The Choice
Gathering insight into intentional dating—and into your own dating roadmap—is essential, especially in the early stages. Equally important, though, is recognizing what happens when you don’t act on what you already know. When your skills and practical tools don’t overcome familiar patterns, it can lead to frustration and repetition. Often we’re clear about what would suit us best—our values and desires—but knowing and believing are not the same. And believing is easier than doing. Choosing to act requires you to step into agency; it asks something of you that the familiar wound hasn’t yet accepted or been reshaped by. It requires you to believe in your inherent worth.
The process of choosing comes down to yourself. Romantic relationships and even friendships can be significantly more difficult for those with wounds influencing cycles of people pleasing, self abandonment and minimization of needs. What it sometimes comes down to is no matter how aware you are, the question becomes are you willing to choose what you need even if it costs the relationship or reshapes what you know of the relationship. Because sometimes it’s not that we are doing the dating process wrong but coming to a point where we engage with the familiar. What do you do when the familiar comes back around? The desire to be chosen? The subtle drive to transform to become worthy?
The desire to be chosen is natural. The abandonment of self for the sake of being chosen, well that is a wound. Being gentle with this reality is necessary. I think sometimes what’s difficult to accept even when we have the skills and tools to respond well in dating is that something deeper is needed emotionally that if not cognizant we might search for solely in relationships around us instead of within ourselves.
Accepting that you’ve forgotten yourself behind, well this isn’t a small feat but a vulnerable place of acceptance. Comeback…to listen, reflect on what you need. Maybe that looks like talking with your partner that you’ve neglected your needs in the relationship. Maybe it’s revealing to those around you that you’ve slowly silenced parts of you that are important for the sake of connection. Maybe it’s offering forgiveness for engaging with the familiar or finding a small way in your day to honor something that you need. What I hope it does not become is shame spiral, or a series of what ifs, or resentment towards the self. We make choices from our needs and sometimes we are simply still learning that our needs are needs and therefore important.
Whatever the choice, choose to be gentle with yourself.
I have also fallen into the familiar. Coming back to what I knew so well with not only my racing mind but my anxious body and my obliging yes. It’s hard when you’ve unlearned and learned new but when it becomes time to apply its like the skills go blank. In a moment of deep honesty and vulnerability with myself I created a series, “A Quiet Listening”. It's a series of short poetry style blogs that explore the unfolding of the subtle loss of self through subtle minimizations, questions, and the quietness of listening within to find yourself back. While it can be emotionally difficult to realize that you didn’t quite show up for yourself as you’d liked - I hope you find comfort in the fact that someday you did. That is just as beautiful. That is just as brave. Because you listened.
This is what I heard when I stopped trying to be chosen…