59. Your years of “wisdom” may be causing you a lot of dating pain

As a dating senior, whether you’re in your 50s, 70s or beyond, you’ve lived enough years to have gained some valuable wisdom and experiencee. I was reminded of that again this morning when I read a New York Times op-ed piece written by a guy who’s lived on a farm with his wife for the past eight years. He wrote that he understands the wisdom of the old farmers he knows.

“They are wise,” he wrote, “because everything has already happened to them. The barn has burned down. The cows have trampled the cornfield. A finger has vanished into the combine. The soybean market has gone south. If the very worst hasn't happened to one farmer, it has happened to the neighbor down the road. A lot of the surprise has gone out of life.” We could say that about a lot of other things in life too at this age: A lot of the surprise is gone.

Yet sometimes our experience doesn’t seem to serve us well. When it comes to mature dating, I’ve noticed just in my own experience over 10 years that a lot of the surprise about life may be gone, but it sure isn’t true about a lot of relationship pain. Why is that? It appears that while we’ve had a lot of experience we’ve also formed some pretty firm ideas of how things should be by this age. And our ideas may not match reality in the dating world.

Even if we’ve had real challenges in past relationships we tend to forget that challenge is actually a realistic part of a relationship, especially when we’re older. And especially after a long marriage. Dating at this stage of life is never what we expected we’d be doing, and it’s new and different than it was 30 or 40 years ago. We have our ways of doing things and seeing life. Someone else comes along and their ways aren’t like ours. We were used to how Fred didn’t pick up his socks and Mary got irritated when the toilet seat was left up. It wasn’t much of a big deal.

Differences can be painful, though, when we think my way is the only way and your way is wrong. The cows aren’t supposed to trample the cornfield. Maybe Ray, the guy you’re now dating, flirts with waitresses. You think, “My late husband never did that and Ray shouldn’t either.” Or Marge, your new love, wants to keep her male friends. Your wife doted only on you; doesn’t Marge love you enough not to need other male friendships?

The problem in these and many similar scenarios we could describe, is that if you’re hurting you probably haven’t questioned your life views. You haven’t needed to question them in the past. But now you’re in a new game. Are your beliefs and long-held conceptions true? Does it really mean Marge doesn’t love you because she wants to have lunch with other guys as friends? Is Ray’s flirting with a waitress just his fun, joking way of enjoying people instead of the threat to your relationship that you’ve made it out to be?

Suffering in your dating can only come because you haven’t looked to see reality as it is. “What is” never causes hurt. Only our opinions of what is cause us to hurt. We’ve all lived long enough by this time to have a lot of fixed “shoulds” and “oughts” about life. So everything we see in life, tends to pass through these “right-wrong” filters. In other words we’re judging most of the time. When we stop judging, however, we can see what’s actually happening, not what’s happening through our filters. We see that our idea of what Marge and Ray should do is just that – our idea. Does that make it right? When you question it you may find your way of seeing has been colored by the past.

Your husband flirted and had affairs. Does that mean Ray is flirting to have an affair? Is it true that he’s even flirting at all or is that your interpretation of his friendliness? When you’re hurting because of something your new date or partner does it’s time to stop and question, if you want to get out of the pain. Ask yourself: What’s making me angry or sad or jealous? You find your date is doing something she shouldn’t be doing. But ask further: Is that true? Are you seeing through filters that may never have been true? Is it possible your belief is just plain wrong? Have an honest look. With openness you might find you’re seeing this new person with fresh eyes, not through your filters. And who they are, you might see, is wonderful.

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer

58. Your painful programming can be gone in a flash when you stay in "now"

You might think you’ve been programmed to respond to situations in certain ways, or you have an image of yourself that’s been programmed for many years. These old programs can get easily triggered in a dating relationship because we’ve got something at stake. We want a partner. A guy I knew was married for many years to a woman who would just clam up when there was difficulty. That was probably her programming, and it just took over and that’s how she responded every time there was difficulty in the relationship. No communication. Great manipulation. The older you are the stronger the programming! Bummer!!! <Joking> But let’s take a look at programming or conditioning for a minute.

What is conditioning? It’s a memory of repeated messages we’ve taken in from others or given ourselves isn’t it? Someone may have told us we were stupid many times as a kid; we took in that message and even added to it by telling ourselves the same thing. So we say we’ve been programmed to feel stupid. People often act as though they’re victims of that conditioning. But anything from the past, including conditioning, shows up now only as a memory doesn’t it? It really doesn’t exist. It’s just a thought that we call memory because it’s from the past. There is no such thing as the past except as a memory that appears only in the moment. Right now.

Without thinking about it, how programmed are you? It’s not possible to actually be programmed. It’s only possible to have a memory of programming. Yet programming can have an effect if we don’t examine our thoughts. If an old memory tape plays and we’re not even aware of it then the programming is working. However, you don’t need a rocket scientist to become aware when programs are playing. Usually you’re not feeling happy at that time. You’re suffering. And the suffering is a clanging bell that says, something needs fixing here, just like pain in the body is a signal to get help.

So when you notice you’re hurting emotionally just stop for a minute. Stop and notice what you’re thinking. If you’ve got an old programming tape playing – one of those things you believe because you know you’ve heard it at least a thousand times – now you can know that it’s nothing more than a thought. See through it and it loses its power. After all, programming is just a phantom that seems real, just as you think a mirage will give you water, until you see the reality. It seems that we really are stupid because of the programming. But without thoughts there is no programming and no “stupid” feeling. It doesn’t take years on a therapist’s couch. Just notice your false thoughts and come back to “now”, that’s all.

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer

57. When senior dating makes you hurt here’s how to watch pain dissolve

Let’s say your dating has left you disappointed or angry, or feeling abandoned or jealous. Whatever it is, something is causing you to hurt emotionally. Yesterday I talked about how we label things and that labeling causes the hurt to last longer and feel stronger. Why is that true? Because the label is just a word, a thought, it’s not the reality. Have you ever noticed how something you worried so much about turns out to be much less painful in reality than your worried thoughts about it? That’s because we’ve dredged up a lot of painful memories from the past that we’ve slapped onto the thing with our label.

Without a label an emotion is just a sensation in your body. If you look around the room you’re sitting in right now do you have to tell yourself you’re seeing it? No, the seeing is just happening isn’t it? In the immediacy of what is you’re just seeing, before thoughts and labels come up. So let’s say you’re feeling a sensation you call fear right now. As soon as you label it you’re not seeing it fresh, just now, as it is. With your added label you’re now experiencing what that label means to you. But it’s based on what? It’s based on a dead past. You’re dragging in a past that doesn’t even exist except in your mind.

You say you’re feeling fear, and you remember all those terrible experiences you associate with fear in the past. Pretty soon you’re putting a lot of energy into that label, “fear”. Your natural reaction then is to resist those painful feelings and in thinking about it and resisting it what happens? Energy is fed into it and it grows and grows. Remember, without energy a thing just dies, even a thought or a label, which is just a word for a thought.

Bankei, a Zen monk of about the 16th century, said, “Everything is perfectly resolved in the unborn. Why exchange the unborn for thought?” What he means by the unborn is just what arises spontaneously and in the moment. He’s saying when we just see it and leave it alone it will resolve itself. When we exchange that simple seeing of “what is” with thoughts and labels we’ve turned it into something it’s not.

The way through an emotion, whether we label it fear or loneliness or jealousy or anger, is to just be with it. See it as it is, just in its freshness and immediacy, like you see the room before thoughts about the room come in. In just the clear seeing of a sensation, when it’s not fed energy by labeling it and resisting it, you might be surprised at how fast it runs its natural course and just disappears.

Yes, it may come up again because our habit is to label and resist. But once we’ve seen that the label isn’t the real, and the real is never as bad as the label, we can just drop the label again and be with what is. You’ve already seen that the label is not true so you don’t get stuck in that any longer. Then what are you left with? Just Being, contentedness.

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer