It’s very tempting to rush into love. It’s very tempting to think we’re ready to love because we want to – and there’s nothing wrong with that wanting. But readiness to even look for a partner, let alone choose one, can be more complicated than it seems. Which is why this second chapter is something of an amber traffic light.
The first amber question to ask is this. Is now the right time to be seeking a committed relationship? There are many life situations, temporary transitions and extended periods where being single is essential. Perhaps our focus currently needs to flow inwards to ourselves because our energy needs to flow outwards – maybe to a demanding job, a sick parent (or child), a sudden life crisis. If so, though we may want the support of a relationship because we threaten to collapse without it, choosing a partner may actually be the last thing in the world we should be attempting. And not just because partnership’s arguably the second hardest challenge of a lifetime – the first is parenting, if you’re wondering – so it shouldn’t be undertaken while vulnerable. But also because, vulnerable, we may choose a mate simply as a crutch; crisis over, life healed, that crutch may be superfluous. Unfair to both parties.
There are also many life phases when being single is enough – not because we are running on empty but because we are fulfilled. It can be a hugely enlightening exercise to list the people close to you then list the things they give to you, the things that enhance your life. Company, conversation, common history – or that simplest of support, a hug. Do this exercise and it may gradually dawn on you that most if not all of your needs are being met at the moment. If so, you may opt to put partner choice on hold – or choose a mate who fills the current gap even if they don’t offer the traditional 24/7 comprehensive companionship.
Staying on amber
The next amber question is even more challenging. Is it ever the right time to be choosing a partner? It’s said that the best thing in life is to be happily partnered and the next best thing is to be happily single – but for some people the hierarchy’s reversed. Some of us are entirely whole without additions, flourish better without distractions, are simply happier alone.
If you suspect you’re more contented when single, consider – and not just as a passing thought – whether partnership may not be what you are meant to do with your life. The ideal of singledom is highly valued in many spiritual traditions less because of puritanism than because it frees us to follow our real vocation. The composer Robert Schumann, when he achieved his initial musical success, is said to have compared it to his forthcoming marriage in these words: ‘I doubt if being a bridegroom will be in the same class with these first joys of being a composer . . . I now . . . marry the wide world.’ If you are seeking a relationship only because it is what ‘everyone’ does, try on for size the possibility that you are not everyone. You are special and the best way for you to thrive may be to ‘marry the wide world’.
Planning
For the rest of us there are still the practicalities to consider. Do we actually have room in our lives right now to hold down a committed relationship? The reality is that online dating, for example, will likely take up an hour each night – the equivalent of a working day each week for anything up to a year.
And once the search is over, life will be even more overextended. For love may be wonderful, but it demands time, space, energy and a willingness to accommodate. And while statistically our formal working hours at the start of the twenty-first century are apparently almost half those we endured at the start of the nineteenth, the additional claims on that time, space and energy – by family, friends, hobbies, housework, travelling, childcare, texts, email, Twitter, Facebook and the miscellaneous demands of living – are arguably double what they were a hundred years ago.
The extra sting in the tale is that the more successful we’ve been in life up to now, the more we’ve developed our career, expanded our social life and gained a rewarding lifestyle, the less room we have for partnership. The more established we are in our world, the less flexibility we have for allowing a partner into that world. To love, we may have to sacrifice at least some of the rest of our lives. (For moving stories from people who feel they’ve not sacrificed as they should have done, see the website www.notimeforlove.com, which describes itself as a project to acknowledge that ‘in a reality where time is finite, prioritizing love, in any form, can be challenging’.)
Stop? Go? Wait? Hesitate? Panic and stay pinned to the pavement?
Try this exercise. Map out your typical week – morning, afternoon, evening. Indicate which of those twenty-one time segments are currently full to the brim, then judge how many segments you would – or could – happily drain in order to make room for a relationship. Then ask what having a relationship might drain from the rest of your life and what the rest of your life might drain from a relationship. Is the bargain worth it? This is not, you understand, to dissuade you from the journey, but to make the advance planning more realistic.
Facing fears
Which brings us to the question of emotional readiness. Here, the elephant in the room is typically the emotion of fear – particularly because choosing a partner also involves the intimidating challenge of being chosen.
When I ask the men and women in my dating classes to think of one word to describe how they feel about partner choice, what is mentioned more than anything else is some variation on the fear concept; unease, wariness, anxiety, terror. As well as fear of making the wrong choice, we suffer fear of being rejected – ‘I’m too fat, too shy’; fear of being left on the shelf – ‘I’m too old, too boring’; and fear of being shamed by being left on the shelf, particularly when our peers all seem to have clambered down from said shelf and are now happily mated. Though on that last point, be aware that one never knows what goes on behind closed doors. Not to encourage Schadenfreude, but many of the couples who seem most happy now will be the ones sobbing on your shoulder when they hit their first divorce in a few years’ time.
There’s also huge fear of admitting the fear. We don’t want to confess – in this age of self-possession – that we’re struggling, that we’re not completely fine about the whole partner-choice business. Bridget Jones’s Diary made us laugh at Bridget’s dating struggles not only because her errors redeemed ours but also because her fight for control over life and love made us more able to break the silence and admit our own struggle to ourselves and to others. And Bridget’s final triumphant union with Mark Darcy, when it came, reassured us that there could be a good result even for those of us most petrified.
Since Bridget, many books – both fiction and self-help – have urged a ‘fake it till you make it’ attitude to fear. But there is another way. More recently, and to my mind more usefully, we’ve started to embrace the suggestion that vulnerability may be better than bravado. Writer Brenè Brown, in her book Daring Greatly, brings the fear story up to date when she talks about the huge courage it takes to even consider entering a relationship, let alone doing so – but how the act of revealing the fear behind that courage is a key first step on the road to successful partnership. This is vulnerability. This is ‘daring greatly’.
Many of us already do just this. When my class participants confess their lack of self-confidence, I often look round the room awed by what these men and women are bringing to the field. Intelligence, personality, talent – but, above all, the courage and willingness, often despite earlier heartbreak, to dare greatly once again. Because of that, surely success is certain. As the Chinese proverb says, ‘Pearls don’t lie on the seashore. If you want one, you have to dive for it.’ And we do.