Dating With Dignity

Friends are a part of any balanced life. We need friends with whom we can shop, watch chick flicks, and work out. We turn to our friends—especially our girl friends—to vent about the men in our lives, complain about our bosses, or to ask for advice. Anyone who has spent any amount of time without significant friendships can attest to just how awful the implications can be. We simply need friendships to feel fulfilled.

The problems arise when the friendships are not so fulfilling, and more detrimental—specifically to your love life.

Here at Dating With Dignity we’ve witnessed an array of toxic friendships. There are the partying friends—the ones who drink seven nights a week and encourage you to do the same. The two of you hit the town regularly, hook up with random guys, and announce you want a man who can keep up with you and your antics.

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We just finished the fourth week of Beyond the Rut, and a lot of strange feelings have come up for me.  This week focused on how our past dictates the choices that we make, and how it is imperative that we break free from the past in order to live and choose consciously and authentically.

As the result of doing this work, and looking back at my life so far, I’ve found myself on the verge of tears nearly every day this week.  I’ve felt uneasy, and anxious—two feelings I thought I’d said goodbye to since completing Breaking Free.  I realized that when I start digging into my past, these uneasy feelings inevitably crop back up.

If you’ve read some of my previous blogs, you may know that my father died this past December.    It marked the end of his life, and, in a way, the end of mine.  My entire life has felt defined by my father, and my desire for a normal relationship with him.  Unfortunately for me, my father was anything but normal.

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Last week we began another series of the Breaking Free From Your Romantic Rut course, as well as a brand new, advanced course called, Beyond the Rut: Create Sizzling, Independent, Feminine Energy, and Master Skills to Attract Who You WANT, Not Just Who You GET.

As its name implies, this course is deigned to keep you focused, and delve even deeper into the strategies and tools we learned about in Breaking Free.

I wanted to take this course because it seemed like a natural next step. After completing Breaking Free I began to notice all of these wonderful things happening for me. I started making more friends, and meeting more guys. I’m happier, more confident, and I trust, implicitly, that everything is going to work out. This is a huge difference from how I was feeling before I took the course. I was fearful and worried all the time. I didn’t trust anyone, and I didn’t know how to create healthy boundaries. . I also picked all the wrong guys—I was drawn to high-drama, lose-lose situations. I was hurt, and just shut down. I didn’t even want to let anyone in.

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Casual Sex. It seems to be a right of passage for many women. We are proud that we can finally have guilt-free, no-strings-attached sex with friends, or near strangers. And, for the most part, there really is nothing wrong with it, as long as everything is safe and protected, and you’re being honest about truly wanting a casual, noncommittal setup.

So where do the problems arise? When you start wanting more.

Once you’ve been used to living in a world of hook ups and pseudo intimacy, it can be hard to make the transition into land o’ love with Mr. Boyfriend Material. And, we have to be honest, your chances of reforming anyone in your current booty call line up are slim to none.

This means that you have to start over fresh. At Dating With Dignity, we believe in order to get different results you have to do things differently. Your old ways aren’t going to cut it anymore and, as with any change in behavior or habit, it’s going to be hard and you can expect to be tempted back into your old ways from time to time.

Luckily, we’ve compiled some tips to make it easier for you to stay on track towards your very own happily ever after:

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As many of you know, DWD has been in Portland for the past week on a speaking tour. While we were there we were given the opportunity to host one of our incredible MANimal events. It was an amazing night and we were able to meet and connect with some really wonderful women. We had a great man panel, and everyone in attendance was truly present and eager to learn and share. One of the more memorable moments of the evening actually occurred when the conversation took an unexpectedly controversial turn at the presence of this particular question from our audience:

Should the woman offer to pay on a date?

This is a question that always works its way into our MANimal events. Women want to know what is expected of them, financially speaking, on the first few dates. In LA, the answer is always an emphatic “NO.” The men don’t want you to pay, they don’t want you to offer to pay, and they don’t want you to pretend that you want to pay. They aren’t into the fake purse grab, and they all are in agreement that they are turned off if a woman insists on paying.

Given the vigor and finality with which our LA men always answer this question, we were fairly confident that our Portland manelists would answer similarly.

So, you can imagine our surprise when our Portland men offered up a unanimous “YES” in response to the question. Apparently, while the men in Portland don’t necessarily want you to pay, they absolutely want you to offer. One gentleman admitted he actually finds it mildly insulting when a woman expects him to pay.

We can see how this geographical discrepancy could lead to some confusion for the die-hard Dating With Dignity gal.

Luckily, DWD has an especially brave woman who decided to give the fake purse grab a whirl in real life, and let us know how it worked out. This woman, we’ll call her Macy, went on a date with Portland Paul, a guy she’d been out with a couple of times. They were still very casual, and taking their time getting to know one another. At the end of the date, she offered to pay, and he let her. She was kind of surprised, less than enthused, and probably won’t be seeing him again. And, while this wasn’t the only factor contributing to the premature ending of this particular romance, it didn’t help matters much.

The moral of the story? Portland Paul probably enjoyed that Macy offered to pay. Portland Paul probably even enjoyed that Macy ended up paying. But Portland Paul will not be enjoying Macy’s company any longer, which, we can be fairly certain, was not his intention.

So, while there appears to be an inconsistency in how men feel about the dinner date payment plans, a few things remain true whether you’re in Portland, LA, or anywhere else where people go out to dinner:

1. If you are going to offer to pay, you have to really want it. No matter what Portland Paul says, do not do the fake purse grab. It’s insulting to everyone involved.

2. If you really want to pay in the beginning of a new relationship, and he really lets you, be prepared for how you might feel about it.

3. And finally, to keep things clean, don’t offer to pay on the first few dates, even if you really mean it. Let him be the man, and practice receiving. It’ll make you both feel good, we promise.

By: Angelica Martin

We just wrapped up our sixth class of Breaking Free of Your Romantic Rut.  This class focused on “Realizing Your Relationship Vision.”

We talked about a lot of things this week, but my favorite part of the class focused on looking at how we handle the bad things in life—death, breakups, a mistake at work, your favorite restaurant being out of cheesecake, to name a few.

It seemed easy at first, because I tend to take most of the bad things in life in stride.  When a bunch of things get really bad all at once (as has a funny way of happening) I prescribe to the “keep on keeping on” mentality.  I just move forward.  I’m not really destructive, I don’t whine a lot, and I look for the silver lining.  I definitely cry and feel what I need to feel, but I think I handle life’s troubled times quite well, with the exception of one:Breakups.

I don’t handle breakups well at all.  I remain entrenched in the turmoil and grief far beyond a reasonable time frame.  I literally make a home for myself in that dark space of limbo, in which the relationship is over but the emotional attachment remains strong.

While most people stay there for a couple of weeks at most, I move in indefinitely.  While there, I rehash what went wrong, hope for a reconciliation, engage in inappropriate friendships with the ex, and doubt myself.  What did I do wrong?  Was breaking up the right choice?  What if he was the one? Oh, God.  He’s the one.  I’ll never find someone else like him.  I’m going to call.

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We just finished the fifth week of Breaking Free of Your Romantic Rut.  This week we focused on “Choosing Who I Want Through Understanding Who I Am.”

This week was unique in that we each constructed a list (one of my personal favorite pastimes) of the values we most desire in a partner.  Like most other women, I’ve made a list before of the traits I want in a man.  I did it when I was about 15, and among the more ridiculous items I included were: has curly hair, listens to good music and doesn’t like turtlenecks.  I’m not kidding or exaggerating.  This is the exact type of list we are supposed to stay away from.  The new list is supposed to focus on values.  Clearly, I don’t truly value a disdain for turtlenecks above, say, honesty or integrity.

To aid in our construction of this values-focused list, Marni told us to imagine a relationship we admire, and then write down the characteristics we would like to cultivate in our own ideal relationship.  We then made a second list of our own values, for example family, spirituality or intellect.  The second list is supposed to reflect whatever it is we value in life and in others.

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The fifth week of our 8-week course, Breaking Free of Your Romantic Rut, focused on identifying our relationship goals. At first blush this appeared to be a no-brainer. It almost seemed like a waste of a week. As I flipped through the material prior to the class (because I truly am that nerdy), I  didn’t understand at all. Clearly we all signed up for this course because we are in some sort of rut, have recognized the error of our ways, and have turned to Dating With Dignity to lead us from the trenches, guiding each one of us into our very own healthy and fulfilling relationship.

What I had forgotten to add on to the end of that sentence was, “eventually.”

I’ll try to make this simple. There are three different cycles of change, and they relate to a card-playing metaphor. The first cycle is “The Toss-in.” That’s when you recognize that the hand you have just isn’t going to cut it anymore, so you toss it in. You fold. You’re done.

The second cycle is the shuffle. You’re moving things around, and changing things up. You’re taking action to determine what didn’t work before, and what did, and how to reconcile the two with something that works for you now.

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He's inside!

I recently read an article in which a 41-year old woman, Georgina Merriman, has, at long last, found love and married.  This in and of itself can seem like an impressive feat, given the hopelessness many feel regarding their love lives, but what really excited me was the irony in how her union with this dream man came to be.  You see, for 19 years Georgina has taken the train to and from work each day, and to pass the time she looked for her love online.  Not the type to leave it up to fate, Georgina knew she had to take the reins and control her own destiny if she wanted to find love.  And, while Georgina spent her evenings on the train perusing online dating sites, her future husband sat patiently in the row behind her for almost ONE year.

Finally, Georgina ripped her eyes away from whatever dating site she had been perusing, and her gaze met Mark’s.  The next day he offered her a seat next to him.  A few days after that, they began a full-blown transit-born love affair.

Georgina’s story is not a new one.  This type of love story abounds in novels, movies, or your parent’s relationship, perhaps.  It’s always the same: unsuspecting woman falls in love with least likely candidate–the man sitting patiently–right in front of her face.

The message here is not a hard one.  It’s not that dating sites are bad, or even that you should begin taking the train to work.  Georgina’s story reminds us that, as helpful as dating sites can be in finding a mate, there is simply no replacement for engaging in your life–showing up–in a way you never before considered.

Here are some ways you can do just that, beginning today:

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We had our second session of the “Breaking Out Of Your Romantic Rut” course, and this week we focused on “Exploring New Ways of Thinking.”  We looked at effective ways to shift away from the problems, limiting beliefs and negative thinking we identified last week.

 In an effort to create awareness regarding the impact destructive choices we make have on the relationship choices we make, Marni taught us about “Vicious Cycles,” which are the romantic ruts we act out as part of our relationship Hamster Wheel (a dysfunctional relationship rut that has no ultimate end and wreaks havoc on our self-esteem and ability to connect with men deeply).  This exercise enabled me to look at my behaviors and acknowledge the point in each situation at which I have the power to make a choice.  That choice determines whether I stay on the hamster wheel, or get off.  An example:

Angelica’s Hamster Wheel With Max

First Stop: I don’t talk to Max for a while and I feel good.

Second Stop (the point where a decision is made): Max contacts me and I pretend everything is okay and engage him.  It feels good— in the moment.

Third Stop: I hear something about him and another girl, or see something that makes me upset, and it makes me feel like I don’t matter to him, and I grieve for our broken relationship all over again.

Next stop: I don’t talk to Max for a while and I feel good.

 Wash, rinse, repeat. 

 Our homework was to write down four or five additional hamster wheels, and had I not been tired and ready for bed, I could have gone on well into the morning making Wheels.  After seeing these cycles in a variety of different situations, I discovered that I’ve been making the same mistakes for quite some time now.  Who knew?

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