I’ve been doing thought work since last August on dating.
It’s really helped me to go from hating dating to being able to tolerate it to being able to enjoy it once in a while. However, I’m always cognizant of the fact that I’m doing Thought Work at all times through the dating process and I’m feeling neutral and not really attracted to anyone.
Those magical feelings of falling in love don’t seem to be manifesting for me because my thought is “You could literally fall in love with anyone if you worked at it hard enough with Thought Work.” For some reason, this thought doesn’t make anyone I meet feel very special to me. I start off the process with a guy thinking, “Yeah, I’m not attracted to him, I’m not super hot for him, but if I did enough Thought Work, I could totally get there. It would take time, but I want a relationship.”
After a first date, I go back home and crack open a notebook to do my Thought Work on all the things I wasn’t crazy about with this person. I try to shift it so that I don’t hate dating as much and so that I can see the person as more attractive. The problem is, because I’m doing so much Thought Work, I think to myself “Is it really this hard to feel attraction to someone? Does it have to be this much work in order to not hate dating so much so that I can keep going?”
I want dating to feel fun and magical, but I don’t feel that way about it. I just feel like, “He’s less than perfect for me, so here’s another opportunity to do Thought Work, so back to the salt mines.” I’ve gotten to slightly more-positive-than-neutral with this approach, which is not a bad outcome – I consider this a win.
Is there anything I can tweak to make this result in more positive emotion than just slightly-better-than-neutral? I’ve definitely gotten to neutral with a lot of unappealing things about online dating, so I’m fairly certain I can shift this, but I’m stuck at the moment. Maybe my want list is too long? It’s pretty long. I am always doing Thought Work on things like “He doesn’t have a good job,” and trying to shift it to “He might have other things to offer that I might value”. It just feels like a lot of work.
