Dating and Projections

I realized today that I’m becoming allergic to expectations and projections.

And I know how sneaky they are. I’ve had plenty of experience placing completely disproportionate expectations on other people, especially potential partners.

My longing to find a loving relationship has, at times, clouded the way I’ve approached people. Instead of meeting who was actually in front of me, I was often unconsciously relating to who I hoped they might become, or what I hoped the relationship might give me.

So today I find myself returning to one simple realization:

Friendship first.

Let everything else grow from there, if it is meant to.

I’ve been dipping my toes back into the dating pool. Opening up to the idea of meeting my partner. And I still remember the first time I consciously tried dating, about five years ago. Before that, relationships simply happened. I wasn’t searching for anything. I was simply floating through life.

Five years ago I came to a very clear realization: I wasn’t ready for a conscious, loving relationship.

I couldn’t stop crying during sex. Looking back, it wasn’t because something was wrong with me. It was because something much deeper was asking to be seen.

Over the years I’ve also realized that what my nature longs for isn’t really sex as we’ve been taught to know it. It longs for what Barry Long described as making love, a meeting where presence matters more than performance, where nothing needs to be earned, proven or taken. A movement from lust to presence, from pleasing to devotion, from trying to earn love to simply being Love.

I remember saying to someone I was seeing at the time, “Maybe in five years I’ll be ready.”

And here I am.

Asking myself whether that time has come.

What I notice isn’t that I’ve become perfect. It’s that my discernment has changed.

I can see much more clearly when expectations begin to arise in me. I can also feel when someone is relating more to their projection of me than to who I actually am. Strangely enough, that has become an immediate turn-off.

What’s even more interesting is that every now and then I meet someone where I don’t sense that happening at all. There’s a quiet spaciousness. No pressure to become something. No fantasy to live up to. Just two people meeting.

And in those moments I notice something else: I’m beginning to be much more aware of my own assumptions, expectations and projections.

Something else struck me today.

Projections aren’t simply something that make relationships difficult. In my opinion they are what prevent us from ever truly meeting another human being.

The moment I begin relating to who I hope you are, who I fear you are, or who I need you to become, I’m no longer meeting you. I’m meeting an image my own mind has created.

And maybe the same is true in reverse.

If someone falls in love with an idea of me before they’ve had the chance to know me, there is something in me that immediately withdraws. Not because love scares me, but because I long to be seen rather than imagined.

It makes me wonder how rarely we actually meet each other. And it also connects to the fact that I rarely feel truly seen, Life can only give me what I am embodying in my own actions.

Not through fantasy, longing or through the stories we carry. But as we are, one moment at a time.

This is why friendship feels so important to me now. Friendship gives us time and the neutral space to let reality speak louder than fantasy. It allows another person to remain a mystery instead of rushing to define them.

Maybe conscious relating isn’t about finding the perfect partner, feels like the first step is learning how to truly meet another human being.

Just meeting. And seeing someone as they truly are.