Dating : I’m In Love with Who I Want You to Be

At one time, if you’d asked me what was wrong with my past relationships and previous partners, I’d have listed a litany of their sins and faults: infidelity, abuse, dishonesty, and more.

But the truth? The truth is what was really wrong with those relationships and those partners was this: I was in love with love.

I was in love with the idea of being in love. Having grown up with parents who are now married for almost 45 years, grandparents who were married nearly 70 years before they passed, and a high school best friend who is still married to her high school sweetheart 26 years later, I had plenty of examples of lasting relationships and strong love.

So of course, it makes total sense that I’d want that for myself. But I wanted it so badly for myself that I was more in love with love than I was with a partner. I didn’t want a relationship with that specific partner — I just wanted a relationship and that partner happened to be convenient.

And this is where the problem is.

When you’re in love with being in love, you don’t hold out for a solid, lasting love. You scrabble to find and hold onto the first hint of love you find — which means you settle for scraps and crumbs instead of having the whole feast.

And when you do this, you end up in unhealthy, unhappy relationships. You end up overlooking red flags. And you end up developing patterns that become habits so that you repeat these mistakes over and over again.

The good news is I was able to stop doing this. I was able to identify the patterns, break the habits, and get a healthy, clear grasp on what love and romance should be rather than what I wanted them to be. And if I can do it, so can you.

But how did I do it?

To this day, I fantasize about Patrick Swayze in his role as Johnny in Dirty Dancing. Healthy or not, I’d still jump at that chance.

But this is something a lot of us do in reality: we see someone and start imagining a relationship with them. And based on what? A few glimpses of them, some overheard tidbits of conversation, and if we’re really taking it slow, a date or two.

And when we imagine these relationships, we don’t just imagine the next few dates or the first weeks. Oh no, our romcom musical montage goes all the way through getting married and having kids or whatever our romantic whole enchilada might be.

But our feelings and imaginations don’t recognize the difference between fantasy and reality. So when we start envisioning this future, it can start to feel unbelievably real.

We build this person to be who we want them to be in our mind and ignore who they are in reality. We fall in love with our fantasy lover and ignore the lover who’s treating us like crap.

When I stopped focusing on the future, everything changed. When I stopped being so determined to get married (or remarried), so determined to find a relationship, and let each date simply be it’s very own thing with no expectations or demands, I stopped building fantasy relationships in my head before the appetizer arrived on our first date.

When I just remained present in the moment and didn’t try to anticipate the future, I gave myself the space to see my dates for who they really were — warts and all. And this allowed me to walk away much more easily when I saw even the tip of a red flag.

I spent a lot of years with an “ultimate goal” for my love life: marriage. Marriage was the Holy Grail of relationships. It was the natural result of a healthy, happy, real relationship and lasting love — or so I thought.

The thing about goals, though, is that they’re things we want to achieve. And usually we want to achieve them sooner rather than later. So I went on every date with the idea that I was looking for my future husband and the sooner I found him, the better.

Having a specific role to fill is good when you’re interviewing someone for a job. It’s not always so good when you’re dating. In fact, it can end up being a lot like trying to put a square peg in a round hole — and tossing away a lot of perfectly good square pegs just because they won’t fit.

These days, I no longer have this ultimate goal of marriage. Do I want to get married again someday? Sure, if I meet the right man and the circumstances are right and it’s what we both want. But I’m also open to merely living with a long-term partner, having a series of short-term relationships throughout my life, casually dating permanently, and even taking breaks from dating and relationships at all from time to time.

And this allows me to see people for who they really are instead of just looking for the things about them that fit the mold I want them to fit. Instead of trying to confirm they check a box labeled “future husband,” I can instead decide if they’re someone I would even want to be friends with, much less spend the rest of my life with.

I love a good romcom and there was a time when I devoured romance novels by the handful. But here’s the thing about movies and books: they’re not real. Nothing about them is ever real. Even the true stories come with the disclaimer that some events have been fictionalized or dramatized — meaning if it wasn’t juicy enough, they made it juicier.

And in those movies and books, there are a ton of unhealthy behaviors that we begin to associate with love. Things like:

· Being total opposites who fight all the time and then fall in love

· Borderline abuse

· Outright abuse

· Possessiveness and jealousy

· Dating the “bad boy”

· One person chasing another indefinitely because they’re “meant to be”

· Someone making a huge sacrifice or other major display to prove their love

And there are other things that we see in these movies and books that might not be unhealthy but also aren’t always so great in reality, like:

· Friends who fall in love

· Exes who come back together

· Secret children

The thing about these behaviors is that when we start to associate them with love, we make excuses for them in reality. And while there might be a time when some of these behaviors might be reasonable (keeping a child a secret from an abusive or addicted parent or moving to another country because your spouse has a huge opportunity, for example), the way they’re portrayed in books and movies is not.

I had to learn to enjoy these books and movies for exactly what they are: entertainment. They aren’t user’s manuals to finding love.

One caveat to this: Sometimes you do get the big display of love in the form of the rose petal path to the bed or the splashy marriage proposal. But the key is remembering that the reason these are considered such big displays is that they don’t happen all the time. They’re the exception rather than the rule and that’s what makes them so special when we do get them.

And not getting them doesn’t mean your partner doesn’t love you.

Love should not be about scoring points and making sure you remain equal. But it also shouldn’t be one-sided with only one person doing all the work. And all too often, my relationships ended up being one-sided.

When my partner would slack off, I’d pick up their slack. I felt like if I could just keep us afloat long enough, eventually they’d step up and do their part and maybe even more. Of course, you know what really happened.

Sometimes you have to take a step back and let the other person show you who they really are in a relationship. You have to put everything down and wait to see what they’ll do. And if they don’t do anything, you need to take a long hard look at what that means.

When I stopped giving more than I got, I was able to see more clearly just what it was I wasn’t getting. I was able to see just how little my partner did, how little they really cared, and how unhealthy and lopsided the relationship really was.

Once I could see that, it became a lot easier to walk away from a partner who wasn’t really trying to be a partner.

Of course, it’s possible to go too far with this and end up being the partner that doesn’t put in any effort. So it’s important to remember that this isn’t about forcing someone else to do all the work. It’s about not picking up the work they should be doing. It’s about doing your part, and only your part, and watching to see them do their part. And if they don’t? You walk away.

Real love isn’t about loving the idea of someone. It’s not about loving their potential, or who you want them to be, or who they claim to want to be. Real love is about loving the person in front of you, exactly as they are, complete with flaws and problems.

Healthy love isn’t a volatile mix of two people. There will be moments of passion, but mostly healthy love is quiet because it’s two people who accept each other as they are and work together to build something stable, lasting, and happy. There aren’t constant arguments and dramatic arguments.

If you want to find real love, look at the real person in front of you. Accept them as they are. If you can’t accept them as they are, then any “love” you convince yourself you feel for them isn’t real.

It’s okay to have standards and expectations of the person you want to be in a relationship with. The key is in accepting when someone can’t meet those standards and expectations and being willing to wait for someone who can.

Wendy Miller is a Single Mom Coach & meditation teacher. After years of settling for abusive and otherwise toxic relationships, she began using meditation and other tools, to heal herself, set boundaries, and only engage in relationships (romantic and otherwise) that bring her joy. She wants to help other single parents find the love & happiness they seek, including and going beyond romantic love. She lives in Florida with her two sons, where she homeschools while solo parenting, while surrounded by what feels like a zooful of animals.

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