and where rules come from, and break them down and work through them one by one. But that would take a long time, and personally I don’t think it’s necessary, unless you want to go for a deep dive into your psyche through therapy or coaching.

Why? The suffering we experience as a result of our rules being ignored or violated is just the symptom of the underlying cause of holding on too tightly to a value or belief. It’s the how, not the what, that we need to break free of.

In other words, the problem isn’t that we have rules, or even we have too many or too unrealistic rules, it’s how tightly we hold onto them.

“In the process of letting go, you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself.” — Deepak Chopra

After all, our rules are meant to keep us safe. They often come from a place of pain that we experienced, and we believe the only way we can protect ourselves from it is to make a rule — or several — so we never have to feel the pain again.

However, the rule or rules may be helpful at the time, but it’s not anymore.

It’s hard to let go of something that has helped us, or we think has helped us, but until we can do so, we remain at mercy of our rules and a victim of our past, instead of a creator of our future.

It’s time to loosen our grip on our rules and expectations.

It’s time to let go.