Intuition for Pain-Free Dating

Are you single? Have a better Valentine’s this year. The number of single people asking me how to use intuition in their dating lives has doubled in recent years. Finally people are getting that intuition can be applied to everything, even finding your soul mate. Intuition can reduce the amount of fruitless dates to a few plum selections that are enjoyable and productive. It can also help people to manoever through the stickier aspects of dating (don’t want to kiss them at the end of the first date? who picks up the cheque? should I call them first?) with grace and effectiveness.  By tuning in to the other person you can sense what their dating style, values, preferences, and even schedule, is like. Is he not calling me because he is busy or because he’s just not that into me? No, he really is busy and he also doesn’t want to appear desperate. He’ll call Thursday so I will chill out because he’ll unconsciously pick up my desperate vibe and I’ll mess this up. Or perhaps you’ll sense that no he really isn’t that into me. He wants somebody more fast/slow/tall/short/pink/purple whatever, so I am moving on and am grateful that he let me go in a graceful way that I can save face. Besides, if I’m honest, there was a lot I liked about him and wish him well, but I need somebody more fast/slow/tall/short/pink/purple etc.. Suddenly dating becomes a little more respectful, humane, and subtle but less mystifying.

There is real mystery in dating, the mystery of why two people can want to open up their safe, comfortable lives to confusion, possible rejection, potential re-wounding, you name it. But we do it everyday. Everyday people take that risk and fall in love and make (or adopt) babies and share their love in the world. That is a great Mystery and it is beautiful. But we don’t need to be mystified by the mundane and neurotic aspects of dating. We create all this drama around situations that would be entirely easy if we simply knew, knew that he was actually just talking to his ex-girlfriend to get back with her, or knew that she was really just trying to bounce back after a bad break-up and wasn’t serious about the date, or knew that the person really actually liked you but was just nervous. Everybody wants to be loved so there are no villians in dating just confusion and occasional poor choices. But if we know what the deal is going in we can make choices based on whether it works for us or not. They’re just shopping around? So am I! So perfect, we can just have fun and not take this date seriously. But everybody is so afraid the other person won’t want to go out with them if they admit that or that it would be awkward to be that honest or often they just don’t even know themselves what their agenda or intention is. Intuition takes the guessing and drama and to some extent, the ego, out of dating. When you can sense the other person’s perspective, you don’t need to take it personally if they aren’t that into you. Bottom line: intuition makes dating less painful and more productive.

So try this a day or so before a date. Sit down somewhere quiet and let yourself relax to the point where you are almost going to fall asleep. Now ask yourself silently, “What is this person’s intentions? Are they serious about finding someone? Are they truly available? Will I want them? Will they want me? What’s the lesson in this meeting?” You might want to pause after each question to hear/feel/see/sense/ the answer. Sounds simple, right? The trick to intuition is you have to get out of your own way which means you have to drop all of your preconceived ideas, biases, belief systems, agendas etc. to become like a blank slate for the other person to be able to be whatever they are without any reaction from you. So let’s say you have a history of being dumped. Naturally you are going to be afraid that you will be rejected or dumped again. So when you ask the above questions, your past experiences, in other words, your fear will answer instead of your intuition and you will not get accurate information. Your fear will say “This person is not serious, not available, won’t want me, will hurt me.” Then you will be nervous or defensive on the date in a way that will baffle the other person and if that doesn’t push them away, you will feel like, “Hey, I gave you a chance to leave before humiliating me and you’re still here, which means you really are trying to mess with me. This is cruel. Now I’m angry.” And that will sabotage the dynamic for sure. So your fear has created this situation, when perhaps the other person was genuinely open to having a relationship. It could also go the other way too, where you have a history of not getting what’s being put out there. So your hopes will answer, “Yes, this person is interested in me, serious, and available so I give myself permission to like them demonstratively.” So you are very friendly, even flirtatious on your first meeting, assuming a level of reciprocity and intimacy that isn’t there and what happens? The other person thinks that you are desperate, easy, delusional, or needy and they pull away when they might have been more open to you if you had sensed they were genuine but conservative.

Now sometimes we luck out, and our mistake just happens to be a dating style that jives with the other person but that would require us to rack up lots of chances to hit that small percentage who will co-incidentally have the same style (or material) as us. This is why some people call dating a “numbers game”. Just date as many people as possible, the proponents of this theory say. Then we hear the urban myth of the woman who pledged to date any guy who asked her or the other who dated practically every night for a year and a half, and after dating some  400 guys finally found The One. I have one question: did this woman have a job, friends, hobbies, a life? I don’t think it is healthy, productive, or necessary to date like that. Dating should be a meeting with someone we are genuinely interested in getting to know better because we have reason to believe that there is a good potential of them being compatible, not that “you’re my Tuesday night desperate random meeting”. We are not cattle to be thrown at each other  in the hopes of mating. Intuition elevates us to what we are at our best: spiritual, conscious, ethical, mature human beings looking for love. So that even if the person doesn’t turn out to be The One we go home feeling good about ourselves, about our lives, about the way we conducted ourselves, and with a pain-free lesson about ourselves and dating that brings us closer to The One and sustains reasonable hope.

Find out what intuition can do for you, whether you need help learning to read people better, get out of your own way, or whether you blame yourself for your singleness when really it is something else entirely. Learn in a one-on-one session with a professional intuitive, in an intuition workshop, or from an intuition development book, but instead of feeling disheartened this Valentine’s feel empowered and find reasonable hope again.