Relax and Enjoy

[James]

I thought this was a good simple point that people should be reminded of . .

Dating: Easier than you think?
By Randy B. Hecht


My seven-year-old niece Danielle is not one to be trifled with and does not appreciate being treated like… well, like a seven-year-old. So when she asked me why I was divorced and I replied that it was a little complicated, she responded indignantly, “Just tell me!”

“Well, I got married, and one day my husband said he didn’t want to be married anymore, and we got a divorce,” I said, certain that she’d reach immediately for that favorite of all kid words, “WHY?” Instead, she replied – eyeing me, as if I’d been an idiot to make such a fuss over nothing – “That’s it? That wasn’t complicated at all!”

OK, so things are not quite as simple as that. At the same time, dating often is not as complicated as we make it out to be. No, it’s not an easy thing to find the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life — but some of dating’s most confounding complications are those we build into equations while we complain about how tough it is to be single out there.

We’d never do in our careers what we do on our dates. No one arrives day one on a new job sporting deliberately lowered expectations and an assumption that the new boss is probably going to be as big a psycho as the last one. Judging by job-hopping and (especially in the past few years) downsizing statistics, many of us are destined to seek and find better employment down the road — but that doesn’t prevent us from gaining one thing or another from our present jobs.

Yet we burden our first dates with a make-or-break urgency instead of recognizing that they are, before anything else, an evening’s or afternoon’s entertainment. Yes, a few couples know from the first kiss that they belong together. And a few people have started in the mailroom and risen to the CEO’s office within a single company. But falling short of that mark doesn’t make the whole business a washout.

Then why all the pressure? After all, genuinely disastrous dates are the exception, not the rule. Most bad dates are no worse than dull, and most of those that go beyond that make excellent fodder for our most hilarious war stories. And then there are all those dates with perfectly nice people who we like very much but don’t end up loving, at least not romantically. Some of those people could very well become our good friends if we weren’t so keen to pass judgment on their suitability (or lack thereof) as life partners.

So, next time you find yourself getting tied in knots about an upcoming date, force yourself to take a few steps back. Meet. Make conversation. Practice being charming and, if possible, being charmed. Enjoy the date for whatever it is rather than whatever you think it could become, and let that be enough for the day. That’s it, as Danielle would say. That isn’t complicated at all!