Jess lanai

When I write these ‘how to date’ posts I am not in anyway implying that I know how to date.

What I’m saying is I know how to be inept at a dating and I’m documenting as I become more adept.

I’ve gotten more into writing these dating posts because I feel as though I’ve made quite a bit of progress.

Dating is a skill.

I find it to be a very similar skill to writing actually.

It’s hard for the same reasons writing is hard.

And the difficulty of writing has to do with having an internal experience that is basically a big mess of emotions, sensations and projections that are all jumbled together and then trying to civilize them so they have an external value.

It’s very hard to do.

Dating does have a scale.

Certain things do tip the scale. For better or for worse.

The more attracted I am to a man the more time he has to make mistakes. The less attracted I am the less time he has to make mistakes.

What I’ve noticed from dating myself is a general confusion on how much time I should give a person.

I think many women go through what I’m about to describe but I don’t know for sure because this is something not many will talk about.

I’ve gone through the scenarios where I wonder if I should give men I’m less attracted to more of a chance.

Not something I ever did when I was younger. Attraction was my god. There was no degrees of attraction. There was insane overwhelming attraction that left me completely at the mercy of the man or there was no attraction and in that case zero consideration.

Now that I’m older, and a bit less dramatic, I can notice varying degrees of attraction.

And I decided to investigate these varying levels of attraction. I’ve gone on dates with them in the spirit of experimentation.

I didn’t like it.

For two reasons. Reasons number one was that my lesser attraction made me feel far more entitled to things. Which I didn’t find to be a pleasant emotion.

It also made me feel incredibly guilty because men would be trying so hard and they’d be very good people and I’d just imagine having to dump them.

But then on the other hand my option is overwhelming attraction to a man and in that scenario I essentially become an idiot slave.

The main problem with being an idiot slave is that although it is fun, it can be quite dangerous. My emotions can only handle so many times of being an idiot slave.

Because as an idiot slave I tend to work too hard to get too little. My emotions will record this and start to rebel against me and I will lose control.

I feel there is perhaps some sort of balance I can someday find. So far my ideas on finding balance are two only things.

There is a level of attraction I have to have or a relationship is not possible. But it might not need to be overwhelming attraction.

And in the presence of overwhelming attraction I also might not need to become an idiot slave.

If I communicate better I might be able to avoid my emotion’s rebellion and therefore retain control over myself.

Any man reading this might be asking what creates overwhelming attraction.

The truth is I’m not entirely sure. It’s not one thing.

It’s a combination of many things.

There are some fundamentals of course. Good looking of course.

The sense that a man has man friends and is respected and liked by those man friends. Or perhaps respected and liked at his place of work because he’s fair, useful and fun but not a pushover.

The sense that a man has a vision for himself and something he’s striving for.

A good sense of style and how to present himself.

A sense that a man is an individual that can think for himself and is not influenced by trying to be popular or accepted. Yet also the sense that he can handle the perception of the external world so he has a healthy balance between what he wants for himself and being of value to society.

Those are the fundamentals.

But a man can have all those things and I still might not feel much of an attraction.

Which has happened to me many times.

So what actually causes intense attraction is a bit more nuanced. It’s usually little quirks. Things so subtle that my body picks up on it long before I can.

I think it’s too complex to fully understand.

I’m not sure how common what I’m about to say is. But I think it’s pretty common.

I never felt entitled to a relationship. Because of how shy I was I had the belief that I would not be capable of ever getting a relationship.

And my experience rather reinforced that belief. But my behavior was probably the driving force behind what I experienced.

Because I was so shy and awkward I made men shy and awkward. And I’ve learned that shyness is not read as shyness. It’s read as dismissiveness. As lack of caring or lack of interest.

People get very offended by lack of interest. And when people get offended they get very defensive. Which means they are mean.

They belittle, or they might display their lack of interest, or try to communicate they think as lowly of you as you do of them.

So my dating experiences when I was young were quite brutal.

Over time I have overcome my shyness. But it can still creep up.

And to define shyness it’s not simply a bashful thing where I like everyone around me but I’m shy.

No.

It’s a desire to guard my own space especially from two particular types of people.

Person number one I don’t like. So interacting with them wastes my time and energy.

Person number two I like too much and thus they inadvertently take too much of my time and energy.

So I treat these two people the same.

I got over my shyness by keeping my boundaries very firm with people I don’t like.

And attempting to communicate with people I do like so I feel less pressured around them.

But I’ve gone off on a tangent. My actual point to all this was that I’ve never felt entitled to a relationship.

Because I’ve never felt entitled my mentality has always been that I must earn one. Or perhaps accept not having one.

So I don’t consider what I want in a man to be of much importance.

What is more important is what I have to offer because that is what will determine if I can get anything anywhere near what I want.

I don’t think this is an entirely bad way of thinking. But.

It can get warped very easily.

It can spiral down into low self esteem. And low self esteem is a nightmare of the self fighting with the self.

Things can get very twisted with low self esteem.

With very low self esteem identities can break or be created. And sometimes when they are created they get much harder to break again and that can be what is most dangerous.

I’d argue that low self esteem is far more prevalent in women than entitlement is.

I still don’t know how to date though but I’m getting there.

And I stayed more on point with this post than I thought I would. But I still didn’t get to even a fourth of what I meant to really say.

I’ll try again later.