52. Senior dating can hurt as much as teenage dating when you believe your thoughts

Romance and affairs of the heart are often really painful for people. It’s no different when you’re a more mature guy or gal. Senior dating can be just as hurtful as teenage dating, and for the same reasons. I’ve talked about how it’s always our thoughts that cause us to suffer emotionally in life. It’s never an event or a person but always our thoughts or beliefs about that event or person that causes pain.

The way to get out of that suffering is by honestly investigating our thoughts and beliefs so we can see what’s real and stop living by the lies we’ve been telling ourselves. After that kind of investigation people are usually amazed at the relief and lack of stress they suddenly feel about an incident.* They often say, “It can’t be this easy.” It’s not surprising they’d think that because their old, painful way of seeing life has been with them for years, sometimes decades.

We’ve gotten the idea through some forms of psychology and therapy that it also takes years to reverse those long-held beliefs. But it doesn’t work that way, for the same reason it doesn’t take years to light a cave that’s been dark for centuries. The darkness was only an absence of light. When light shines, the darkness that was never a real entity in itself, disappears instantly. A wrongly held belief is merely the absence of the truth.

Let’s say you’ve had a painful belief for years that you’re not attractive to men. You decide to question that to see if it’s true, and you realize it isn’t. You have lots of proof of times when men found you attractive and alluring. Once you see that reality, just by stopping and looking, it’s like shining a light into a dark cave. The erroneous belief that you were not attractive is instantly seen as false. You don’t have to change anything or fix yourself in any way. You just see the truth for the first time. You realize your old belief was just a wrong thought, an illusion. It has no substance. You don’t have to remove an illusion that was never there.

Maybe it’s a little easier to see this if we look at children and their fear of a monster under the bed as they’re getting ready for sleep. You turn on the light, you show them there’s nothing under the bed, and the problem is gone because it was only a thought believed in, nothing more.

Worry is like that. It’s a thought that we believe and it scares us. But when the worry is over and nothing fearful happened we see that the intense suffering we felt was simply an illusion because we thought we could believe our thoughts. Thoughts about ourselves are no more true than a false worry thought. At some point a thought appeared – “I’m not attractive”. Maybe someone told you that, it doesn’t matter. Somehow the thought showed up for you and somehow you latched onto it and believed it. It became true for you. But in reality any belief we have about ourselves is nothing more than thought-energy that appears and disappears like lightning unless we grab onto it and consider it one of the elements of “me”.

Once you’ve seen enough truths you may eventually even see that nothing you believe is true. Life is living itself, and your beliefs and thoughts about it have no bearing on it at all. Then you can settle back, relaxed in the knowing that without an opinion about how life should be, you’re quite happy with what is, just as it is.

* You’ll find a highly effective questioning method described in article #19 in the November 27th archive in the sidebar.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer

51. Dating is better when you’re not living lies about yourself

What you think of yourself deeply affects how you relate to other people. As a man or woman dating in your senior years your so-called self-image is as critical as it was when you were a teenager just starting in the world of dating.

If this self-image – this idea we have of ourselves – is so important maybe it would be wise to investigate it a bit. We could say that a self image is a compilation of separate ideas we have about ourselves. We’ve grouped them together and now we say “this is me”. It’s a bit like having a bunch of lego blocks scattered on the floor. Then someone comes along and puts them together and builds a house. But is it really a house or is it lego blocks put together to look like a house?

There’s a huge difference between the lego blocks and our building-block ideas of ourselves, however. The blocks are real. Our ideas about ourselves aren’t. Those ideas consist of whatever impressions we have of an event in the past. They’re always faulty, for two reasons. One is that our interpretation of an event could have been wildly inaccurate because of things such as our age at the time, our emotional state, our fears, our programming, and more.

The second reason our building block ideas are faulty is that our minds only remember a very small amount of what actually happened in an event. Think back to the last conversation you had with someone. It may have lasted for 10 minutes, yet if you relate it to someone else you can only remember about a minute’s worth of the dialogue. And you don’t remember that during that talk you scratched your forehead and saw a bird flying by out the window. Even worse, you can’t remember that great joke your friend told you. You couldn’t possibly remember all the things that happened in that time.

So with our imprecise memory of events and thoughts over months and years we form ideas that seem as solid as building blocks. Then we take these erroneous building block ideas and build our house which we call “me”. That’s how we define ourselves. From then on everything in life is referenced to this false sense of “me” or “I” and we don’t even know it’s false. If our building block ideas were made up of impressions of our unworthiness and inadequacy we’re working with malformed blocks. The “me” that we think we are, then, is pretty distorted. And that skewed “me” is what we present to the person we’re dating. It’s not true but we present it as though it is.

If we see ourselves as not very appealing how do you think we present ourselves? Probably not very confidently. And how are we perceived? Probably pretty much the way we present ourselves. You don’t have to be a genius to see through a person with a low self-image. It shows from their every pore, in every movement they make doesn’t it? They either look and act as unworthy or they may project elaborate pretenses to try to appear good enough.

What’s the image you project? Whether you’re in your 50s, 60s, 70s or beyond you might want to investigate what kind of self-idea you’re putting out in the world as you date? Ask yourself, Is my idea of me really true? After all, this “me” you think you are is just your own bundle of ideas. Are they true? Were they ever true when you really look?

If you feel even the slightest sense of inadequacy or unworthiness you don’t have to keep believing that self-created picture. Instead, explore, investigate, question and see the truth. Break the shell of a false self-image and let the natural, loving, genuine self that’s the essence of every person shine through in you. I guarantee dating and life will be better when you’re not living lies about yourself.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer

50. When you “secure” your relationship you lock your partner in prison

In the last article, I wrote about how the need for security leads to the desire to have an exclusive dating relationship with someone. When we think we have to compete to get what we want in life it’s natural that we’ll try to tie things down so we can feel more secure. Especially in our senior years many tend to feel fear for the future, and they want security. In relationships it’s usually called commitment.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with commitment at all when it’s freely given. But when Jane tries to pin Joe to a commitment he’s not ready to make there’s a problem. Jane, of course, wants a guarantee that her dream man will be there for her so she wants to lock things up, to make sure things don’t change and he doesn’t leave. But Joe feels like he’s being forced into prison.

Trying to make sure nothing changes in your relationship is not the way the world works. It works exactly the opposite. Change is the very foundation of this world. There has to be movement, which is change. Without movement everything becomes stale and dies, like a lake that has no inlet or outlet. Soon it stagnates and dies. Our very bodies prove that change is the norm. We breathe in and out, our heart pulses and rests, then pulses again, our thoughts change moment to moment. In nature the tides come in and out, seasons come and go, day turns to night and to day again. There’s a to and fro in life, an activity and a rest. It’s all about movement and change.

Yet we somehow think we can make life secure. So we want to fence in our partner, like a horse in a corral. But is it even possible to guarantee someone will be there for you? Maybe they’ll die tomorrow. We seem to know that, yet we want to control everything we can, especially that our guy or gal won’t be free to find someone else attractive. That feeling comes from fear, but is it honestly what you want for someone you profess to care about? Do you want to imprison them so they can’t possibly find someone new? Or would you feel more loving by allowing your date or partner to feel free to find anyone in the world? If they stay with you they stay freely, not out of obligation. If they move on, isn’t it pretty clear that they feel happier with someone else? And wouldn’t you be happier with someone new who wanted to be with you rather than someone who felt forced to be there?

There is no security in this life, no matter how much we may want it. Gravity always pulls toward the earth, not away from it. Water is always wet. And life constantly changes. We’re happy when we ride along with “what is” instead of trying to squeeze life into the shape we want. You can’t defy gravity and you can’t defy change. Go with it and live a life of ease.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Custer