I don’t want to date like a man

In 2018 I wrote an article here about how I had been told over and over by men, that I dated like men. I just reread it because it gets a lot of views and I was also curious to revisit what I wrote back then.

I was reading through and as I scrolled through, I got to number 6….

If you’re fresh out of a relationship, we don’t want to date you to give you a post-divorce/break up ego boost. Be you. Be single. Go on lots of JUST dates. Go out with your boys. Do what you need to do. Let women you meet know you’re just getting back to dating after you got divorced and not looking for a relationship. Again, be honest. Let a woman decide if she’s up for that. Ladies, we can do the same. And I’m not in the business of trying to change your mind about what you should be doing with me, even if we have great chemistry. Timing is important.

This one kinda stopped me, and I slowed my reading. This is such good advice and I find myself in this situation more often than I’d like to admit (ahem, now). But what do you do if you’re a few months in and THEN, you’ve both expressed there’s feelings for the other, they let you know they’re committed to you, to the ‘us,’ to what you have, but they don’t know what they want? It’s early on, but I’m 41, and I know I want to work towards a relationship and this news really threw me off. Even if it’s slow, I appreciate slow growth since fast and intense doesn’t usually end well for me. But that still has me wondering how can you be committed to all of this but not know what you want?

Naturally I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I don’t want to feel played or strung along or mislead. I keep coming back to my own advice- I’m not going to convince you or try to sway you one way or another, and at the same time, I want to stay true to myself, what I want, and still have boundaries. Their decision has nothing to do with me, but for them to figure out on their own what they want. I can be patient for the right person, especially since what we have is so good. I’m not in a huge rush and hearing the reasons why made a lot of sense to me. When you date post-divorce, you learn that people have every agreement under the sun written into their divorce decrees and sometimes they make no sense to us on the outside of it, and sometimes they’re really detailed, or pretty general when it comes to introducing people to the kids. You learn you can trust them to know how to manage the intricacies of their agreements and situations. They do know best and maybe it won’t work out in the long run, but if it’s my ego and my own fears being placed into a situation that is otherwise something that feels right, deeply secure, fun, trustworthy and something I look forward to in every way, then my heart tells me it’s okay to let it play out, to give it a chance to grow into what it will (or won’t be).

I can let go of my need to always know the outcome before I tiptoe into the next step and just let go of the need to control things. Needing to control and know the outcome is a very masculine thing to do, and in my soul, that isn’t me. I don’t want to have to control things and when I do, it creates this domino effect of anxiety due to the over analyzing and the planning I think is happening, instead of just going with the flow, letting my intuition and feelings guide me. When I lean into what feels most natural, I feel my best. I feel secure in what I’m doing and things simply feel like they unfold perfectly.

Finding someone who naturally brings these qualities to the relationship is a huge breath of fresh air. I’m not used to it. I’ve never been asked what I need and doing this has been a huge place of growth for me. It requires vulnerability, trust, and an openness that has brought such a sense of relief when I’m met with feeling held, seen, heard, and just patiently loved through it all. He genuinely wants to meet my needs and be what I need from him, but not in a way that betrays himself. I feel my best when I let myself be the feeling, loving, open, honest woman I am. Letting go is on the top of my list of things to work on- especially letting go of outcomes and needing to know. I want to stay the same soft, sweet, relaxed, non-stressful version of myself I usually am and it is taking some deep self-work to do this when I’m feeling this other shit creep in. I’ve had to come up with some real tangible things I can do in these moments and this is what I’ve found truly works best to feel the feelings, move through them and move them out, and also just do what I need to get out of my head.

1. Work out. Go for a walk. Yoga. Anything to move my body works. Movement gets us out of the anxious state from the ground up. There’s not a lot you can focus on in your head for very long when you have the world around you to pay attention to, the next exercise in your routine to do, or when you’re listening to your yoga teacher. Movement also allows us to move the trauma through us, rather than storing it inside our bodies.
2. Deep breathing. You can do something simple like closing your eyes and just taking slow, belly filling breaths, holding it for a second and releasing it just as slowly. Sometimes I imagine a shape and breathe as I move along the sides of it for a certain count. I also love laying on my yoga mat, placing one hand on my belly and one on my heart and just feeling my heart and breath work effortlessly. Deep breathing stimulates the vagus nerve which is part of our parasympathetic nervous system. This naturally creates a sense of calmness and brings you back into your body, and is another way to keep that anxiety from getting stored or memorized into your body.
3. Write. Just free write. Or sometimes I will pick a word and use that as the thing I’m writing about. I think the act of writing, although we’re still kind of in our heads, it’s helping to get those thoughts out and on the page, hopefully helping with the rumination of thoughts that tend to swirl until we do something with it.
4. Make a cup of hot tea. For me, tea is something that soothes me from the outside in. I pay attention to each step, choosing the tea I want right then, usually it’s something grounding with elements of herbs rather than a florally one; boiling the water and listening to the sound of the water pouring into the mug. I swear hot water sounds different! The smells come next while feeling the warmth of the mug in my hands, and the way the first sip moves from my mouth to my stomach. Every one of my senses is filled, soothed and a nice distraction.
5. Sometimes I’ll play my only phone game. It forces me to think about strategy and I only get 5 moves at a time so by then it’s does its job and I move on with my day. And if I pass a level, I get a little dopamine rush as a bonus (lol).

As a single mom raising three kids (and one in college), I have to make so many decisions and be in control of everything, all the time. Love and relationships is not one of the places I want to be that way. I don’t want to be told I date like a man. I want to be able to let that side of me go when I’m with someone because I trust them so much that I can drop deeply into my more natural feminine ways and just let what will be, be. I want to learn to trust myself and my intuition and to be able to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition. I know I’m getting there because I’m not as cutthroat as I used to be. Knowing the difference between when someone is genuine with you so you can trust that versus someone taking advantage and stringing you along is a really big step and one that’s important because some people truly do deserve to be given patience if that’s one of the only things they’re asking of you.