123. True dating happiness may not be what you think it is

If you asked most mature daters why they date they’d probably tell you they date because they hope to find a mate and be happier. So dating is a means to an end, and that end is always in the future of course. When you look at it, a lot of our life energy goes into activities aimed at helping us be happier in some future time.

So if future happiness is the bottom line for our dating, maybe it would help to examine just what do we mean when we speak of happiness. Happiness isn’t really the opposite of unhappiness. But that’s the way we often look at it. We think we want the happiness side of happy/unhappy full time. First, that would be impossible because we’d have to have some unhappiness to even know what happiness is. Besides that, we’d burn out if we had the “high” most people think of as happiness all the time.

Maybe if we looked more closely at our lives we’d say we really want to be content rather than happy. We live in a society that’s hooked on loud, busy, wide-eyed, active events that we often call happiness. That’s really a myth. Lasting, steady happiness is much more faint and subtle. At first we may have to look a bit to notice it.

Consider a small baby. Aren’t they happy just being, without needing to be bombarded with busy activity all the time? Events can happen that bring a smile or laughter to a baby, but when the event is over they’re not looking for their next “happiness” fix. Events or no events, it’s all just part of the mosaic to a baby. Instead a baby is just pure presence and awareness, without an opinion, interpretation or judgment about the world. Babies are simply interested – curious, fully engaged with all their senses, and content.

Where we sometimes have trouble in our dating is that we don’t want to just be in life. No, we want it to be exciting, thrilling, and knock-your-socks-off romantic. We want highlights. Based on just our own thought-pictures of dating we tend to make judgments about how it should look and feel instead of just seeing it as it is. As long as we’re looking for those highs we’re going to be disappointed and discouraged much of the time.

Instead of seeing dating as a way to get something in the future – a partner and happiness – we could just see dating as an activity that takes place as a part of our lives. It can be a pleasant and interesting event without an agenda. Without expectations and judgments the time we spend dating could be ordinary and spectacular just in its simplicity. When your focus is without seeking happiness in the future there can be happiness right now, just by being where you are with your senses wide open and fully engaged. To me, that’s true happiness.

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer