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Dating Baggage

Dating Baggage

I visibly cringe when I see ‘no baggage’ written on women’s dating profiles. My experience of dating is that there is no one who reaches my age without having baggage. In fact we have more of it lying around waiting to be reclaimed than we think.

I am not talking about the physical ‘baggage’ like children (and before you criticize me for calling children baggage I have heard women describe there children like this on more than one occasion), an unsold house, debts, court injunctions or an ex who still texts every hour and periodically threatens to kill him/herself if you don’t go out with them again. Those are easy to understand and cope with. Well sometimes. I went out with one girl who spent most of our first date responding to texts from her ex asking about who I was. Needless to say, romance never bloomed.

The baggage I am referring to is invisible to the naked eye. The baggage in our minds. You may not realise it but everything we’ve ever seen, felt, heard or smelt gets filed away in our sub conscious minds (and there was me thinking I had a shit memory!) – EVERYTHING. These filed away bits of information shape how we think about the opposite sex and how we thing about what they say or do in front of us.

“Yeah but that is all in the past. That partner of mine who slept with someone else, treated me like shit, hurt me (or you did it to them) – I am over him or her”. It’s true that you may not actively think about them but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an impact on you anymore. You see everything that happens to us, in fact everything you have ever seen, felt, heard or smelt gets filed away in our sub conscious minds (and there was me thinking I had a shit memory!) – EVERYTHING. These little filed away bits of information shape how we think about the opposite sex and how we thing about what they say or do in front of us.

As we sit opposite each other and gaze into our respective eyes (with either feelings of growing love or impending nausea) we are judging each other and comparing every tiny action and word through our personal set of filters based on everything that has happened in our past and here’s the really cool bit. We don’t even know we are doing it. Those guts feelings and instincts come from those deep memories. If I look at you the way one of your shitty exes once did it will, to some degree, effect your opinion of me.

THAT’S THE BAGGAGE I AM TALKING ABOUT.

So know you now this what do you need to do about it? Nothing. Just being aware it is happening can be enough.

The worst baggage I ever encountered? You will have to read the book 🙂