The Coronavirus pandemic is causing the biggest societal disrupter I’ve experienced in my lifetime- not even living through 911 in Washington D.C. came close. Living in the nation’s capital during that time was very interesting indeed. I witnessed lots of divorces in the aftermath of that crisis, people leaving jobs they had long become dispassionate about, and people leaving the city in droves for more sustainable lifestyles. It had people question what’s valuable and worth preserving and what needed to change. When this virus meets it’s end or at least loses steam around the world I believe we will see many automatic ways of being transformed, some for the better. One of those aspects of modern life that has changed quickly in the last few months is online dating and I for one couldn’t be happier! We have now been given the gift of reassessing our patterns and patterns when it comes to modern dating have been broken for a long time.
Let me first go over what’s been missing in modern swipe left or right dating. When asking a group of young women what the hardest thing about meeting men last year they said they felt it was a numbers group in other words you have to sleep with a lot of frogs before you’d find the prince. They said that just expected that they’d have sex with someone and then decide if they wanted to see them again or not. Most of the time it was a single hookup or two. This was really heartbreaking to hear as someone who found the perfect match using the LearntoFindLove System. All our graduates feel the same way – dating apps and sites are acceptable ways of attracting your ideal partner but only if you have a road map, a plan, a system.
What’s the plan? In our course we help you identify exactly what your old patterns are from past relationships for starters. This information and self-awareness is a powerful tool that you can implement immediately. An example would be if you always attract “safe” guys with no chemistry then it’s likely that you had a Fatal Attraction type relationship in your past or that you had some type of sexual injury perhaps in childhood. By the time you finish the program you know exactly what you need, why you haven’t gotten it in the past, and can quickly assess behaviors in potential partners very quickly.
This brings me to why I’m so jazzed up by what’s happening during Covid19 season, it’s because people are now almost forced to learn more about each other before the chemical cocktail of hormones makes clear decision-making and evaluating very difficult. Yes you can meet them online in a video chat and yes you can get distracted by their physical appearance but it won’t be as difficult to get to really know someone.
Here are some tips for “dating” during social distancing and staying home orders:
Keep the first meeting relatively short (30 minutes or so) and try to do it without a camera to get a better ‘sense” of the person before you see them
Have your L2FL checklist and start to ask questions based on getting clarity about them
If you haven’t gone through LearningtoFindLove then at least come up with a list of values and non-negotiable items. Make sure those aren’t based on compatibility*
Remember that the question to ask yourself at the end of a “date” isn’t, “Is he the one?” but rather, “Is he worth spending more time with for further evaluation?”
* A footnote about compatibility. Compatibility is what online dating sites rely on to create matches almost as much as they rely on chemistry/physical appearance. If this were a reliable way to create long term committed til death do us part relationships then research would suggest that matches made online have a greater success rate than meeting elsewhere. Sadly the numbers confirm what I already suspected – the divorce rate with online matches is the same dismal 50%. Think about it, I like to play tennis and my partner doesn’t I can play with my friends. It doesn’t make a lick of difference in how deliciously in love we are or how much we love spending time together.
The other C we go over in the course is that chemistry/physical attraction factor. Yes it’s super important but in the beginning it’s much more important to evaluate other things like talents, traits, behaviors, and what we call loving consideration. This is exactly why I now have some hope regarding the masses using online dating these days. Staying at home and not jumping into “booty calls” has been a silver lining this spring!
Our next learningtofindlove cohort is forming now. Here are the details.