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Relationships come in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors and flavors. We are born to parents. We are raised and educated by a variety of adults. We have other young peers, friends and relatives. Eventually, we venture out to trade our products and services for money: we consult, we are employed, we work for The Man. Unless we are very unlucky, none of these things work well the first time. Some people are extraordinarily unlucky: their parents are perfect, their teachers effective, their friends considerate and their job prospects few but desirable and readily available. We usually call people like that lucky, but that is part of their punishment. Some day, something won't work quite the way they are accustomed to things working and they will have no freaking clue what to do next.
The rest of us have some degree of experience trying a bunch of times, maybe trying a variety of tactics, before we keep friends, a job, the right to drive the family car. A lot of people characterize the first few attempts as failures. I'm here to tell you that is, at minimum, misleading, and more accurately, a distorted perspective, a belief that will bog you down in your efforts to get what you want.
We can all think of other ways of characterizing those first few attempts. A learning opportunity. A solution in search of a problem. The right way to get . . . something you don't want right this minute. These are all workable, unless you have an knee jerk cynical response, something that reads those phrases, churns a bit, and spits out "Failure".
For you (and anyone else who cares to play along), we're going to redefine all those failures as successes. They aren't just neutral, they're actually good. They're good even if you don't learn from them at the time, because as long as you remember a failure vividly enough to think of it as failure, you can still learn from it. You aren't dead. You haven't forgotten. You can retake that test any time, with cheat sheets, with a personal coach, heck, we'll give you the answer sheet to copy.
Take that nasty memory, the one that still can make you cry or cringe or blush. Remember what everyone told you you should have done. Remember what you realized too late you should have done. Remember the epiphany you had reading the last self-help book on the subject. Rewind through that awful memory, substitute in a new face and body for the person who hurt or betrayed or humiliated you. Watch it slowly. Every time you did the wrong thing, watch yourself do the right thing, hear yourself say the right thing. If you can, feel yourself go through the right set of actions. If it's too hard, just run it like a bad movie you watch jet-lagged in an unfamiliar hotel room. Pay attention to what happens in response to your new choices. If you don't like those responses, go back to your friends, go read more books, think about it a little longer. Come up with something that turns out the way you want it to. When you're satisfied you've got it all figured out, run it one last time with feelings turned on. If that nasty memory ever comes back up, run the new one in parallel. If anyone refers back to that awful incident, you've got a new story to tell to go with it: what I will do if I ever find myself in such a situation again.
If you take some time and think about your previous relationships, odds are you'll realize that a lot of them would have ended a lot quicker if you knew then what you know now, if you were then who you are now. That's a win. That's a success. You are a better person for those relationships. Some of those relationships might not have ended at all. That is also a win. You have become enough of an adult to sustain a good relationship when you are in one. That's a success. You are a better person for those relationships. Maybe there are a few relationships that still make you scratch your head. You aren't sure what happened. Maybe you were sure you knew, but the new, wiser you is willing to allow for uncertainty. That's a win. You are open-minded enough now to know when you don't have enough information, to know when you don't understand someone or haven't been able to communicate yourself effectively to them. That's a success. You are more sensitive to feedback. Your ability to connect intimately with other people has improved through those relationships.
You can go back at any time, to any memory, and learn again from the past. We get a lot of chances to learn, even from chaotic, unpleasant experiences, and we don't need to learn from them while they are happening. We can get some distance, acquire some perspective, turn down the volume until we can cope. And when you are going through new chaos with others in the future, remember that they, too, may not learn from this particular experience for years (and years and years and years). Cut them a little slack. If they need to take a break, that's fine. If you need to end things, that's fine. Relationships, whether with friends, lovers, family or business associates, are rarely a smooth, even, uninterrupted progression. Expect that. Prepare for that. Plan for that. Compensate for that. If a relationship is smooth, even and uninterrupted, worry about that instead. Make sure you are sensitive to the needs of other participants. If a relationship is dead easy, it might be dead, or it might be that someone else is doing all the work and having a much less pleasant time of it.
Relationships are numbers games. Most people are prepared to deal with this reality in at least one kind of relationship in their life. Some people are very good at getting a new job. The process of getting their resume out to lots of firms, following up with phone calls, setting up an interview, interviewing, following up with a thank you and negotiating compensation is familiar territory. Most people are not good at this process. They get a new job only after being laid off (or unexpectedly quitting) their previous job. They find new jobs through networks of acquaintances and former coworkers, barely able to assemble a resume, unable to produce a cover letter, and wholly ignorant of the rest of the etiquette associated with the process. Recruitment firms exist to make it easier for companies to sift through these people. Books are written with painstakingly detailed instructions on how to do this. If everyone were good at getting a job, it would be relatively straightforward to translate that process for starting a relationship into starting any other kind of relationship. The analogy will continue to appear throughout this book.
Some people are very good at making new acquaintances. The process of approaching a stranger, introducing themselves, asking an innocuous but open ended question, listening to the response, continuing briefly, thanking the person by name, shaking their hand, offering contact information if desired and leaving is familiar territory. Most people are not good at this process. They meet new people only rarely, when forced to at work or by friends and family, or when their existing social circle contracts excessively or is unavailable. They forget names, they ask yes-no-questions, they interrupt the answer or argue with it, they walk away abruptly, they fail to offer or collect contact information or they never follow up. If someone offers them contact information, they never call, or they fail to clearly identify themselves when they do. If everyone were good at making new acquaintances, it would be relatively straightforward to translate that process into starting any other kind of relationship. The analogy will continue to appear throughout this book.
Some people are very good at increasing intimacy with casual acquaintances. The process of trading personal information, slowly developing a picture of another's likes and dislikes, exploring their personal history, trading expertise and entertainment, walking their dog, putting them up during a bad spot, is familiar territory. Most people are not good at this process. They don't control -- or even much influence -- who they get to know better or how well or on what time line. Those who do control who they get to know find the process chaotic and unpredictable. They overwhelm another, or perhaps their efforts aren't noticed at all. They are surprised when a new friend betrays or rejects them, or are often forced to end all contact rather than put up with a continuing pattern of abuse. If everyone were good at increasing intimacy with casual acquaintances, it would be relatively straightforward to translate that process into increasing intimacy in any other kind of relationship. The analogy will continue to appear throughout this book.
All relationship processes involve more than one person. No matter how skilled, no matter how good you are as a person, you will never be able to completely control the outcome, or even the direction, of a relationship. Maybe you can make someone hire you (making them an offer they can't refuse), but in general, relationships require the active, willing participation of all participants. That said, you have a great deal of influence on selecting those participants in all these relationships. You put an address on your resume and cover letter. You walked up to that guy in the bar. You asked your next door neighbor in for tea.
You can increase the likelihood that the company that hires you is one you want to work for, and the guy you talk to the bar is one you want to date, and your neighbor becomes a friend and not the other side of a feud in several ways. If you have reliable information the company is terrible to their employees, the guy has domestic violence convictions and your next door neighbor is involved in lawsuits with their other neighbor, you know enough to stay away from the beginning. I recommend you do it. I recommend research wherever possible.
If you don't have reliable information, or you do and it's favorable, a relationship is a lot more likely if you do approach them. You could wait forever for the perfect job to find you, and we won't even discuss that guy in the bar.
The slightly less obvious tactic: apply to lots of companies, talk to lots of guys (and not just in bars), invite all your neighbors over and throw a small block party. If you control 10% of the spark that happens between people, you may have to try this 10 times before it works at all -- even if you do everything right.
Good things come of trying lots of things lots of times. People tell you what works and what doesn't and a little piece of why. They won't say in so many words, but form letter rejections from companies have their own code and a battalion of books to explain it to the HR departments that produce them and the hopefuls that peruse them. If you've been LJBF'ed (let's just be friends) the delivery of the request can tell you worlds and if you can't read it your friends may be able to help. Almost everyone can tell the difference between a neighbor that doesn't come to a party, a neighbor that drops by for a few minutes and a neighbor that won't leave when asked to, repeatedly.
To best play a numbers game, you need to have a lot of techniques for generating numbers. For the block party, you walk around and drop off invites on doorsteps. For the job, you connect with a recruiting firm, buy a book detailing companies in the field of your choice, peruse the classified ads, pore over the phone book, call all your former coworkers, catch up on back issues of your trade magazine or professional journal, attend a conference for your field. The options for dating are incredible. Guerrilla Dating Tactics by Sharyn Wolf is an excellent starting point. Read that book or other books and talk to all your friends, not just one or two, and not just same-sex friends. Devise a set of strategies for meeting lots of prospective dates, for repeat contact with the ones you are interested in. You'll also need a set of rules for winnowing out the non-starters as quickly as possible. Red Flags! How to Know When You're Dating a Loser by Gary Aumiller and Daniel Goldfarb has a selection specifically aimed at heterosexual women. I don't have a recommendation for one aimed at other genders/orientations. The book has some validity across gender and orientation. If you don't like their rules, or they aren't appropriate for you, invite a bunch of people like you (same gender, looking for the appropriate gender, approximately the same age range) and develop a consensus system. Expect to modify your rules over time. Once you've generated the numbers and some of them have survived the fast cuts (either you didn't talk to them, they didn't survive the first, second, third or whatever date), you will need a way to decide when to get out of a relationship which is not progressing in the way you want. Now is always a good time to be thinking about when to leave and how. Think about it before you have to. Try to remember these thoughts when your self-esteem has been taking damage and your friends are starting to lose patience.
If you have rules for meeting, repeating, sifting and evacuating, the dating/romantic relationship process will lose a great deal of its terror. It will continue to be chaotic and unpredictable. It will still be capable of bringing you great joy and pain. But you should be able to see things coming before they arrive. You will feel more control. You will hear what your friends are trying to tell you, maybe not while they're telling you, but before you're forced to eat crow.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created February 9, 2002 Updated February 9, 2002