If you are hung up on first impressions you may find yourself chasing your own imagination and not getting to that real relationship stage...
Picture this: You go on a dating website, you start scanning through photos or looking through suggested ‘matches’, and you rule out some or even a lot based on not feeling an instant attraction. You might read through some profiles and even though they appear to have similar values, you don’t feel that ‘spark’ and so dismiss them.
With other profiles, they say stuff about themselves that rings your ‘hook’ bell – they mention being a churchgoer, or that they earn six figures, or that they’re educated at an elite university, or that they have a dog, are a family person, have loads of degrees, are supertastic intelligent, are a green campaigner, or quote from an obscure book that you love too. You fire off an email to them or if they’ve already made contact with you, you eagerly reply, feeling excited at possibly meeting just the type of person you’re looking for.
Out in the real world, you go on first dates and if you don’t feel a ‘spark’ and a ‘connection’, are immediately or by the end of the date, mentally saying “Sayonara” and bracing yourself to continue your quest. Or you feel disheartened that you still haven’t met that ‘someone’ with that ‘spark’…that you can also actually manage to have a relationship with.
It is fascinating that so many people are hung up on instant attraction, instant chemistry, instant spark, and basically this illusion of instant knowledge about a person that they either haven’t even met in the flesh or don’t even know.
These people feel spark with a one-dimensional photograph.These people feel spark with words and even promises which in the cold light of day and in hindsight seem ridiculous to be made by someone they hardly knew.These people feel spark with what their sexual organs or their imagination tells them.
These very same people will protest that they ‘can’t’ go on a date with someone and will find it unlikely that their attraction and interest will grow, if they don’t feel it immediately. For them, attraction, love, chemistry and the whole kit and caboodle have a foundation in something of nothing. There seems to be an absence of spark with action.
What you don’t realise if you’re relying on ‘instant’ or very quick attraction, is that you’re saying that you can be attracted to and even fall in love with someone that you don’t know, but that you couldn’t become attracted to and fall in love with someone that you grew to know. Isn’t there something very odd about that? You can fall in love with the promise, but you couldn’t fall for the reality?
And here’s where it becomes very interesting: When you experience that instant/very quick attraction, what follows after is the discovery phase, where you hopefully get to know them in reality. What I’ve seen happen time and again, is that people who rely on this whole ‘instant’ thing, don’t adjust their view of the person, their level of trust, their ideas about a possible relationship, as they get to know them. They stick with their initial perception and they don’t reconcile it with reality.
When the person does things that directly contradict the image you have of them, you keep going back to the initial feelings and perceptions you had, as if this is ‘right’. It then means that aside from not feeling attracted to people who you don’t feel it ‘instantly’ with, you also won’t reduce your attraction to someone you felt it with immediately, even as you get to ‘know’ them and they’re not meeting your vision, hope, and expectations.
This puts you into a bit of a ‘no judgement’ quagmire where you will only rely on the immediate ‘information’ that you think you’ve gleaned, and won’t trust yourself to go through discovery and get to know someone, or to evaluate actions and situations, make a judgement, and ultimately make a decision. This is a very tricky place for you to be in. Don’t you want to have to use your eyes and ears? Don’t you want to have the option to choose healthily? Don’t you want to actually know someone in reality?
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