Meandering Mind - Eva Dillner [62]
Say you are a woman who's pondering a potential mate. What images come to mind? Do you see children trailing after him, do you see yourself making love in romantic settings, do you see yourself buying a house and fixing it up, a rich social life, sailing around the world, quiet evenings in front of the fireplace, or...
Let the images come and float through. Notice if there are other people involved and what activities you see yourself in, notice the role you put him in, what hopes and expectations you have of him in your dream.
The important thing here is to get in touch with your fantasy and be honest about it. Julia Roberts in the movie Pretty Woman told Richard Gere she wanted the fairy tale. She didn't want to be a kept woman, which he had offered her. It was painful to be honest as she thought she had lost him all together when she said, “no I want the fairy tale.” In the movies we have to have happy endings so he came as the modern knight and rescued the princess out of the tower and she got her fairy tale ending. Just one example of letting go. You know
If you love something
set it free
if it comes back to you
it is yours
if it doesn't
it never was
When you come out of your drifty space and have let your fantasy roam, come back to the here and now and write down your images. You will see threads and common themes. Go ahead and dialogue with your mate or group about your true dreams, talk about what you think they really mean to you, be curious about the other people, try to understand them and their dreams. I think that is the true meaning of love, wanting to discover and know who the other person really is.
This exercise clarifies what you are really signing up for. Isn't the time to discover this now? Why wait until later and find out you thought you were signing up for something else entirely?
Twenty-Four
How do we meet people?
If the people you are meeting don't have dreams that match yours, perhaps you need to look in a different place. There are some common misconceptions about how we actually meet mates. I've been alone now for some time, and every once in a while my friends and I talk about going out dancing or to the pub to meet some men. But every time it falls flat, none of us have any interest in really going there anyway.
I've been working my way through the exercises in Everyday Karma by Carmen Harra. A key element in her work is to go through every single relationship you've ever had, it doesn't matter if they were short or long, you count them all and review the key elements of each one. I won't belabor them all here, as there were about fifty men to review, but I will share with you one statistic - how I met them all:
through work - 13
at school and hobbies - 14
through friends and colleagues - 19
going out - 4
Surprise, surprise the best way to meet people is to do life. When you focus on what you are interested in and participate in those activities, you naturally come in contact with others of like interest. These friends have other friends and so on.
Why not make your own tabulation of your relationships? Where did you meet? Was it by going out? Through school? At work? While engaged in a hobby? At a friend's house? Take a look at where and how you connect with people. Most often we meet through common interests and it is the rare exception where we pick someone up at a dance or other outing and the connection turns out to be a lasting one.
I related my research to a friend of mine. She confirmed my statistics and said there has been research done on this and the number one place we meet mates is through work. So there!
Then I talked to another friend of mine. When she reflected on how she had met the men in her life, it turned out she had met most of them by going out dancing. Well so much for statistics. I suggest you do your own summary of where you've met the relationships in your life. Then pursue those avenues that gave you the best results.
Getting to know each other
Having sorted out how you meet, it's time to