169. Is senior dating always supposed to go the way we want?

Do you remember that little song we probably all learned in grade school? In my school we learned to start it section by section in the classroom so you had to concentrate on your own words and not listen to the section next to you because they were on a different verse. By now I’ll bet you know what song I’m talking about. It went like this: “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily life is but a dream.” Remember?

Well, what the heck does that have to do with dating you’re probably asking. Just this: I don’t know who the author of that little ditty was or what his or her view of life was, but in a simple, almost uncanny way, those words say what spiritual teachers say, that life is a dream and we can flow with it and be merrily happy.

As you can see, this applies to all areas of life. But it may apply to dating even more, for one reason: dating often smacks you in the face with your emotions. You might be able to hide your fears or insecurities or poor self-image from yourself in many areas of your life. But in dating you often come painfully face to face with them.

But can we really just set aside our emotions and painful struggles in dating and simply flow gently down the stream? It takes real honesty but yes, we can. The honesty has to do with seeing life as it actually is, not the way we think it should be. In our happy-go-lucky, made-up world people are honest and true, for instance. In real life people are sometimes deceitful. We can deal with that reality if we don’t kid ourselves into thinking it shouldn’t be the way it is.

I had lunch the other day with a woman who, a few years ago, had been in a committed relationship and learned that her guy was having an affair. She’d had the same experience in her marriage some years earlier and she suffered a great deal.

Had she known about seeing life as it is, however, the pain may have been much less. We’re used to holding onto our beliefs and myths about life in the perfect world. The funny thing is that this is a perfect world, we just don’t think so because of our little opinions and desires. In our dream world lovers don’t have affairs. But is that true? The reality is they do.

That’s life, and dealing with it as it is, is so much less painful than trying to prop up our myths and push things around to make them fit. In fact, when we look we probably can also see that not only is there dishonesty and deceit in the world but that we’ve been a part of it. For example, maybe you didn’t have an affair but did you deceive someone? Maybe your deceit was just not honestly telling someone that you didn’t want to continue dating so you made up excuses why you weren’t available instead. In most cases we’ve all had the experience of doing, in some form, what we’re accusing someone else of doing.

So what do you do to get out of your pain in dating, whatever the cause may be? You simply look at life and see if what happened to you is the way life really is. Does life always play by what we think are “the rules”? No, life is the way it is. One East Indian teacher puts it this way, “When you agree to be guided from within life becomes a journey into the unknown.”

The unknown can be scary. Or it can be an adventure. Again, be honest with yourself. Is there really security in the known? Can we really know anything about a future that we want to be secure? Are we sure that having been deceived wasn’t the best thing for us? Maybe we were lucky to find out early. We just don’t know.

And since we don’t know, why not go the painless way and simply accept that the Intelligence that guides everything is guiding our dating relationships too? We can stay present and be surprised at what shows up next. In my own experience this pure witnessing way of life, without attachment to “my” wants, produces amazing results. Six months down the road you might be blown away by what you see has happened.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer