Dating Goals: How knowing what you want can transform your love life.
“What is your goal in dating?”
That question might sound strange if you’ve never thought of dating or building a relationship as something that requires setting a goal. For some people, relationships seem to just happen, without much thought put into the matter. For most of us, the romantic relationship we want is something that takes work and at times feels like it’s beyond our control. Often, dates don’t happen when we very much wish they would, or the date happens, but it turns out to be nothing like what we had excitedly anticipated. Even when in serious relationships, many women find themselves frustrated as time passes and they realize that their relationship is not what they had hoped for, nor is it heading in the direction they want.
Be honest about what you want.
If you’ve been struggling with your love life, something that can help tremendously is reflecting on what you want out of dating and relationships. What is your end goal? Do you want to eventually get married and have a family with someone? That’s terrific! It might not feel terrific if you’re having a hard time even meeting men right now, let alone going on dates, but knowing what you truly want is crucial. You have to know what you want before you can start troubleshooting and working on getting there.
Of course, “What do you want out of dating?” can be a nebulous question. Maybe you don’t know exactly what you want long term, you just know that you are frustrated with how your dating life is going (or maybe not going) right now. That’s very relatable!
One way to clarify what you want is to reflect on what feels the most painful or frustrating to you in your current dating life. It might be that you are frustrated that you’re feeling rejected because the guys you like never seem to be interested in you. It could be you’re feeling trapped because you’ve been enjoying casual dating for years but not having success with developing many (or any) serious relationships. Maybe you’re feeling scared and hurt in your current relationship because he is reluctant to move to the next level of commitment - getting engaged, getting married, etc.- when you’ve known for months that you’re ready for that.
Once you know what is the most bothersome to you about your dating life, consider what you would want instead. For example, would you like to meet more men with whom you have great chemistry, and who are just as interested in you as you are in them? Would you rather have fewer dates, but all those dates be with men who are better-matched for you and share your desire to be in a serious relationship that moves toward marriage? Would you like your boyfriend to be not just accepting of commitment but actually excited for it and eager to initiate moving your relationship to the next level? Whatever it is you want, be honest with yourself about what you would want your love life to look like in the next month, next year, and next five years and beyond.
Be honest about where you are right now.
Once you know what you truly want out of your love life, you can look at your current situation with more clarity. Starting from where you want to be allows you to reverse-engineer things and work backwards to where you are right now. For example, say that what you want in the grand scheme of things is to get married, build a life together, and raise a family with a wonderful man. In that case, getting married would be a significant milestone in building a life and a family with the man that you love…but right now, you’re single and not meeting any men nor going on dates. As a single woman, your next step is not going to be figuring out your favorite cut of diamond or buying a white dress or planning a wedding. Your next step is going to be meeting more men who may be a good match for you, and then hopefully going on some dates. A lot of women set themselves back by focusing too much on their desire to be married, while ignoring (or denying) the reality of their current dating life. It might be frustrating to admit that your love life is not at all where you would like it to be, but that’s the first step in making the changes that move you towards where you want to be.
Keep your goals in mind, but keep your focus in the present…good things aren’t meant to be rushed.
Once you come to terms with where your romantic life is at right now, and where you’d like to be, keep most of your focus on where you are at right now. If you’re single/dating, that means focusing on dating – having fun, getting to know people, and gradually developing a more serious relationship with someone who is a good match for you.
While it’s important to keep the long term goal of dating in mind, being overly-focused on the outcome of dating can set you up for disappointment. You want to be strategic about how you invest time and effort into dating, as well as how you manage your expectations. When you have an obsessive focus on the outcome that you want, it can distract you from being present in the earlier stages of dating and cause you to lose sight of what needs to happen in those earlier stages of dating in order to get to that long term goal. It’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing the dating process as tedious roadblock between you and “happily ever after,” especially if your love life has been falling far short of your expectations. But when you approach each stage of dating for what it is, you’ll actually be better able to meet the kind of man you’ve been looking for and start building the relationship you want. Not only that, but you’ll be able to enjoy dating more and find more confidence along the way – both of which make you even more attractive to the kind of men you want to date!
As an example, let’s take dating apps. When you are on a dating app, the goal is not to get into a relationship.
Does that surprise you? Getting into a relationship was the whole point of downloading Bumble and Hinge on your phone, right?
Well, yes and no. You want to get into a relationship, and meeting guys on the apps is a great thing to do if you would like to be in a serious romantic relationship. But on the apps, you’re not going to find a boyfriend - that’s not what the apps are for. What you can do on the apps is meet people, and that should be your goal. (Not sure you’re making the most of dating apps right now? This post is for you!)
It’s similar when you are going on a first date. When you are on a first date, your goal is not to conduct an interview of a potential future husband. Your goal on a first date should be having fun, learning about each other, and seeing if you enjoy his company enough to warrant going on a second date and continuing to get to know him. Most of us know how easy it is to get caught up in the fun and the romance and end up going into the first date with excited anticipation of “What if he’s the one?” How often do you have the disappointing realization (maybe before you’re even halfway through the date) that he most certainly is not the one?
Of course if there are serious non-negotiables, like religion, then you will want to explore that sooner than later. Keeping your focus on the present doesn’t mean disregarding what you want in the future. No matter what stage of dating you are in, you want to be wise and have your eyes open for red flags along the way. That’s why it’s so important to know what your goal is and what you want out of dating relationships. You just don’t want to get so caught up in the marriage that you want eventually have that you end up overlooking all the steps of dating – meeting men, going on dates and getting to know people, gradually building a relationship that becomes more and more serious – that lead to the lasting love that you want. It’s a matter of knowing what you want your love life to be like in the long run, and staying present in each stage of dating as it comes.
Sometimes you’ll learn enough about someone on a first date – or even when talking with someone on an app – that you’ll know that they don’t share a fundamental value that you need in a long-term partner. If you’re treating every interaction like an interview for your potential husband, then it might be disappointing to realize someone is “out of the game,” so to speak. But if you’re taking dating for what it is and getting to know people (and, in doing so, likely getting to know yourself better as well) then this is great news – in just one date, you’ve gotten enough information to know that you’re not interested in a second date, and you’ve had a good opportunity to hone your dating skills. That’s a success! But you’ll only appreciate successes like that if you are taking each stage of dating for what it is. If you’re hyper-focused on finding the man you want to marry, anything less than a proposal will seem like a colossal failure.
(It’s worth noting that all of this applies to people who are already in a serious relationship, too. If you want to eventually marry and build a life with someone, then you don’t want to spend years of your life dating someone that you would not be willing to marry – no matter how fun, caring, handsome, and exciting he may be.)
Identify where you’re getting stuck and what’s holding you back.
Another thing that can be very helpful is to identify your sticking points in dating. Sticking points are barriers that keep you stagnant when you want to be moving forward – where do you get stuck in the dating process? Are you able to identify guys you would be interested in dating, but you freeze up when it comes to actually talking to them? In this case, you likely need to work on building up your confidence, practicing flirting (yes, it’s a skill, and it takes practice!), and getting used to pushing through that initial discomfort in striking up a conversation with a handsome stranger. On the other hand, maybe you have no trouble meeting guys and sparking up a flirty conversation, but you seem stuck at the “meet-cute” and don’t often get to the point of swapping phone numbers, let alone a first date. In that instance, you’ve got the flirting down, but it would probably be helpful to practice being a bit more direct and start learning ways that you can encourage a guy to take the lead and ask for your number.
It could be that you’re going on lots of first and second and third dates, but it always fizzles out there and you’re not ever developing a more serious relationship like you would like. Or maybe you don’t have a problem dating and even getting somewhat serious in your relationships, but you find yourself getting blindsided by breakups every time. Maybe you’re the one doing the breaking up with every guy you date, and your relationships never seem to make it past the three-month mark.
For any of those situations, you likely need to be more selective about who you are going on dates with (i.e. do these men seem like they are interested in dating more seriously, or do they seem to be sex-focused and more likely to be interested in just casual dating or hooking up?), and it would be important to reflect on your own behavior in these early dates/relationships. Are you ruling out men too early, based on arbitrary or inconsequential things like height - you know, things that have minimal impact on who a man is or how he would be as a potential partner? On the other hand, are you overlooking red flags - lack of respect, immaturity, incompatible values in foundational things like religion or core values - and therefore not ruling out men who should be ruled out early in dating? And how are you in these early dating scenarios - are you presenting your best self on dates, and are you acting (and responding to a man’s behavior) in a way that sets a healthy standard for what you expect from the men you are with?
Even long-term relationships are not immune to sticking points. Commonly these long-term relationships get stuck due to fundamental differences in desire for marriage or children (or irreconcilable differences in desired timelines for these major life events), incompatible career/lifestyle ambitions, or differences in religion or core values. The longer you wait to address a sticking point in a serious relationship, the more likely that sticking point is to be damaging to the relationship - even to the point of a breakup. Whatever stage of dating you’re in, if you find your love life is stalling, there could be any number of things (and, not uncommonly, it could be a combination of more than one thing) that are keeping you stuck in your dating life.
Identifying where your dating life is getting hung up (and why!) can help you get a better idea of what you can adjust in your approach to dating for better success. Sticking points can also reveal things about ourselves. One of the reasons that dating can be so difficult is because of the way it’s able to highlight our greatest vulnerabilities, hurts, and fears. The honesty required to reflect on these kinds of questions can definitely be a bit of a gut punch, but there’s no way around it. Once you know what is keeping you stuck, you can reverse-engineer from there. When you start changing the things that are within your control, you stop holding yourself back.
If there’s a part of the dating process where you continually run into trouble, it’s worth addressing. It could be that it has less to do with how you’re meeting guys and who you’re dating, and more to do with what you believe about yourself and the people around you. If you struggle with things like low self-esteem, lack of confidence, or cynicism about men and dating, that can often be the biggest barrier to getting the kind of love life you want. You can have all the right skills for dating, and meet all the right guys, but you still won’t get the love life you want if you are unknowingly sabotaging yourself. In my work with clients on dating (not to mention my own experiences when I was single), I have seen time and again how much someone can hold herself back when she allows her poor self-esteem dictate how she will approach dating, or when she lets herself become jaded and cynical. We all have days where we don’t feel our best or are a bit pessimistic, but if it’s a trend more often than not, it’s worth addressing for your own sake. The fact that it will likely improve your romantic relationships is a great bonus, but more importantly, you don’t want to let those negative beliefs limit you and keep you from living the life you want – in dating, or in anything else.
Don’t expect dating to give you something it’s not meant to provide.
One thing many women realize when they are brutally honest with themselves is that some of the primary needs they are meeting with dating have nothing to do with meaningful relationships, marriage, family, or the basic human need for companionship. For many women (and men), dating gives them validation, attention, confidence, greater self-esteem, a feeling of being desirable or worthwhile, a sense of power or social currency, and so forth. These are all normal and natural emotional needs that everyone has, but they are things that dating and relationships cannot give you. Things like confidence, self-esteem, and an assured understanding of your own value and what you have to offer are things that are best found independent of a relationship. A healthy relationship will promote and support your confidence and the like, but no relationship will imbue you with these qualities in any meaningful or lasting way.
That’s not to say that you cannot be in a relationship if you are lacking self-esteem or confidence, but rather that you should be actively working on building your own confidence at the same time. If you are single or casually dating, it pays to be extra thoughtful and intentional about how you date, how you interact with men, and (especially) how you think about your dating experiences. You want to to make sure that you are dating in a way that does not leave you feeling more dependent on men/dates for confidence but rather fosters the healthy self-esteem that you are working to build. The healthier you are mentally and emotionally and spiritually, the better you’ll be able to be discerning in dating…not to mention, you’ll be better able to present your best self on dates, which will make you even more attractive to the kind of man you want to be with.
The key takeaways:
- Figure out your end goal. Be honest with yourself about what you’re hoping to get out of dating and your romantic relationships.
- Take stock of where you are now and what your next step should be.
- Take each stage of dating for what it is, and remember that it’s all part of the process. There’s no “fast forward” button for life or dating.
- Identify barriers and areas of dating that are “sticking points” and take time to reflect on what might be behind that. Once you know where you are getting stuck, you can start making changes that help you get “unstuck.”
- Take care of yourself throughout the process. Dating won’t cure low confidence, poor self-esteem, or lack of purpose, so don’t let dating become your identity or use it to serve a purpose it’s not meant to serve. Take care of your own emotional, mental, and spiritual health so that you can be discerning in dating and be the best version of yourself.
Dating can absolutely be difficult and frustrating at times, but when you take ownership of what you want out of dating, it’s much more likely to be an exciting, healthy, and rewarding process.
So what do you want out of your love life? And where can you take ownership and do something different to make your your dating/relationship happier and more successful?
