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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 🙂
Born to a working class family in Essex, Dave endured a boringly happy childhood. His educational potential was largely squandered by his desire to spend his days pissing about. As a result his clerical career started at sixteen with the civil service and then the NHS. He sustained a lifestyle that saw him just about earning enough to keep himself in beer and fags until his ‘career’ hit a seam of good luck.
He applied for a job, two grades bigger than his current role, and was successful. This was due in no small part to the urgent need for someone and the lack of any other applicants. This break put him into a profession from which his career advanced at reasonable speed. More importantly it allowed him to move into the private sector.
Never confident with women he failed to ask out pretty much every woman he fancied and ended up with an impressive catalogue of female friends, until he finally plucked up the courage to ask his, soon to be fiancé, out. The relationship was to last five years. They never married (there was some confusion between the parties about what being engaged meant in relation to marriage timescales).
His life became one of happy mediocrity with a well paid job and an attractive but underappreciated fiancé. Excitement was provided by a brief flirtation with motorbikes. Then he confronted mortality. At age 28 his mother died and, whilst on the surface he coped well with the grieving process, his life turned 360 degrees.
His coping strategy was to take a job with lots of international travel (his fiancé abandoned him shortly after) and to engage in every adrenalin sport known to man. This wild ride lasted three years before he met, fell in love with, and within a year, married his wife.
He took to marriage like a snake takes to rollers skates. His attempts to surrender to domestic routine, over adventure and unpredictability, were largely unsuccessful and led to an expanding waistline, a penchant for Austin Reed clothes and finally, eight years in, his wife leaving.
Adapting to single life pretty well, all things considered, he embarked on a journey of understanding, and then indulging, his mid life crisis. Snowboarding, sailing, flash cars and clothes, dating any woman that showed even the remotest spark of interest and partying hard (well as hard as his social circle and limited looks allowed).
His career was the one area where success continued to seem assured, so inevitably three years after his divorce he went to work dismantling that. He engineered redundancy from a six figure salary + bonus + benefits and headed into the world with no idea what to do next.
After six months of having fun he trained, and set out as a self employed Business Coach, a role he has stayed with, to date. Through coaching he began to access new ideas and ways of looking at the world and finally finds himself content, happy and living life the way its meant to be lived…in the moment.
Throughout his life only three things have been constant…the support of his family and closest friends, his love of nature and Gary Numan.