How to date and not lose your soul

Is it possible?

Imagine that you are living in some time warp and it’s the olden days.  You just went to a nearby farmer to get a bunch of eggs for your family.  You put them all in a basket (remember, it’s old time so there’s no Styrofoam containers), and start off walking down the path back to your home.  The basket is quite heavy considering how many eggs you have.  So heavy, that it will surely make your fingers ache as you walk the hour-long trek to your house.

As you round a corner that takes you through a short cut via some woods, you stumble a bit on a rock, lose your grip on the basket, and bam!  The cracked eggs lie gooey all over the ground.

Now let’s reverse the story and add several baskets.  Now you’ve spread out the eggs that were in the one basket into four.  Of course, you still stumble at that corner, but this time, instead of dropping all your baskets, you just drop one.  Yep, you lost some eggs (bummer!), but you’ve still got three baskets left.

Dating can be a lot of fun.  It can also destroy you. 

So, how do you avoid the destruction?  Carry more egg baskets.

Going out with someone is always going to affect your heart.  While you are acknowledging that you like someone else, you are also putting your worth ‘out there’ as well.  One of the pleasures of dating is that it feels really good that someone else has picked, of all people, YOU to be their favorite.  Naturally, if you eventually break up, it hurts because they’re not just rejecting your taste in music, but you as a person.

There’s no way around that hurt, but there are ways to avoid it destroying you. 

In the egg analogy, eggs are your sense of value, worth, well-being, the sense that “I’m good.”  As humans, we place those eggs in certain baskets in our lives.  If you put them all in one, though, like a dating relationship, and you drop it (aka someone dumps you), you will feel worthless, used, unlovable, bad, or worse. 

Dating tends to make people want to put everything into that basket.  How do you know if you are putting all your eggs in a dating basket?  We get clingy, we stop caring about what anyone else thinks, we don’t listen to other’s advice, we think nothing else matters, we ditch all our friends and sometimes even family, we get overly jealous and suspect others of plotting against our relationship, or we might even feel like our significant other is our reason for living. 

Outside of the fact that if you lose this person you will have nothing left, the one basket thing also keeps people in bad relationships.  I’ve known girls who had abusive boyfriends, but were convinced that if they broke it off they would have no life afterwards or that no one else would ever love them.  So, they stayed in the abuse. 

So, spread out your sense of well-being in other things too, like your interests, your hobbies, your family relationships, your friends, or your talents.  These are the things and people that can hold you up when you hit the crises that life sends your way, like a breakup.

There’s one basket, though, that is more important than any of these and has helped me weather every storm.  It’s the one that is tied onto my wrist and never drops.  I’ll hit that in another post.