Is Your Picker Broken?
The below article was forwarded to me yesterday. It was written by Dr. Mark Rogers, facilitator of Relationship Ready a 3-day workshop designed to help singles date successfully. It raises a lot of good points, and it is something that all of us dating singles out there should take a look at.
After you are done reading, take the “Is Your Picker Broke?” QuickQuiz, and get results sent to your private email immediately:
http://www.assessmentgenerator.com/H/cRmarkrogersphd1173982975.html
| Is Your Picker Broke? A Special Report ……………by Mark Rogers, Ph.D. |
The Common Denominator
In a recent Relationship Ready* workshop, an attractive, mid-30ish woman was bemoaning her history of romantic relationships. She recounted a dismal story of partners, one after another, who seemed to be perfect but turned out to have major personality flaws. Those flaws lead to her experiencing disappointment at best, abuse at worst, in a series of painfully miserable relationships, all of which had started out with the delightful euphoria of having finally found the perfect partner.
Eventually the workshop facilitator asked her, “What is the common denominator in all of those relationships?”
Listeners would not have been surprised if she had answered with some diagnosis of an underlying personality disorder in all of her partners. Her description of the relationships she’d experienced showed more than average insight, and she had obviously thought long and hard about what had happened to her. She could easily have named some common thread of dysfunction - fear of commitment, incapacity for developing emotional intimacy, a tendency towards chemical dependency - and none of us who were present would have been surprised. However, what she said shocked us all.
She was quiet for a few long moments, bowed her head, and then with tears welling up in her eyes, looked directly at the facilitator and said, “I think my picker’s broke.”
Your History of Romance
When your history of romance includes more misery than magic, more eventual pain than enduring pleasure, it’s tempting to blame your partners. It’s not that difficult to identify what’s wrong with them after the relationship ends. By that time, you can usually come up with a list of things.
Apparently however, it’s tough to tell up front, early on, during the get-to-know you phase, that a partner is going to be untrustworthy, unavailable, unreliable, uncommunicative. When they are in full-speed ahead dating mode, most partners - male and female - are putting their best feet forward. And then, when the euphoria of new love wells up within the hearts of the newly infatuated, there’s no critical assessment going on at all.
At least, not by the partners who are heady on heart-swelling. Friends and family can know better, and often they will try to dissuade their loved one from pursuing a relationship they are convinced is bad news. To no avail, of course. Opposition from friends and family only throws the new lover into the arms of the beloved, where the couple find the beleaguered relationship even more enticing.
When Your Partner Picker’s Broke
If your Partner Picking Pattern is defective, you know that the euphoric phase of romance is not a good indicator of the eventual course of the relationship.
In fact, your infatuation feelings ought to come with a Surgeon General’s warning: “Intensity and Urgency of Romantic Inclinations has been shown to be dangerous to your emotional health and mental stability. Your heart will thank you if you keep it on a tight leash to keep it from rushing headlong into the briar patch chasing any attractive rabbit that pops up.”
A defective Partner Picker won’t ring warning bells when the object of your affections displays symptoms, indicators of future problems that your friends and family can plainly see coming. If you would listen to those who love you, they could and would tell you when you’re making a bad mistake. But part of a deficient Partner Picker syndrome is becoming deaf and blind. Deaf to your friends, blind to your partner’s flaws.
If your Partner Picker’s broke, you find yourself falling blindly in love with folks you should be watching very carefully. It doesn’t feel like blindness when it’s happening, it feels like visionary clarity. But that’s just the euphoria affecting your emotional eyesight.
When your Partner Picker’s broke, you know you’ve made a mistake later on, much too later on, after the relationship has sunk some roots down into your life and heart. That’s why romance becomes such a pain-filled endeavor. You keep having to uproot relationships from the most intimate parts of who you are.
Common Conclusions
When your Partner Picker’s broke, you can look back over your history of romance and come to these common conclusions:
* I get into relationships too soon or too suddenly, as if there were powerful magnets at work.
* I don’t see - even deliberately ignore - signs that I should pay attention to, signals that the relationship is seriously flawed.
* I pick partners who have some common threads of dysfunction. There’s a pattern in my picking, and it’s not pretty.
* I don’t do it on purpose. I even try really hard not to pick partners who are bad for me. (I’m not that sick, really.) But it happens anyway.
* I’m not that attracted to partners who are good for me. There’s chemistry only with the ones who are bad for me. (Am I that sick, really?)
Bad News and Good News
If your Partner Picking Pattern is defective, there’s bad news and good news.
The bad news is that the dynamics that lead to picking bad partners run deep and don’t go away by themselves. You aren’t likely to be able to consciously affect them successfully, without doing some major work on yourself. Trying harder won’t work. Neither will feeling really bad after a relationship ends. Pain may be highly motivating, but it’s not particularly instructive in this regard.
The good news?
You can do the work on yourself. It’s really not about your partners, although it certainly looks that way. You can identify the pattern of your romantic radar and then you can retune it. That way, you won’t be attracted to or attract those partners who are bad for you. Your radar won’t ping on them, and it won’t send out a signal for them to follow to you.
The work that you need to do on yourself is maybe obvious to others, but it might not be to you. Or if it is obvious to you, you might not know how to do it. Or if you know how to do it, it feels enormously difficult to accomplish. Not just pedaling up a steep hill, it feels like climbing Mt. Everest. It’s hard work, always, and you can’t do it by yourself, hardly ever, but it IS doable. It’s only hard, not impossible. And the tasks are straightforward, if difficult.
Repairing Your Romantic Radar
To repair a broken Partner Picker - and retune your romantic radar - you need to accomplish three things:
* Identify what your dynamics (not your deliberate intentions, your underlying dynamics) are looking for.
* Reframe that search, changing it from “Finding the perfect partner” to “Fully growing myself up emotionally.”
* Begin maturing your insides, the part(s) of you that are trying to solve by partnering what can only be fulfilled by becoming an emotional adult.
If the second and the third points sound strange to you, then you are normal. Most folks don’t know - even in this highly psychologized culture - about the connections between romance and emotional development.
That connection and the steps you can take to retune your romantic radar are the central themes of Relationship Ready, Pathways’ enormously successful experience-based training for singles. If you have had enough of picking partners who turn out to be bad for you, if you have collected a critical mass of misery in romance, or if you have had your fill of friends and family doing relationship interventions on you, you deserve what you can get from Relationship Ready.
Tags: dating, finding your met, singles
