Conventionl dating advice sucks, focus on this instead.
Dating advice can be found everywhere we look.
I say this as someone who almost exclusively writes about dating and interpersonal relationships, but it’s true.
To me, it highlights a growing feeling of collective listlessness and cynicism about romantic relationships and raises questions about whether they’re even worth pursuing at all.
This disillusionment, coupled with lackluster resources and role models, often leaves us wanting.
We have no idea what we’re doing.
Let me start by saying I am by no means an expert, but most of us have no idea what we’re doing in love…and it’s not our fault.
Since virtually no one teaches us anything about healthy relationships or emotional nuance in school, we are left to our own devices, usually making bumbling, painful mistakes without much guidance.
What we learn at home is what many of us assume about how relationships work. We watch our parents or caregivers interact, building our understanding of love from what we see.
If it’s not seen there, it’s gleaned from music, television shows, or in films, or worse, our education comes from pornography which sells us false and damaging narratives about love, sex and pleasure, violence, and entitlement to (primarily) women’s bodies.
Ultimately, our sex education programs lack emotional depth if we live somewhere that offers them at all. The media’s examples of love are often unhealthy, immature, or inaccurate, ending with scenes of neat closure and assumed resolution.
And what is this mysterious resolution, exactly?
How did Harry and Sally make out after they got married?
What about Sandy and Danny after she changed her personality for him and they drove into the clouds in that hot corvette?
Did Clementine and Joel address their dysfunction, her drinking, and his depression differently the second time around?
Or what happened to Kat and Patrick when he bought her a guitar after humiliating her, but she’d been accepted to Sarah Lawrence?
Besides melancholy indie movies, most fail to show the terrifyingly complex and open-ended nature of our favorite characters’ relationships after the credits roll.
Ultimately, we are left reliant on either painful trial and error or self-education (often both) and little direction on what we can do to find happiness and fulfillment in love.
So rather than complicate the process, here’s the one thing I’ve found through my trial and error that seems to make relationships function.
The secret sauce
It seems pretty straightforward.
The key is personal accountability.
It seems simple because taking accountability and holding others accountable is simple in theory.
Yet very few role-model it.
In application, it might be one of the least demonstrated behaviors occurring in our world today.
World leaders and politicians shrug their shoulders, answering mounting pressure from constituents with incompetence, and institutions of power answer to no one as they brutalize vulnerable populations and destroy lives.
Corporations ravage and exploit the earth and its inhabitants with dangerous practices, little to no regulation, and nonexistent reprimands.
Technology has allowed us to disconnect in the dating world to the point that ghosting, breadcrumbing, bailing, or worse have become commonplace with little consequence.
No wonder it’s become easier and easier for us to blame someone else for our problems or difficulties in dating or otherwise; it’s all we see anywhere we look.
People who publicly take ownership of their mistakes and change the behavior, rather than some celebrity or politician making a forced, disingenuous PR apology, are virtually nonexistent.
It’s always someone else’s fault, but never anyone’s responsibility to try to fix it.
The reality is that everything ultimately boils down to our willingness to take responsibility for ourselves and how we participate in relationships with others.
We are individually accountable for showing up in the best ways for us AND each other, the planet, and future generations.
Taking accountability requires humility, putting the ego aside, admitting we’re wrong, and putting in the effort to change.
This can be difficult when people feel powerless or inadequate because being “right” becomes part of their identity and one of the only things left to cling to. Being “wrong” or making mistakes brings up uncomfortable feelings.
We avoid accountability because when we’ve done something wrong, we believe that we are somehow inherently wrong too, and we have to confront shame.
We will do almost anything to avoid feeling the discomfort of shame.
Taking accountability for our actions is not an admission of moral deficiency.
It’s an acknowledgment that we have not shown up favorably and perhaps not truly reflective of the person we want to be.
Sometimes we miss the mark, and that’s okay. We have to get comfortable with the idea that we won’t always get it right the first time.
I realized over time that how I react, show up, argue, love, communicate, and address my wounds stems from the level of conscious awareness I have about my behaviors and triggers.
To indeed be in control of my life, living authentically, I have to take ownership of who I am and initiate the process of knowing myself.
Everything else stems from there.
How to put it into practice
We live in a society built and thriving on exploitation and evading responsibility; therefore, many of us are out of practice.
Regardless, personal accountability remains a common thread in success and empowerment in any area of our lives, and developing it is key to making something work.
My experience
In every relationship I’ve had, partners have triggered me. Sometimes simply being with them has either brought out or shined a light on parts of myself I didn’t like.
After talking about our lifestyles and sharing my interest in healthy living and personal development, I once dated a guy who made fun of me for not drinking and said, “stop trying so hard you make everyone around you look bad.”
If that was not a reflection of his shame about his drinking problem and lack of self-care, I don’t know what is.
To neg and blame me for his discomfort, rather than respect my values even if he disagreed, was a way for him to avoid looking at himself. He could escape the shame and self-loathing that arose when he was confronted by someone who made different choices, ones he believed he should have been pushing for himself.
There have been many times I’ve felt insecure, inadequate, frustrated, rejected, anxious, or scared and all of these feelings are mine. They are my responsibility to manage.
That is not to say I think someone should internalize abuse or assume it’s “my own problem” when someone disrespects them or worse. It simply means it was my choice and responsibility to pick partners with discretion and when they showed me their true colors, leave.
If I chose poorly, it was that much more likely my partner was not doing the internal work, to begin with, leading me to take the brunt of the blame and emotional labor in the relationship.
In healthier relationships, I had to look at my feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, often leading me to question my worthiness of quality partners. I had to work on my self-esteem and build a life outside of the relationship to avoid sabotaging something good for me.
The bottom line is at the end of the day, I had to self-reflect on what was going on for me internally, and while all of my feelings are valid, they are not my partner’s responsibility to manage.
They can support, listen, and validate me, but ultimately if I don’t take ownership of how I show up, the relationship becomes filled with blame. Both people lose the ability to problem-solve as a team.
Where you can start
Reflect on your impact on others and the world as a friend, partner, employee, and consumer. How do your actions affect others, even distantly?
Ask yourself how often you apologize when you’ve hurt someone else without giving excuses or justifications. If you don’t, are you willing to start?
Understand that a relationship can only go as far as the work both people are willing to do to own their half of it.
Separate your identity and value from being right or always having the answer. Humility is sexy and relatable.
Start exploring ideas and literature that challenge your thoughts and beliefs to get comfortable with being wrong.
Confront your shame. Reflect on what makes you feel shameful and where you can start forgiving yourself, so shame no longer controls you or your responses.
It is a long and sometimes painful journey to develop new character traits and implement different behaviors.
This isn’t necessarily something that will happen overnight, especially if avoiding accountability through deflection, gaslighting, acting pathetic, lying, defiance, and a slew of other manipulative and maladaptive techniques have been role-modeled to us and practiced throughout our lives.
The good news is we can always choose how we want to show up in the world, and while we can’t control other people, we can decide how to respond to them to create a relationship filled with love and respect.
