The Holidays Are Golden

You can find a relationship defining gold mine in the holiday season. If you've been dating the same person for a while, and you think this person is pretty special, whether your 16 or 60, the holiday season is your opportunity! Of course everybody is just a little different so there's bound to be some variation around this theme:

"People are a lot like clocks."

The gears in a hand-tooled clock create their own special working environment. Taking some gears out of one to replace worn out parts in another may sound logical, but it can actually be a bad idea. The custom working system of the one may not be compatible with the working environment in the other.

Everybody grows up in a family environment that's like the gears in the old clock. We can't just assume that "...since we're so much alike," we'll work well together! Our old family system, the "old clock," may not be compatible to allow it to work in the "new clock."

So, buy into an opportunity the holidays can offer to help you check it out. You can use them to help you sample the compatibility of your "old" family environments with what you're developing, potentially, as a new shared one. Also, don't let what's probably a normal fear around meeting and spending time with your special person's parents and family members rob you of this opportunity.

Here are some helpful "gear evaluation" questions:

1. (Before the event) Are you both comfortable with this opportunity? Discuss how and why you feel what you are respectively feeling.
2. (Before the event) How comfortable are your families with this opportunity? Discuss how and why you believe they are or are not comfortable.
3. (After the event) How much effort do you feel family members made to help you feel included? Discuss how and why it may have felt that way.
4. (After the event) If you had opportunity to personally contribute to the overall experience with his/her family, what was that like, how did it happen, and what were you feeling in the process? Discuss that, too.
5. (After the event) Overall, discuss what you feel this experience tells you about the potential compatibility of your different "gears," and what you believe is your likelihood for working well together.
   

OK. That's it.

Until next time...be yourself, have fun, and be smart!

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What to do...what to do?

Are you standing there wondering what to do for your next date? Take the pressure off!
Agree that for your next date you'll get together just to plan something...something you can wrap several future dates around together...something that will require pooling your talents and skills to accomplish...something you'll both remember well into the future!

Of course we all know every dating event has a built-in goal and an agenda of some kind that serves the goal.

Dating agendas can be simple or complex. They can also be constructive or destructive. Constructive agendas tend to support friendship--whether the relationship goes anywhere long-term or not. Destructive agendas are often predatory and manipulative. They predict short-term relationships that don't end happily or with any kind of warmly memorable or meaningful friendship.

For starters, and as a general rule, people like to talk about themselves. Somebody once told me that the author and journalist Earnest Hemingway put that fact into practice. He never missed an opportunity to get some good biographical information. That's to say, if a person had the good fortune to casually meet Mr. Hemingway, whether on a street corner waiting for the traffic light to change or waiting for an elevator to pass the time otherwise counting down the floors, he would warmly and curiously ask some biographical questions. He asked about their business, about where they grew up...maybe questions like, "Tell me about your family, do you have brothers and sisters, what are your favorite diversions, skills, interests, dreams, and your greatest successes or disappointments...", etc? I understand he'd interject things about himself throughout the conversation, too. Hemingway had a constructive people-agenda. His comfortable familiarity--and his informal style with the people around him--won many friends and acquaintances.

Through the first few dates with the same person, let me encourage you to tailor your agenda in the Hemingway style. I expect you'll be doing more than just standing on the street corner or in an elevator, so build your "Hemingway" posture around these four thoughts:

1. Friendship is built on mutual respect. A feeling of mutual respect opens the door to interpersonal communication and mutual sharing.
2. Friendship is built on a sense of genuineness. In new relationships, genuineness is felt, then it's confirmed or dis-affirmed over time.
   
3. Mutual respect and felt genuineness (sincerity) contribute to openness and self-disclosure and they build a sense of commonality. People feel the most comfortable with and are attracted to others with whom they sense they share common experiences, interests, and desires--Aha, closeness!
4. A growing sense of closeness is good, but closeness for closeness sake is a dead end...and it can be relationally dangerous! So, the best way to determine the appropriateness in a developing sense of male-female closeness is to plan together and then do some cooperative projects. Projects done collaboratively will tell you whether or not growing your closeness is a good idea. Some examples of simple projects might include volunteering your cooperative time...planning a surprise birthday party for a mutual friend...planning and cooking a meal for some mutual friends...cooperatively "dog sitting" a friends pet.
   

When your next few dates are focused around some project you've decided to do together you won't have any difficulty deciding how you should spend your time, figuring what to do next, or considering how to pay for it. You've already made that decision easy and you're well on your way to having some great and relationally informative fun!

Till next time...Be yourself. Have fun & be smart.

SEX: Just One Part of Your Romantic Attraction

Guys and gals differences often, curiously, pulls them together. For starters, guys and gals often don't think the same about the same thing. It's a fact! Consider a few examples:

• Boys and girls learn differently
• They tend to view people differently
• They tend to socialize in different ways and for different reasons
  
• They may be interested in the same employment--even the same jobs for that employer--but for definably different reasons
• They tend to want some of the same things from a love relationship, but for very different reasons and driven by different priorities
• They process information differently and often with different levels of efficiency--of course depending on the information and the nature of the environment
  
• In their own homes or residences they tend to attach very different expectations to and have different priorities for its physical/spiritual environment

OK, so what? You're kidding, right?! If you're going to make any sense of your dating experience at all you've got to know these things! Even a modest understanding of the differences in the way guys and gals think, and why, can step you in a very different direction with you date. It can make the experience you share a lot more memorable and--if you want--a lot more potentially repeatable! Remember a Smarter Romance is all about shared, meaningful experiences.

Till next time...be yourself, have fun and above all, be smart.

So, you're going to call him (or her) for a date?

OK, so you're going to call him (or her) for a date...to do what? Movies, dining, dancing, a concert, a ball game, bowling, pool, some kind of party across town, or maybe you'll just be hangin' out together with mutual friends?

What do you think you want to accomplish on that first date? Hmmm. Consider my "TV watching principle"

I've watched my share of television shows--dramas, mysteries, situation comedies, investigation news journals, made-for-TV movies, etc. You get the idea. In my experience most TV shows, aside from offering some kind of emotional stimulation--momentary entertainment--they're not particularly memorable. Of course there are those exceptions to the rule. But in my experience a really memorable one gave me something I didn't have before, and it was packaged in a way that made it immediately "fit" into my life circumstances. I think the "take away" was memorable because it was immediately relevant, usable, and re-usable. That's true of the dating experience, too.

It's one thing to be "on a date," but it's quite a different and a comparatively more memorable experience when you do something cooperatively with your date. But you can ratchet up the value of that "take away" even more! Dating is most memorable when the experience you share is something you've planned together and then you actively do it together.

So, you say you're going to call him (or her) for a date? Make the first date an investigative experience, that is to say, purposefully plan some time together when you can discover and discuss your big interests (other than the opposite sex!). Thoughtfully ask each other and discuss this question: "Overall, what makes you tick. What do you generally enjoy doing the most, and what about it makes that personally meaningful (i.e., Why is it important to you)?

Then, if after that first date you're finding yourselves agreeing on the idea of another date with each other, don't wonder what you're going to do. Take the pressure off! Agree that for the next date you'll get together just to plan something that will require pooling your talents and skills to accomplish it...something you'll do together and that you'll both really remember!

More along the same theme next time. Have fun. Be yourself...and be Smarter!

Little Green People on Earth?

I'm really not a judgmental guy. Sometimes I may sound that way. When I watch adolescent boys and girls I find myself thinking, "I was never like that was I?" Then I think, "Yah, I was." But then I think, "What's the biggest difference I see between me, then, and what I observe now?" Two things come to mind, and I attribute them both to changes in our culture's mindset. I heard of someone who put green dye in her fish pond. The fish remained healthy, they acted like fish just as they had before--but they turned green! All that to say, I don't think it's the kids' fault any more than turning green could be blamed on those fish.

I can summarize the "two things" with the words "sex" and "bearing." "Sex" is my reference to the--and I really hesitate to use this term--pornographic influences we all seen in our culture and the impact these have on us all, particularly our young adults. Where can anyone turn and not hear or see some message about sex, and I don't mean just differences in gender? These messages saturate our media and marketing efforts. Unsubtly they dare young adults to be sexually active as early as they can. For the rest of us we're challenged (from a bathtub on a lonely beach!) to hang onto the sexual sizzle as far into our geriatric decades as we can.

"Bearing" is my reference to someone's personal conviction around a life purpose and his or her motivation and grit to tenaciously chase it. By contrast, and for example, much has been written about the upward trend in our nation's high school drop-out rate, about young men's (and women's) curious inclination to freeload at their parents' home through their 20s and early thirties, and about the grip binge drinking has on the high school and collegiate crowd.

The things that make romance smarter can have a near magical influence in adolescents' lives. Among those I'm privileged to observe around me day-to-day, I wonder who among them won't turn "green?"

Till next time, be yourself, have fun...be smart.

(PS: You can see that romantic sunset on the bay front at Newport, Oregon)

Those Nasty Barnacles.....Life Skill No. 8

If you spend any time at the beach you can see them a lot on the rocks and posts and structures along the waters' edge. Barnacles are little crustacean critters that can attach themselves to these surfaces, and to large fish, and to the hulls of ocean going vessels. Because the sheer numbers of these little creatures can grow and grow, they begin to slow ships' movement through the water. So the ships are routinely removed from service to scrape the Barnacles from their hulls. The ships are then returned to service.

People can acquire "Barnacles," too. Their influence is strikingly similar to their oceanic namesakes. They vary in the degree of influence they can have on people's lives and on the lives of people around them. But they can actually slow or stop a person's development and hinder his or her ability to reach personal goals or make self-desired contributions.

Here's a short list of destructive "Barnacles" I've observed:

• Drug Abuse (including Nicotine) Addiction or Illegal Drug use
• Alcohol Abuse and/or Addiction
• Chronic Gambling/Gaming
• Sexual Abuse and/or Sex Addiction
• Chronic Anger and/or Rage
• Addictive Behavior around Spending Money

Actually, I believe there may be some acquired skill (Life Skill No. 7) associated with one's ability to be Barnacle-free. However, it's often true that if a person already has or is going to accumulate crippling Barnacles, the critters' presence will be seen as early as his or her dating and courtship years. Keep a sharp eye out for critters that have already "attached" themselves to your dating partners. Their presence is telling you something. Listen carefully.

Until next time. Be Smart. Have fun.

Life Skill No. 7, Planners and Goal Setters--or not

Some people are planners. Some people don't, can't, or just won't plan--for whatever reasons. Some people are goal oriented. Other people aren't goal oriented, may think goals are stupid, or just don't care. Again, it probably doesn't matter why.

The real point is this: opposites can attract. If one of you is a planner or a goal oriented person you may find yourselves attracted to each other, in part, by the fact that one of you has a need the other can effectively and efficiently meet. I've seen that happen a lot. There can be a sort of magnetism in this dynamic. Both partners tend to benefit. There's recognition, some appreciation, and a real sense of being valued on both side of this relational equation. All of that can be a good thing.

But the "feeling appreciated and valued dynamic" can go stale. At some point those skills--or the lack of them--can become a potentially bad thing. As your relationship matures you both may gradually discover, and hopefully not too late, that this marvelous ability one brings to the relationship can feel meddlesome or even controlling. Ugh.

So, how do you fix that? Again, as with so many of these kinds of team dynamics, and the "rules" that can get set-up around them, it's best to see them and talk about how they feel to you--as a team--BEFORE you make a long-term commitment to the relationship. Carefully discuss how you both want to incorporate the skill one of you has into the ebb and flow of your working relationship.

For example, you might consider designing a formal agreement (an agreed upon "default" rule) that goes something like: "The one who has the planning/goal-oriented skills will always do the planning and organizing for the team UNLESS EITHER TEAMMATE CLEARLY AND EARLY COMMUNICATES THE DESIRE TO CHANGE THE RULE FOR THE PRESENT SITUATION. That's just one way you could do it and write your rule. Listen, be sensitive, and creative.

Put yourselves in the best position to know what you're getting yourselves into. Don't be in a hurry. Work together to make the skills (or non-skills) you each bring to your relationship work for you. Even non-planner types can do this. It's about having a Smarter Romance.

More next time. Be who you are. Have fun.