Friendly and not-so-friendly ghosts

When you begin thinking about who you want in your life, the kind of person who makes sense, you may be influenced by a ghost — not Casper and not necessarily friendly, but someone who haunts you without your even being aware of it. This ghost is someone who rearranged the emotional furniture in your room and is likely to be someone who you cared about but who didn’t turn out as you wished. It may be a first grade teacher who seemed to like your best friend best, a best friend who moved away, or someone who didn’t give you a Valentine. It could also be a traumatic experience, like overhearing a remark from a supposed friend that hurt your feelings.

And just like ghosts, who are assumed to be souls who haven’t found peace, your emotional ghosts are fueled by lack of resolution in your head or heart. Because this chapter is about laying the groundwork to go and do something that’s scary and fun and exciting (that is, date), it’s a great idea to have as much of your energy at your disposal as possible. Therefore, an exorcism is in order. You don’t need holy water, incense, or a priest, just a bit of courage and a paper and pencil. If you’re haunted by an emotional ghost (what an image!), write down the specific characteristics of the ghost — turn on the light of your intellect and understanding.

Ghosts need darkness, fear, and tension to survive. You may not be able to get rid of all the thoughts, but you can probably keep yourself from being haunted by just getting all those thoughts out into the open and into your notebook. Ghosts can only haunt you in the dark, so turn the light on.

Describing an Ideal Match For You

Now that you know who you are, what would you like in a partner? I’m not necessarily talking about the rest of your life — after all, you may very well want different things in someone at one stage or another of your life — but it makes no sense to date someone who loves kids and animals if you want a lifestyle of travel and high adventure and risk with a partner. Similarly, if sex is crucial in your life, dating someone who thinks sex is dirty is somewhat counterproductive.
Look at a specific list of the characteristics that would balance your good and bad points. For example, if you’re shy, would you be happier with someone who is more outgoing or shy like yourself? There is no right or wrong answer here, just good questions.

Start with the fantasy list describing your ideal partner, and compare that list to the list describing your characteristics. See if there is a fit, a match. Are you looking for security or excitement, domesticity or adventure, stability or thrills? Are you looking to balance who you are or find someone just like you?

Who Am I?

All of us are the products of our gene pools (that’s why this chapter begins with parents); our experiences (that’s why the preceding section looks at patterns and fantasies); and our choices, intellect, and emotions, which is what this section looks at. By now, you’re beginning to understand that there are no perfect people and no perfect characteristics. Almost anything can have a plus and a minus. You can’t begin to work on emphasizing the good stuff and downplaying the icky until you know exactly what and where each is.
So to work:

1. 1. List the things you really love about yourself in your dating notebook, and be very specific. What you love about yourself is the basis of everything else, but for heaven’s sake, don’t write, “I’m a really nice person.” What does nice mean? Instead, write that you are patient with your little brother, impatient with a check-out clerk, likely to snitch a candy bar if no one’s watching —well, actually, that part goes in the next step; so carry on with the good stuff, or if you can’t separate ’em, begin the “what I’m not crazy about” list and come back to this one after you’ve purged yourself. Make sure that this list is long enough to withstand the next task, which is to list what you don’t like about yourself. If you can’t come up with at least ten specific good things, you’re having a pity party or you need a therapist, seriously. We are each responsible for fashioning ourselves as likable by our own standards, at the very least. If you can get other folks to agree, terrific; if not . . . well, we’re not talking crazy here.
2. Now complete the I’m-not-crazy-about-these-things-in-myself list. Just bedrock — who you are and what you can change and what you’re going to have to learn to live with yourself — goes here. Some of the things you’re proudest of often have a downside. For example, if you’re independent, you may not be as attuned to others’ feelings as you would like. If you’re sensitive, you may be too dependent on others’ opinions.

The point of this exercise is to emphasize the positive and either downplay or obliterate the negative. The very act of thinking about yourself in this way, being specific, and taking inventory is the first step toward taking responsibility and changing what you can and want to change about yourself. Then you can begin to repattern your behavior: Snap that rubber band against your wrist when you lose your temper or fine yourself when you gossip; focus on your great posture and ability to put others at ease.

Look for the Patterns before Start to Date

Since you’re old enough to read and think about dating, you have some patterns to go on. Even if this is your very first dating experience, you’ve talked to the opposite sex, fantasized, and interacted. In this section, you look at those patterns (this is also good information to put in your dating notebook):

• Who you choose: Are you drawn to blondes, bullies, actors, athletes, people who hold you too tight, or people who seem to disappear? Are you talking down-to-earth or mysterious, bubbly or reserved, serious or silly?
• How you act: All of us act in characteristic ways, and once we understand those ways, we can see our behavior and the effect it has. Understanding this, we can then begin to see alternative ways of behaving — what to do more of and what to change — before our emotional bruises become permanent. In your notebook, put down what works really well for you and what bombs. Are you really a good listener, or are your jokes terrific? Do you dance well or help everybody with homework? Can you remember your first grade teacher’s name? Do you do well at Trivial Pursuit? Do animals love you? Are you great at crossword puzzles?
  

• How you react: Where are your buttons? What makes you blow up —what words or phrases or situations? We all have them, and they’re often connected by a long, sturdy thread to our past. I hate being told to shut up. “Keep quiet” is okay; “stop talking” is okay; but someone’s saying “shut up” makes me see red and purple and black and blue. Don’t get hung up on the belief that some people are just naturally good at dating and some are awful; it’s basically not true, and even if it were, it has nothing to do with you. The goal of this blog is to help you figure out how to build relationships in a way that makes some sense to you and is effective and honest and sincere and fun.

Don’t assume that everything you can do, everybody else can do. It’s just not true, and the beginning of any good relationship is the relationship you have with yourself. Don’t be shy and don’t be overly critical or overly kind. Paper and pencil can help you to focus on your strengths.

When you’re done, you’ll probably have a pretty detailed list of the most super New Year’s resolutions of all time: how you’re going to polish, trim, highlight, and embrace who you are and who you are cheerfully and enthusiastically becoming. The more specific the list, the more obvious the path and the more straightforward the task.

How to escape parental haunting?

The solution to parental haunting is to figure out how your parents acted, figure out what you wanted them to do differently, and determine how, logically, you can fix it so that this pattern of behavior doesn’t control your dating behavior. Because you’re doing an inventory here, keeping a notebook in which you can jot down thoughts and impressions is a great idea. Make sure your notebook isn’t left around for other folks to read; it’s personal and just for you and your work.

1. Start with a heading called “Mom and Dad,” leaving a page for each, and write down any thoughts that occur. On Mom’s page, you might write, “Neat-freak, warm laugh, takes care of the finances, whines,” and so on. On Dad’s page, you might write, “Rarely home, drinks too much, loves fishing, gives good hugs.” It’s a good idea to leave lots of space so you can let your mind roam.
2. Now go to a new set of pages, again one each for Mom and Dad, and try to organize your thoughts into positive and negative. For example, on Mom’s page, you might put her warm laugh and the fact that she’s in charge of the finances on the positive side and “neat freak” on the negative side. Of course, if you’re being honest, warm laugh might be positive, but “doesn’t take me seriously” might be the downside of her sense of humor. See if you can use your grown-up self to look at things fairly.
3. Once you’ve got a good list going, begin to relate the items on your list to dating behavior. For example, a sense of humor may be important, but so, too, may be someone who won’t laugh at you. Which is more important: having someone who listens a lot or someone who talks a lot? Make sure that the characteristics you want aren’t mutually exclusive. For instance, on one hand you want a man who is really successful; on the other, you want someone for whom you come first. Nope! Doesn’t happen that way.

When you understand which of your feelings about the opposite sex are directly related to Mom and Dad, you may be able, with your grown-up mind and paper and pencil, to free yourself of some of the knee-jerk responses that all of us have. Consider these examples:

• If your Dad always beat you at checkers, you may go for the kill in games, taking all the fun out for both of you, or you may be unwilling to play at all. Finding a game at which you can best your Dad might free you, but at least understanding the cause and effect helps.
• If your Mom was a worrywart, you may feel great anxiety before you leave the house. Your adult self can understand Mom’s fears and separate them from your own.

How Mom and Dad can still ground you?

The purpose of this exercise is neither to prove that there is a terrific set of parents who would have sent you forth with all you needed nor to prove that the parents you got have emotionally maimed you. The purpose is to show that anything your parents did has some positive and some negative possibilities. Once you understand the consequences of parental influence and behavior, you can emphasize or compensate for them. Consider the following examples:

• If you felt your parents never had time for you, you’re probably self-reliant but find it difficult to trust and are a bit brittle on the outside. What you most want is someone to hug you and tell you that you’re great.
• If your parents were really lovey-dovey with each other, you may have felt envious and excluded. As a result, you may look for a date who ignores everybody and everything but you.
• If one or other of your parents doted on you — and I mean really doted —you may feel an overwhelming need to perform or be perfect. A date who asks what you were doing last night may make you feel claustrophobic, as if you’re being monitored or graded again.

Once you know that, you can look for someone who isn’t like the parent, who is self-sufficient, and who is not overly sentimental. Unfortunately, most of us choose someone who’s like the parent who didn’t do whatever we wanted them to do when we were kids, and — voilá! — because we pick the same kind of person, they act in the same kind of way.

Why you should not whining?

Whining is the vocal manifestation of house arrest, pity parties, blaming, and comparing. It’s hard to listen to, will give you wrinkles, and is social suicide. Nobody likes a whiner, which makes it so remarkable that all of us do it from time to time. The worst of it is, the more we whine, the whinier we feel, so make a big sign with a goblet inside a circle and put a slash through it. Get it? No whine (or wine, as the case may be).
Occasionally whining is okay — that’s what friends and family are for — but the amount of time you spend whining should certainly be no more than the amount of time you’re willing to spend listening to someone else whine.