Set to Stun

We are picking up where we left off with the last entry which was....Why not be all in and allow yourself to feel without having to have the security of hard and fast rules and boundaries, which what those look like and where healthy expectations fall without having to totally destroy the luxury of your romantic pink cloud moment is some that I'll talk about in my next post. I was going to wait and post this later , but it's healthy for me to write about it. I would rather  sort it out rather than not jump on the thoughts while I feel like I have some clarity. I will point out that I was taken off my meds, and now I am on my old dose of Wellbutrin. So that might effect and make me more anxious. So boundaries, should exist even before you have the "relationship talk". But they are for you not the other person.

If you think you can control someone or feel the need to control some one you might not want to date at all. Your skin is not thick enough for it. You can say you do not have expectations  in regards to the person you are dating but that just isn't true. We have expectations in regards to everything. To not would be chaos. When flip a light switch, I expect for a light to come on. It might not if I haven't taken care of my end of things like paid the power bill or replace a burned out bulb, but I normally have those things in place so the cause and effect I perhaps take for granted is A + B results in C.  Now the slippery slope is we all have been hardwired wired by our personal history as to what this equation really spells out in regards to our interaction in dating. Some things we might agree on is respecting other to some extent.  If you are not into being respected then you might want to put away the dating App and seek therapy.

Then there is gray area, which gets wider and grayer depending on the level of adult communication you have with the other person. A reasonable expectation might be if someone says they are going to meet me or call me at a certain time that happens. But the gray area there is life happens, what if someone loses their phone, falls into a black out or passes out from exhaustion with every intention of calling or leaving or what ever the case may be. It's easy to then pass judgement and say this person is not responsible so  I don't want to fuck with this. I think it's healthier to set the phasers to stun rather than kill if you notice you are invested emotionally to a degree you feel the chemicals making you happy.

Sure life happening can be a buzz kill to those chemicals. What is important for me to keep in mind is to allow that person to have the space to be themselves. Eventually things will become clearer. It is unfair for me to expect someone to act in a manner that is not where they are at in life. I can choose to then meet then closer to where they are at, but you get into what becomes dangerous ground if you turn them into the person you want them to be rather than who they really are. Who they really are might not be who they show you through the things they say but  through their actions. If someone really wants to spend time with me then it will happen.

 I can tell you I like working out, that requires me taking the time to go to the gym. No matter how much I know about exercise if it's not something I take the time and follow through with the action of doing, then I just like the idea of working out and if I am really deluding myself I might wonder why I am terrible shape after all I thought about the gym enough, the gym must not work, I am the problem because no matter how much I think about the gym it never get better same lack of muscle tone. Picking up the weight and doing something is where it has to start.  So don't shoot to kill, just give very one enough rope to hang themselves or build a swing,

But there is a bit of a balancing act so I can see where a no strings attached no expectation rule works to some extent in the sense that ,if I expect to be disappointed or I am too attached to an outcome I will create that with the power of my intention. Which then turns into why am I always in a string of bad relationships when I am the one common denominators and it is obviously what I wanted or I would have made different choices gotten different results.How attached am I to the results and how congruent is it with who the are as a person. The dog will not quack. The duck will not bark.

Take Me to Your Leader

So what happens when the tractor beam pulls you in and the chemical shift begins to occur that sets off what I call the clean car smell. How do you know what is real and what is not in that regard. Well there are some physiological changes at play. Falling in love is similar to being on cocaine. There are people who are love addicts and just hooked on this chemical mix adrenaline and phenylethylamine as serotonin lowers. When it comes to this I think awareness is the key just as it is any mental health issue. Just because you are bi-polar doesn't mean you are not responsible, in fact in some ways it means you are more responsible because you know the causes and conditions that can send you over the edge.

This can be a very scary time, as you can make a choice of either

A- being guarded, coming off as too cool for school, using things like other relationships, drinking or a multitude of distractions to keep one foot in. This ensures that you are not going to get hurt, You are also not going to get very close. It is like the orthodox Jews, who keep the holy sheet between them to have sex. I was poly-amorous for a long time. When I first started the relationship with my now ex-wife we were in an open relationship. It took her saying that she was never really into the whole poly-amory thing to begin with, for me to question why I was doing it when at the time I really only wanted to be with her. Well it was safe. Granted if that is the path you are going to go down it was not honest of her to agree to participate in that kind of relationship if it was not who she was or what she wanted.

b- Going all in. This is new. The problem here is it allows you to get hurt. The pay off is you get to feel everything to the fullest extent. I think the key to this might some across as grim, realize this relationship will end. If it is going to end then you might as well enjoy it today. When you go to a movie you don't fret over the fact in two hours the credits will roll and the lights will come on. You sit back with your pop corn and enjoy the experience. This is what I would like to do and it does require some thicker skin.

So if you are going to go all in, what does all in look like ? When do you come up with ground rules? When do you become monogamous? Like the old commercial says "Why ask why? Bud Dry"  Over thinking and reading into peoples actions is crazy. It's great to feel like you can get lost with someone and spend infinite periods of time with them, But why put that in a box. Why not be all in and allow yourself to feel without having to have the security of hard and fast rules and boundaries, which what those look like and where healthy expectations fall without having to totally destroy the luxury of your romantic pink cloud moment is some that I'll talk about in my next post.

Getting to Know You

While things have changed  since I started writing this blog, I am going to stay the course and keep writing, even though I am happy at where I have come to and going to go with that. But this does leve the door open to discuss the early clean car smell of dating/ relationships and such. It also makes this particular entry that I started a few weeks ago feel a little weird but I'll go ahead and finish it as it's the proper point b to transition to after the first post. How do you maintain the parts of yourself that you don't want to compromise. Well when I decided this time around to dive back into dating I wasn't worried about the "getting laid" side.  Here is where most guys go wrong. This part is the most empowering as a man this empowering because there is nothing that can be help over my head or used as a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I am  typically pretty happy jerking off anyways as in the past it has gotten the job done better . Like the old saying if you want something done right you gotta do it yourself. But going forward if you like the connection you have with someone then sex can be a way to get closer if you open up rather than get drunk and close yourself off and just "hook up" But we are not going to talk about casual sex rather the getting to know you part of dating.

With dating profiles and not the shorter swipe school of dating that can be just as effective, you need to find a balance of selling yourself and being true to who you are. Coming from a marketing background, I know the importance of writing to your demographics. So here is the intro to one of my old dating profiles started off like this.

As a touring musician , when I am not playing in dive bars I prefer building blanket forts and watching horror movies to going back out to wade through drunks at in smoke filled club

I don't talk politics because it's about as real as professional wrestling, and after all it's not the puppet it's the hand. I support anything that can make this world more like a 80's Mad Max rip-off with roving bands of mutants prowling the streets. So I am pro-Apocalypse, after all it's the most metal thing that can happen.

I also feel that organized religion of western culture is the empty promise of a whore, and I typically like whores

I do practice disorganized religion and prefer my gods to be older than Jewish carpenters

So right from the jump you thin the herd. We establish music as a big part of my life. I don't want to hang out in bars and most importantly how I don't want to get dragged into politics or religion. This might seem harsh and alienating to some. Certainly not all embracing in the more politically correct millennials can relate to, but that is what I was trying to avoid getting into. My ex wife and I had some very different world views when it came to cultural issues. How ever most of the time it worked when we agreed to disagree. I have worked with people and been friends with people for years who never knew my views on this sort of thing. Granted religion can be more of a buzz kill due to the morality clauses and how they like to yell down from their pulpits for everyone to keep their pants on, so that one needs to be weeded out from the jump. Other wise when you are taken aboard the mothership who really gives a shit what your views are on Obamacare when the probe comes out after all.