25. He shouldn't be dancing with her! - really?

Jealousy: It's a huge issue in many dating relationships. Fear is what people usually experience when they’re jealous, and the way we often express it is in anger. We might think that by the time we’re seniors and dating, we’d be beyond jealousy. In my experience that’s not the case. I’ve known people in their 80s who feel extreme jealousy, and they suffer. If you’ve felt jealousy in a relationship you know what it feels like. Your body tells you in an instant. However, if we step back from the automatic responses in our heads, and question ourselves instead, we may find surprising peace.

When we feel jealous of our friend or partner in a relationship what we’re really saying is, You don’t have the right to do what you’re doing: You shouldn’t be so friendly to him, you shouldn’t be so flirty with her, you didn’t need to meet her for coffee, you shouldn’t have danced with him, etc. But what’s real here? What’s real is that they “did” do whatever it is you’re objecting to. The world is as it is. We can argue with it as long as we like and it’s still the way it is, including the people who populate it.

With our jealousy, however, we’re saying to someone: You shouldn't live the way you want to live. You’re supposed to live the way I want you to live. Isn’t that what’s going on? Is that what you’d call love? It’s certainly not freedom is it? And it looks a lot like coercion, force and manipulation to me.

We fear that Special One will move out of our life. So we make ourselves miserable trying to control them. On a practical level, does it work? Let’s review the scene: She does something and you feel jealous. You get angry with her. Now she’s supposed to love you… more? Oh, sure, that makes a lot of sense doesn’t it? “I’ll get mad at you and then you’ll really love me!” I don’t think so.

When we really look and admit it to ourselves don’t we see that life just is as it is? If we really had control over it, would many of the things in our life have happened the way they did? So if someone leaves you, you could just notice reality: They left. Then ask yourself, Can I know they should have stayed with me? Can I really know that would be best for them and me? You might see that you really don’t know.

Mostly we’re trying to find security where there is none. None… really. Your partner could get killed by a bus tonight. You could die of a heart attack before bed time. Let your lover/friend/partner be who they are and notice how you feel. The stress of trying to control is gone. What’s left is peace and inner joy. Isn’t that why you wanted a partner in the first place?

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer

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?

23. Is need for approval your senior drug of choice?

Have you ever watched yourself closely and noticed how much of the time as you’re dating that you may be seeking approval? It shows up often in very small ways – that phony smile, saying yes when you feel no, holding back your opinion for fear someone will disagree. In the dating world seeking appreciation and approval looms high on the list of needs for many people. When we think we need or badly desire a partner we’re willing to shape ourselves into pretzels to get her.

And no wonder we operate like that. We’ve learned it from the people around us all our lives, especially as children. We’re taught to pretend to like people we don’t like, to always be nice and polite and smile, even when we don’t want to. We’re programmed to be inauthentic.

But at this mature stage of life do we really need to continue to seek approval? Look how much energy it takes to be phony. Look at the stress it causes in you when you date someone you’d rather not be with because you don’t want to hurt his feelings by saying no. A friend of mine told me recently she was invited to a movie by a guy she’d just met. He wanted to hold her hand. She didn’t want to. Yet she did it anyway. Why would she do that? Because she wanted something more than she wanted not to hold hands. She wanted him to think she was a nice person. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a nice person. But do you really want to give yourself up so someone will think that about you?

Besides the stress of being phony we suffer an even bigger pain when we want someone’s approval: Life becomes an emotional rollercoaster. We’re up when they’re pleased with us, we’re down when they’re not. We’re really asleep when we drift through life without realizing that it’s our own thoughts that cause us to suffer. We think we need someone’s approval, we think we need another date with her, we think what they think of us matters.

Instead, what really matters is reality - to see that we have no control over what someone thinks. Instead we could just notice that they think what they think, just as it rains when it rains. Life happens as it does. When we’re not attached to it but simply watch it from pure, clear awareness we lose the idea that we have to lie or manipulate or force things to make them go our way. Then we don’t care what they think of us. And where does that leave us? It leaves us with the ability to be honest, real, authentic, free, and happy. That’s love. That’s a gift. And strangely enough, that’s what draws people to us.

22. Pain: He didn't do it like her late husband did

Senior dating is just another facet of life. I keep talking about the reality of life, or the truth of life, which just means seeing things as they are, without adding our own story. The story is our analysis, interpretation, judgment and so on. And the story is always what causes us to hurt, whether in dating or in other aspects of life.

We’ve lived a number of years to get to this senior age, and even though we feel we’ve gotten wiser I’ve also noticed, as I’ve participated in countless workshops and spiritual meetings involving intimate sharing, that a mature age doesn’t mean we’re aware of reality. We’ve had a lot of years to be conditioned about the way life is “supposed” to be. And when we’re not clear we tend to add our stories to life instead of seeing it just as it is. Those stories cause us to hurt.

Here’s an example. Joe is a friend of mine, widowed. He has a companion I’ll call Darlene that he sometimes travels with, and they enjoy each other’s company. In fact, they have an excellent relationship nearly all the time. One time after they’d left the hotel they had stayed in Darlene seemed a bit cool toward him. There was no reason that he knew of so Joe, being a straightforward kind of guy, asked if something was wrong. At first Darlene was reluctant but finally began to share. She later admitted that what she was feeling wasn’t clear to her until she had to put it into words. It was a subtle expectation she’d had that wasn’t met.

He didn’t do what her husband had done

The issue was this. She’d been happily married for more than 30 years. Whenever she and her husband traveled, as they left the place where they stayed for the night he always stopped and kissed her and told her how much he enjoyed being with her. It was a kind of celebration ritual, something she looked forward to and took for granted.

Joe hadn’t kissed her when they left their hotel. He just packed the bags and they drove off. Immediately, Darlene said later, she wondered why. Didn’t he have a good time? Had she done something to irritate him? Wasn’t she a person he was glad to be traveling with? Why couldn’t he just take a moment to tell her that he liked being with her?

She realized, as they talked, that it hadn’t occurred to her that just because her late husband had always exited hotels with a kiss for her and kind words, that just didn’t happen to be what Joe thought about. It wasn’t that he was unkind or uncaring. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a good time. It was simply that Joe wasn’t her late husband.

As a senior, years of conditioning can trip you up

Our thoughts and memories bring up conditioned responses to life. Like Pavlov’s dog, ring the food bell and the dog salivates. Leave a hotel (in this case) and get a kiss and nice words. I’m not demeaning us as being like dogs. It’s simply true that we’re conditioned animals.

As seniors we’ve lived enough years to have a lot of memories. Those can turn into expectations and if we’re not aware we don’t even notice them. But we don’t have to be vigilant all the time to make sure we’re not bringing our history and expectations into a new dating scene. All we have to do is notice how our body is feeling.

If we’re feeling tension or stress we know it. Whatever the feeling is, whether it’s anger or jealousy or any other feeling, it always registers some way in our bodies. There’s the tightness in the neck, the rolling of the gut, the sweaty palms, the furrowed brow… something.

That pain or discomfort in the body is a simple little signal that says, “Wake up! Your thinking is off track. You think something that IS, shouldn’t be that way. It should be your way instead.” Then you can ask yourself: Is that true? Can I really know it should be the way I think it should be?

When you answer that honestly you may find that the way it is, is just the way it is. How do you know it’s supposed to be raining? It is. How do you know he wasn’t supposed to kiss me when we left the hotel? He didn’t. That’s the way the universe is functioning right now. And the universe, or “what is”, always operates by its own light; it doesn’t ask for our opinion. Have you noticed?

21. When you don't need anything dating is fun

In article #20 I talked about how vulnerable and subject to hurt we are when we rely on the praise of others to make us feel good. Let’s paint a couple of scenarios to flesh that out a bit. The first one goes like this.

Let’s say you’re going out on a date for the first time with a guy. You’ve put on four different outfits before you decide on just the right combination. You had your hair done that afternoon, you’ve spent an hour on your makeup, you’ve got the right perfume… and you’re ready. It’s almost as though you’ve said to yourself, I’ve done my part, now it’s his turn.

His turn for what? Well, of course, he’s supposed to see you and tell you how terrific you look, how those colors are just perfect for you, how attractive you are, how proud he’ll be to be seen with you this evening. If he does his job right, you’re happy and chirpy. The world is right. But what if he doesn’t?

What if he doesn’t do his job right? What if he doesn’t praise and admire you? How will you feel then, toward yourself and also toward him? Lots of things could happen, of course. You could start questioning yourself. You could blame yourself because you never did think you were very attractive, and here’s proof. Or he could be the culpable one in your eyes. The insensitive cad! How dare he not even notice all the trouble you went to just to look good for him.

With thoughts like that the evening isn’t going to start out great is it? The poor guy will have to spend the whole evening just working his way up to zero. This may not be you, but if you think it doesn’t happen to mature women you might be surprised. I have a friend in California who told me on the phone of a recent date, and the first thing she said was, “He didn’t even say I looked nice when he came to the door.”

That’s one scenario. Now for another scenario. The same woman is expecting the same man for her first date with him. She dresses nicely, easily adds makeup and a nice perfume and calmly greets her date at the door. She’s relaxed and pleasant, happy within herself and not expecting anything from him except that he be a gentleman. She doesn’t care whether he compliments her or not, and in fact she gets leery if he praises her too much. That feels like he’s trying to manage the situation to get her approval and it feels phony.

Her focus is not on what she needs from him. Instead, her focus is on simply enjoying their time together. She’s not assessing him or judging him for the way he treats her, so both of them feel relaxed and casual together. There’s no pressure and no expectations. We could paint the picture with more detail but you get the idea.

Of the two situations it’s pretty obvious which one is going to be more fun for you isn’t it? When you need something from someone you’re almost always going to be disappointed, if not now, soon. When you need nothing there’s just the joy of being, of naturally living life as it comes. No desire, no suffering.

20. Is your pursuit of a partner putting playfulness on hold?

Caroline had lost her husband about four years before I met her, and her life still was mostly a frantic effort to always have something to do. After her husband died, she told me, she used to walk the malls day after day buying things she didn’t need. When I knew her she couldn’t get enough of traveling, going someplace, doing something, always on the move.

We dated a little bit and it was the same in that realm. She felt time was slipping by and she really needed to find a man to be with. It was hard for her to be alone so she tended to cling to relationships in the hope that her attention and devotion to a man would bring her partnership. Instead, it had the reverse effect. Men would soon be pulling away from her because they apparently felt, as I did, that they were being smothered.

For Caroline, and a lot of men and women I notice, they're addicted to approval. They need to be admired, appreciated, praised and stroked. And they think they have to have someone of the opposite sex to give that to them. One problem, I’ve learned, is that when we’re like that its partly because we haven’t stopped seeking long enough to see that we could just give ourselves what we expect others to provide.

You’ve probably noticed that when you need approval from someone you feel extremely vulnerable. You know if they can make you feel worthwhile with their approval they also have the power to make you feel terrible when they withdraw approval. So there’s always, in the background, that low-lying feeling of terror and uneasiness. You’ve given them power over you. They can jerk your chain any time they want to and you feel there’s not a thing you can do about it.

Stop the frantic seeking

Fortunately, with a little clear seeing we can recognize it doesn’t have to be that way. It only takes stopping the frantic search and the frantic activity to make sure you’re being and doing what you think your approval-giver needs and wants so she won’t get upset with you. We can never really be aware of the truth of life when we’re on the treadmill. And what is the truth when it comes to relationships?

If we look closely we see that truly contented, happy people don’t rely on others for their happiness. They’ve found that real happiness never comes from other people, or from status or position or material gain or recognition. It’s pretty clear that every up has its associated down. To want up without a down is like saying I want mountains without valleys. It just ain’t never gonna happen. It’s impossible.

So you can bet when you’re on a high, brimming with praise and appreciation from someone, that it won’t be long before you’ll be skidding down hill if you continue to rely on that person to feed you. So what’s the answer?

Investigate what’s actually real in life. Do you really need a date to admire and praise you? It may feel good but is it real? When you look you see that while one person may praise you another may be critical. That makes it pretty clear that it’s not “you” that makes the difference. No, it’s their own sense of you. On a good day, when they’re in a good mood, you may get lots of praise. When they’ve had a bad day you may be in for a lot of criticism. Do you really want to hang your hat on that wobbly peg?

19. The end of dating pain with The Work of Byron Katie

Katie, as she’s usually called (Byron is her real first name) is a woman whose clear understanding of life came suddenly one morning, after years of deep depression. She was so shocked she began to laugh and couldn’t stop. What she saw was that life is just doing what life does and that we’re all part of that. Without our interpretation, analysis, judgment and critique of the events of life we simply watch and accept what is, just as it is. After all, we don’t really know the workings from a higher view.

For more than 15 years Katie has traveled the U.S., Europe and other parts of the world demonstrating a method of questioning and investigation that frees people from their pain. She talks to crowds of hundreds. Her method is so simple it’s profound and when people actually use it, rather than just read or hear about, they’re usually astounded. The one comment Katie hears most from people is, “It can’t be that simple.” The questioning process she teaches and demonstrates is called The Work. You can go to her extensive website here: www.thework.com. She also has two wonderful books available that explain the method, with many examples of actual dialogues with individuals in front of the throngs who attend her workshops. Tapes and DVDs are also available to help people learn the process and see it demonstrated.

In various ways I’ve referred to the four questions of The Work in my postings here so they may seem somewhat familiar. Details are on Katie’s website, but here are the questions, then I’ll follow with a simple hypothetical case so you can see how it works. You start by filling out a simple one-page form to outline what’s causing you pain. Then you apply these four questions to the statements you wrote. There are six statements you write out, and in real life you apply the questions to all the statements. We’ll apply the four questions to just the first one here, for sake of explanation. The four questions are:

1. Is that true?


2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?


3. How do you live, or how do you react when you think that thought?


4. Who would you be without that story?

An example of how it works

Let’s put it in context now. Let’s say you wrote, “I’m hurt and upset because I’ve just learned the man I’ve been dating has also been dating someone else when he promised to be exclusive with me.”

Reframing what you wrote it might come out as a statement like this: “The man you’re dating should do as he promised and only date you.” Then the first question, “Is that true?” For most people the answer is likely to be “yes”.

Then the second question: “He should be honest and date just you, can you absolutely know that that’s true?” Some follow-up inquiries often help at this point. Questions such as, “What’s the reality in this life? Do men – and women - sometimes not fulfill their promises and do they sometimes date other people after promising to be exclusive?” With a broader perspective the answer to the question, “Do I absolutely know he shouldn’t be dating someone else.” may now may be “no, I don’t know that for sure”. Other questions that can help here are:
“Have you ever promised something you didn’t keep?”
“Does life sometimes work that way… that people don’t do what they say they’ll do?, etc.

When a person begins to see that their belief about something has nothing to do with what really happens in life they usually see that their belief is just a belief and has nothing to do with reality. After all, how can you argue with what’s happening. The man is dating other women and not sticking to his promise. That’s the truth.

Then the third question: “How do you live when you hold onto the belief that he should be dating only you, and he isn’t?” The usual answer is there’s a lot of pain. A follow-up question here may be, “Do you see any peaceful reason to keep holding your belief?” Or “Do you see a reason to drop that false belief of yours that doesn’t match reality?”

Finally, the fourth question: “Who would you be without that story?” Or “Who would you be if you never had your belief again and simply accepted what is, that here’s a man who doesn’t keep his promise and dates other women?” The answer is generally some words like, “I’d have a lot of peace.” The peace comes from not resisting what already is. That doesn’t mean you stay with the man. No, you may well choose to go your own way. But you can do that, even, with the understanding that he’s just being himself. How can you know that he isn’t supposed to be your teacher through his deceit?

In the Turnaround you see reality as it is

There’s a final step to the questioning, that’s called the Turnaround. You take the original statement, “He shouldn’t be dating other women” and turn it around exactly to the opposite, “He should be dating other women.” How do you know? He is. So the purpose of the Turnaround it just to help us see life as it really is. It’s no more complicated than seeing that life happens. It’s raining outside. How do you know it’s supposed to be raining? It is. Period. But you had a picnic planned. Yes, and do you notice the universe doesn’t ask for your input? Do you want to fight it and be miserable, or just see it for what it is and be content and happy?

You’ve just seen a very simple form of this work, and at first it may seem raw and unbelievable. But the whole purpose of the four questions is just to help someone in pain deal with the reality of life, not their unfounded and hurtful fantasies and the mistaken beliefs most of us have been taught about how things should be.

In life, people do what they do. When we think they need to change so we can be happy we’re nuts. We’re just dangling ourselves on a puppet string with the stick held by that person we want to change. Then, if they change we’re happy, and if they don’t change we’re miserable.

Do we really want to make our happiness dependent on another person or circumstance? Check out The Work if you think it might help you relieve emotional pain you’re feeling. I’ll promise that if you do it openly and honestly you’ll be surprised at its effectiveness. Seeing reality ends the pain because the pain was only in our misguided thinking in the first place. Those thoughts were an illusion. “What is” just shows up. It doesn’t show up with pain attached. Our unexamined thoughts and beliefs are the sole source of suffering.