24. Are you dating in a dream or seeing what’s real?

We’re programmed to seek approval as children. And even though we’re now dating as seniors most of us haven’t really grown up. We’re still seeking approval nearly all the time. I’m not asking you to believe me. Just look around at your friends, and maybe your own life, and you’ll see it.

One way our approval-seeking shows up is when we’re afraid to confront reality. Jolene is an acquaintance who was single again for many years and then met and fell suddenly in love with a man she thought she knew. They dated a short time and married. It was an immediate disaster. It turns out he was an expert at hiding his true personality and playing the role of the man Jolene wanted. And she was an expert in not facing the red flags she was seeing because she wanted his love and approval, and marriage.

She told me that while they were on their honeymoon he became a different man than she’d known, and after three years of emotional abuse and fear she was finally able to get out of the marriage. She was then leery of dating because she didn’t trust herself to know truth from fiction. But wondering whether you can trust someone isn’t the problem. You don’t have to rely on someone to be authentic. We can always trust people to just be who they are, at any moment. No, the problem is not a matter of trust, it’s a matter of seeing clearly.

There are red flags when things happen to people like Jolene. Why don’t we see them? Because we don’t want to. Maybe you’ve ignored the flags yourself. I have. The euphoria of being in love blinds us to reality. We create dreams in our heads and fall in love with the dream. As seniors it’s easy to do. We’re older and we don’t want to live our later years alone. Here comes the rescuer on his white steed. That’s what we see, the shining armor and the white steed, or the glittering princess. We love the dream-person we want to be there - the one we’ve made up in our heads, the one we’ve fantasized and painted in beautiful colors.

It’s another way we add our stories to what is and create a lot of pain for ourselves. How can we see reality instead and avoid all the suffering? We see it by simply looking, without interpreting or putting our own projections on what is. We always know when things don’t feel quite right in our dating. We can stay on our emotional high by reliving our fantasy over and over again. Or we can stop and just witness life from a place of awareness.

Then ask ourselves, Am I seeing reality? Or am I creating dreams in my head? If you’re buying into your self-created dream you know it’s going to bite you later, guaranteed. The price for short-term elation is  long-term disaster. Do we want to dance in our dating fairy tale world and wake up too late? Or do we want to grow up and see what’s real?