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Spending Your Alone Time Wisely
Sometimes, dating can feel like a risky game of casino-table roulette. With every spin of the wheel, you're taking a chance that a new person will be the one for you, and that you may have a future together. And while you may occasionally get lucky with a small, short-lived win, the wheel almost never lands on the number you've assigned to "happily ever after." Much of the time, in fact, you're lucky if you break even.
When you find yourself losing another game of relationship roulette, the biggest temptation can be to slap another chip down on the table and tell the dealer to give the wheel another spin. After all, you've just lost a sizable bet... how can you be expected to win it back if you don't play?
But this isn't always the best instinct to follow. Sometimes, playing your chips too quickly is the fastest way to lose them all. Instead, you need to spend time between spins --time alone, that is-- to evaluate what went wrong.
Time to Grieve
You may think that the time you spend alone after a break up serves no purpose other than to make you feel hopeless and lonely. But this alone time actually has an important role in learning how relationships work for you-- something that applies both to traditional dating and Internet dating. One of the most important roles of the pause between spins of the wheel is to allow you to come to terms with the relationship that just ended. If you don't take the time to let yourself feel and grieve, you're simply setting any future relationships up for failure.
While "get back on the horse" can be good advice when dating, it can also be a mistake to rush in. When you rush in, you take all of your negative feelings and you bring them into any new relationships you form. You may not allow yourself to feel or acknowledge the emotional baggage you're bringing along, but that doesn't meant it isn't there. If you don't use your between-relationships alone time to look at what went wrong, why, and how you feel about it, you may end up punishing any future partners for a past partner's actions. Talk about starting off on the wrong foot.
Learn What You Want
It may not be much of a comfort, but it's true that each relationship you have will teach you something you need to know about yourself, too. That is, it will if you are open to learning. When you're between relationships, both with Internet dating and dating in life, take your time to figure out what this past relationship has taught you about yourself, who you are, and most of all what you want.
After a relationship ends, it can be all to easy to focus on the little stuff that tore you apart instead of the larger issues that allowed the little stuff to harm your relationship in the first place. When you're between relationships, you have the perfect opportunity to look at those larger issues as objectively as possible, and determine how those issues affected you... and how you affected them. The way a relationship went (both the good parts and the bad) can tell you a lot about yourself: the good and bad of how you behave, what you want from a relationship, and most of all, what you don't want from a relationship.
Being alone after you've been in a relationship --especially a long-term one-- can be painful. But it's important to embrace that pain, allow yourself to heal, and most of all, learn the lessons that each relationship is there to teach you. Because if you don't listen to the past, you're bound to repeat it in the future.
About the Author This article was written by Shawn Wilson, a member of the customer support team at Datepad, where internet dating is always free. Datepad has a massive directory of informative dating articles along with a great list of dating site reviews on their dating blog. |
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