Dating vs Friendships?

Geli, help please!

After my divorce, I’ve been lonely and dating off/on, but have given up the dating scene as I find it a waste of time and money; plus I found I was attracting the wrong type of woman. I feel maybe I should just be myself and get on with life ….

However, I think I love someone I dated last year. After praying the soul ties prayer I still think of her often, ….

Don’t know what to do?

Read the reply:

Dear Don’t know what to do,

It’s so easy to get mentally into this mode of, “I’m on my own, I should have a partner, I should have a romantic involvement, I should do some dating, ….” However, that mode can lead to serious frustrations, as you have experienced, creating all sorts of unnecessary pressures.

I suggest a healthier way of enjoying life for right now: build some nice friendships. Yes, real good friendships. It is possible to be good friends with the opposite sex without any romantic or sexual involvement.

The benefits? You get to know yourself in a different light. You get to know how women behave, feel and operate outside your own romantic/partnership. You’ll find when you become friends with a woman without the ‘we’re and item’ and she can talk about how she sees the world of men and may allow you to get privvy to her romantic relationships, you’ll learn a lot. You’ll gain a whole different understanding of relating. However, you MUST keep the boundaries clear and not fudge it into romantic feelings, else the learning process and the benefits will be void.

The most import aspect of building a healthy friendship without the roller-coaster ride of emotions, is that you really get to know yourself first …. and of course the other person.

But let’s talk about you first. It’s funny how relationships sometimes brings up “stuff” in the other person that is actually our own. It’s like the other person is holding an invisible mirror to us which challenges us to be honest with ourselves and then deal with our own stuff appropriately.

During this phase of friendship I strongly recommend that you have solid MALE friends you can be accountable to!

How strong are you? Can you handle being yourself and honouring yourself and your personal development? Can you handle enjoying life and have good clean fun and develop good clean friendships? Are you man enough to be centered and with presence knowing what’s right for you during this phase of your life without slipping into pre-mature sexual activities?

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Re. the lady you dated last year. Forget about the soul-ties prayers for a moment (they have their place, but not here). You were not so much in love with her but rather she met some of your needs. To love someone deeply and unconditionally is a different process to what you experienced.

Identify those needs she met. Most people do not understand their own genuine needs, and when someone ‘accidentally’ meets those needs for a while, we are attracted to them. During the initial romantic phase of a relationship, people seem to have the knack of intuitively meeting each others needs, however if the core needs are not matched, the initial flush of feeling wonderful is soon replaced with reality: a mismatch.

Understand your core needs, first of all. Learn to then meet those needs through ways other than a romantic partner. This is precisely where a genuine and clean friendship is invaluable.

Lovingly,
Geli.