48. There’s an answer if you’re tired of the ups and down of dating

I’ve had lots of older people who are now back in the dating world tell me they’re surprised at all the emotions they feel. The emotional ups and down are like being in high school or college again, one woman told me recently. The ups can be fun for awhile, but there’s always the down, and that hurts. My own experience, however, is that whenever we’re suffering as we date it’s guaranteed to be because of what we're thinking. There’s no other reason – ever. Look for yourself and you’ll see.

I'm defining suffering as emotions such as worry, anxiety, doubt, fear, questioning, seeking, jealousy, sadness, disappointment, etc. Not all thoughts are about suffering but all suffering is about thoughts. When thoughts are about how to fry spuds or dig a hole there’s no suffering.

If you look you'll notice that thoughts just are. They show up by themselves. It's only when we refer them to a so-called self-center that there's often pain because the world isn’t the way this me-center thinks it should be. Life isn’t meeting our demands. That resistance to what is, based on a self-centered “me”, is always painful. What you think should be is the story that causes your pain.

What is, is pure fact. For example. “John didn’t call tonight when he said he would.” That’s a fact. “John obviously doesn’t care about me or he would have called,” is a story. We’ve embellished the facts, added our interpretation or judgment and in the creation of our story we cause ourselves to suffer.

But suffering doesn’t have to continue. There’s an easy way to bring it to an end and it can happen in an instant. One way is just to let go of the thought you’re believing. Don’t be attached to it. Give it no energy and it just withers away and dies. No doubt it’ll come back again and again for awhile because that’s your habit and pattern. If you consistently ignore it though it eventually just goes away.

However, if you can’t just see that the thought appeared out of nowhere and will go back to that same nowhere, there’s a second step you can take. That second step is to question it: Is my thought really true? About John the question would be, “Do I really know John doesn’t care because he didn’t call?” When you see that you don’t really know, and you’re willing to just live in that not-knowing, your suffering is over. How does it work like that? It works because once you give up the idea of a “me” who knows what should be, you fall back into the pure awareness that happens naturally because you exist. Then there’s no “me” that wants anything, thus, no pain. The self-centered ego-me idea, though, always has an agenda, and the agenda is “my way” is the right way.

If you're in pain sometimes as you date, or for any other part of your life, you might try something new. See life as it is, without a story and witness life without an opinion. “I” or “me” always has an opinion. Pure awareness just sees life unfolding, as though from the sidelines, and basks in the mystery of it. From there you see that nothing is wrong.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer