Relationships aren’t like friendships.
Where I can spend weeks or months on the same topics and interests. Almost flatting out. Never growing much.
I can make friends out of convenience.
Maybe we take the same classes, or we work in the same place, or we play in the same team. Eventually, just out of seeing each all of the time, a “friendship” develops.
But romantic relationships aren’t like that.
I can’t just jump in with someone out of convenience and expect it to work.
Romantic relationships need a goal. They need a purpose. They need a why.
Or else they quickly die.
And I become a serial monogamist. Jumping from one relationship after another.
I need to be more deliberate about my love life. As the 75 year Harvard study on happiness has shown, the biggest predictor of happiness and personal fulfillment is love.
So how do I be more deliberate with love? It’s simple: I need to know what I want. For me. For my life.
As Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said, “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
What do I want from Life?
Before I spend months or years chasing a romantic partner(s), I need a deliberate process to identify what matters to me, my values and goals.
I need to ask myself:
- What’s most important to me?
- What do I want those closest to me to remember me for?
I also need to know what my goals in the most important areas of my life are. Here is an example of what my main goals in life:
- Spiritual: Reach the peaceful state of enlightenment
- Physical: Master advanced calisthenics
- Health: Live a long life full of energy
- Emotional/Relationships: Build a large, diverse, loving network of relationships with people I feel connected to
- Work: Teach what I learn to others and build a community that follows those teachings
- Financial: Make enough money to become financially free
- Purpose: Live a life full of meaning and usefulness
Know that I know what my values and goals are, I need to know what type of partner would help me get to where I want to be.
Since I want to do all these things in my life, I’ll need to find a girl who’ll help me with that.
She needs to help me carry some of the burdens of breaking free from a “normal life”, while also having the resilience to endure the struggles that come with starting with nothing and not knowing if you’ll make it or not.
In this journey of deeper dating, I want to find someone to has allows me to be more comfortable being myself while also challenging me to grow. I want to share this journey with someone who wants to do the same.
Type of Partner
As Chase Amante wrote in an article, What to Look For in a Girlfriend, the type of partner to look for is different for everyone. To help with that, he suggested that I should ask myself these questions to know what to look for in a partner:
- Comfortable vs. Stimulating: Is she more quiet, yielding and calm? Or is she more lively, passionate and vivacious? Is she more shy and soft or is she more aggressive and confident?
- Girly-girl vs. Tomboy: Is she more feminine and has almost entirely female friends, and doesn’t “get” men? Or is she more masculine, has mostly male friends, and is interested in what men are interested in?
- Partner-in-crime vs. Romantic: Would I be happier with a girl who’s involved in many things in my life or do I prefer one who is more independent and has her own life?
Conclusion
I will no longer be blinded by attraction and jump into a relationship with the next girl I love.
Having the right partner in my life is important to my happiness, and it’s one of the biggest influencers on the direction my life will take.
I have to make sure that I don’t leave this part of my life to chance. For it is better to be alone than to be with someone who’s going to drag me down.
Source:Quora