Are We Dating or Auditioning?
What if some of us aren’t struggling to find love because there are no good people left, but because we’ve gotten so good at evaluating people that we’ve forgotten how to actually experience them?
Welcome to the Relationship section of I Am Victorious.
I almost didn’t write that sentence.
Not because I don’t have anything to say about relationships. Quite the opposite. I have plenty to say. That may actually be why I hesitated.
Relationships have become one of the loudest conversations on the internet. Everybody has a podcast, an opinion, a list of standards or a theory about what everybody else is doing wrong. We know what a man is supposed to do, what a woman should expect, what constitutes a red flag and when somebody should walk away.
We talk about attachment styles, love languages, narcissists, avoidants, manipulators, emotional availability, the bare minimum and non negotiables. We have entire vocabularies for relationships that many of us did not have ten years ago.
All of that information should have made us extraordinarily good at relationships by now.
So, are we?
Somewhere Along the Way, Dating Became an Interview
I understand having standards. At this stage of my life, I probably understand them more than ever.
Experience teaches you things. Pain teaches you things. Healing teaches you things. Once you have worked hard to put yourself back together, you become understandably careful about who gets access to you.
Somewhere between becoming more discerning and trying not to repeat our mistakes, though, I wonder whether our standards have quietly become scorecards.
Dating can start to sound less like two people discovering one another and more like an interview. What do you do? How much do you make? Do you have children? Have you been married? What happened in your last relationship? What are your intentions?
Then comes the unofficial investigation. How quickly did they text back? Why did they phrase something that way? Why did they use that emoji? What does it mean that they watched the story but didn’t respond?
Before we know it, we aren’t getting to know somebody.
We’re building a case file.
The other person doesn’t even realize they’ve been placed on probation.
When Healing Becomes Another Way to Hide
Podcast culture has given us a lot of answers. Some of them are very good answers.
Conversations are happening now that desperately needed to happen. People are learning about boundaries, emotional abuse, manipulation, trauma, communication, attachment and self worth. People who once lacked the language to describe what was happening to them can finally put words to their experiences.
That is progress.
There is another side to it.
The language of healing can sometimes become the language we use to avoid vulnerability.
Someone disappoints us and it becomes a red flag. Someone needs space and we diagnose avoidance. Someone disagrees with our version of events and suddenly we are discussing gaslighting. Someone doesn’t fit the picture we created and we decide they are not aligned with us.
Sometimes those descriptions are absolutely accurate. Sometimes the person standing across from us is simply a flawed human being trying to interact with another flawed human being.
There is a difference.
The danger comes when we become so skilled at identifying everybody else’s dysfunction that we never have to examine our own.
We Say We Want One Thing. What Do We Actually Choose?
This is where the relationship conversation becomes far more interesting to me.
I don’t just want to talk about who we choose. I want to talk about why.
We can say we want peace while repeatedly becoming attracted to uncertainty. We can say we want consistency while finding consistency strangely unexciting. We can insist that we want emotional availability, then discover how uncomfortable it feels when somebody actually gets close enough to see us.
We can say we are exhausted by complicated situations while remaining inexplicably fascinated by people surrounded by question marks.
Before anybody gets defensive, understand something:
I’m including myself in the conversation.
That is precisely why I wanted to write this section.
I have no interest in standing on the sidelines with a clipboard grading everybody else’s relationships. Some of the most uncomfortable questions I have encountered have been questions I had to ask myself.
Why did that person get my attention?
Why did that situation affect me so deeply?
Why can someone perfectly nice leave me completely unmoved while somebody complicated can occupy entirely too much space in my head?
Was it chemistry? Familiarity? Intuition? Attraction?
Or was it simply an old wound recognizing something it already knew?
Those questions interest me far more than another debate about who should pay on the first date.
We’ll probably get to that eventually too.
Maybe We’re Auditioning Too
There is an irony in spending so much time evaluating whether somebody qualifies for a place in our lives.
We rarely stop to consider that we are revealing ourselves throughout the evaluation.
Our attractions reveal something.
Our tolerances reveal something.
The people we chase reveal something.
The people we overlook reveal something.
Even the relationships that never quite became relationships can tell us something about ourselves if we are willing to look closely enough.
Maybe the goal isn’t to become harder to fool.
Maybe the goal is to become harder to fool ourselves.
Discernment isn’t simply noticing someone else’s patterns. It requires noticing our own.
Having standards doesn’t automatically mean we choose according to them. Healing doesn’t mean becoming impossible to hurt. Growth certainly doesn’t require becoming so guarded that nobody can ever get close enough to matter.
Sometimes healing may sound like, I like this person, but this isn’t healthy for me.
Other times it may sound like, This person is good to me, and I need to understand why healthy feels unfamiliar.
Then there is perhaps the most uncomfortable possibility of all:
Maybe they’re not the problem this time.
Whew.
We’ll come back to that one.
Relationships Are Mirrors
That realization is ultimately why relationships belong on I Am Victorious.
This is not becoming a dating advice site. I’m not interested in teaching women how to “get” a man, teaching men how to “keep” a woman or pretending that human beings can be reduced to a formula.
Relationships interest me because relationships reveal us.
Romantic relationships, friendships, family relationships and even those strange almost relationships can expose our expectations, insecurities, patterns and boundaries. They reveal our capacity to forgive and our willingness to walk away. Sometimes they expose our tendency to remain somewhere long after we know we should leave.
That makes relationships about far more than dating.
They are about identity.
They are about healing.
They are about choices.
Most importantly, they are about the person staring back at us once everybody else leaves the room.
Welcome to the Conversation
The question I want to explore through this section is bigger than how to find love.
How do we become healthy enough to recognize healthy love and honest enough to recognize when we’re the ones getting in its way?
Some of these conversations will be serious. Some will probably be uncomfortable. Others will be funny because, frankly, modern relationships provide entirely too much material not to laugh occasionally.
The goal isn’t to become another voice on the internet telling everybody who to date, when to leave or what every text message means.
I would rather ask better questions.
So let’s begin with one.
If you removed chemistry, looks, status, potential and everybody else’s opinion, what would your relationship choices say you actually believe you deserve?
Welcome to the relationship section of I Am Victorious.
Let’s talk.
Be honest. Be intentional. Be victorious.