How I Met My Husband

One of the most daunting aspects of dating is the rejection. It is never easy to be on either end of a rejection, so the fear of being rejected or of having to reject someone else can make people very hesitant to even try. When I was young and single, I was not at all comfortable being upfront or obvious if I was attracted to someone. I found it even hard to talk to guys I found attractive, because the attraction created an extra nervousness and awkwardness for me that would not have been there otherwise. So for the most part, I ended up with boyfriends who picked me, rather than ones that I sought out.

Throughout my twenties, I was mainly focused on educational goals anyway and was not looking to "settle down". I didn't feel like I needed to give too much thought to the long-term prospects for a relationship, and it was enough for a relationship just to be enjoyable and satisfying in the present. I didn't get married until I was 31, so it's fair to say I "circled the buffet table a few times before I decided what I wanted to put on my plate", so to speak.

The last one of the several romantic relationships I was involved in before I met my husband lasted for seven years. It almost ended a few times because I really knew deep down that it wasn't right for the long-term. There were breaks over the years where we saw, or at least tried to see other people. But the truth is that it's hard to end a relationship that is generally comfortable and loving if there is no animosity to use as a push-away. It was too easy for us to keep drifting back together, rather than working to meet other people.

The pattern finally ended when I accepted a job that moved me about 250 miles away, and I knew if we were ever going to successfully break up, having this distance between us was our best shot. It was especially hard for me because I didn't know a soul in the new town. I had one friend from college living about 85 miles to the south of my new location, and I reconnected with him and drove down there on some weekends just to have something to do.

The first few months there were sad and depressing. I was grieving over the loss of this warm and supportive relationship. I was lonely. I was working on adjusting to the expectations and requirements of the new job, including what was the most difficult aspect for me--giving presentations and speaking up in meetings.

My ex-boyfriend, John and I were still talking to on the phone at least once or twice a week, and he suggested I try match.com. I had never heard of it, and in fact, the service was not even a year old. At that time, it was a very basic service-you wrote a description of yourself, and answered a few questions about the type of person you were interested in, but there were no images. It was also heavily male-dominated at that time. I think the listings were something like four or five men to every woman, and what's more they were often geeky guys-guys who were really comfortable with computers, which it stands to reason would be the earliest users.

The truth is that I have always been attracted to that type. I think it's the intellectual aspect--it's always been high on my list, as I wrote about in What Women Want. Intelligence and geekiness just seem to naturally go together. I have a story about that, which I will tell at the risk of digressing. Many years ago, when I was still together with John, and he insisted on introducing me a guy in his neighborhood that he had grown up with. This guy (I can't even recall his name) was a magnet for women. John was somewhat bewildered by this. He couldn't figure out why girls were always calling him and chasing after him, so he wanted me to check this guy out and tell him, from the female perspective, what qualities made him so appealing. We went over and hung out with him and his girlfriend du jour for a while, and after we left, John wanted to know what it was exactly that made this guy so great. My answer? Absolutely nothing. I had no attraction to him whatsoever. I thought he came across as vapid vain, and empty-headed, all total turn-offs to me. Sure, he had good looks, but I wouldn't have given a guy like that a second glance under any circumstances. This came as something of a surprise to John--I guess he thought if you were attractive to some women, you were attractive to all women. But it's not so. Every woman has her own preferences, and you should never underestimate the power of "chemistry". I don't really understand what causes "chemistry", but I know it when I feel it.

So, returning to my main story-after feeling really empty, disoriented, and emotionally drained for a couple of months, I woke up one morning finally feeling clear. It was like the clouds had parted and the emotional hang-over had come to an end. I finally took the plunge and put a listing up on match.com. I was living in a very rural area and I didn't get very many matches at first. I found I had to go up over 85 miles to start getting matches, because at that point I was able to pick up three metropolitan areas. Then there were a lot of matches, and it took me a long time to read all the listings. I didn't have my own computer at the time, and I would stay at work after hours to read through all of them. It took me a while to narrow down the hundreds of results to four individuals who seemed really promising. At that point, I was feeling very determined that I wanted to be with someone who was totally and completely right for me. I did not want to get sucked into another comfortable, but not-quite-right relationship that I would have a hard time breaking off. I knew that I would need to be assertive. I would need to actively look for what I wanted in a life-long partner, and I would need to be decisive.

I had four matches that seemed ideal, and I began to correspond with all four of them. I didn't intend to be connecting with all four at the same time, but the first one was slow to write back, and I took this as a sign of no interest, which it turned out was a wrong assumption. But I got the idea that not everyone I contacted would write back, so I should not just focus on one person.

Being ideal on paper and having a enjoyable correspondence doesn't necessary mean there's chemistry, as I found out, when I had the first actual meeting. The first in-person date I had through match.com was with Ken, and he was very sweet, friendly, and fairly attractive. I really liked him as a person, but there was no chemistry, and I realized it immediately. We met at a park about half way between our homes, a 45-minute drive for both of us. We spent a couple of hours walking around, talking and getting to know each other, but I knew from the first moment it was not going to work out. At an earlier point in my life, I would have told myself that this was something worth exploring. He was clearly a terrific person, so maybe if I gave it a chance it could develop into something over time. But those days had passed. I was no longer willing to go down that road. Now, it was all or nothing, and I wanted it all.

Being single as long as I was, I had done my fair share of rejections. With a rejection, I want to start out as subtle as possible, because hopefully the other person is having the same realization, which is that it's just not going to work out. Sometimes, it doesn't go that way, and it's necessary to be more direct. With Ken, it was easy. At the end of the day, we embraced, and said how great it had been to spend a few hours together, which was entirely true, and looking into his eyes, I saw he knew what I knew, and it was such a pleasant relief to find that we were both on the same page. No hard feelings.

The second person I met in person turned out to be my future husband. After meeting the first person, I was so hopeful that it could happen so quickly, but it did. I was immediately attracted, and it took less than two hours for me to feel certain that we were going to be together always. The best way I can describe it is to say that in previous relationships, I had the sense that my love had boundaries. I felt like, okay--now I know what this relationship is doing for me, how it's meeting some of my needs, but I also know what it just can't be-you know, I had this sense of what needs were not going to be met. But when I finally met my husband, those boundaries just disappeared. I felt, for the first time, the sense of limitless, bottomless, uncontainable love. I knew there would be no end to it. And there has been no end to it. Our first date was on the fourth of July of 1996, and we have been married for eleven years. It's still inconceivable to me that we won't be together always.

So, that's my story, and here are a few things that I hope you will take away from it:

1. Sometimes you need to be assertive and determined to get what you want, and take decisive action-coasting along letting things happen to you just doesn't get the job done. Once you make up your mind that you will work hard to get what you want, it's often easier than you think it will be.

2. Rejection is just a state of mind. If you're looking for the person who's totally right for you, and the person you're with is doing the same, then it's either happening or it's not. Ideally, both of you will know it. Don't be afraid to be honest-you may meet someone who is a really wonderful person, but is just not right for you, and it's okay to say so.

3. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you're not attractive. Attraction is a matter of personal preference, and everyone's preferences are different. Too many people think they have some big flaw that makes them undesirable-they're too short or not smart enough or not pretty enough, but even if the flaw is real, be assured that there are lots of people out there to whom that is one thing that just doesn't matter. After all, my ex-boyfriend's neighbor seemed to find lots of eager women who didn't mind vain and vapid. Exactly what they saw in that guy will forever remain a mystery to me.

4. Never underestimate or try to fight "chemistry". I think there's a part of you deep down that better understands what you want and need than your thinking mind does. I believe there is such a thing as "true love"-it's not just that there's a good fit and a better fit, but there really is a totally, completely right person out there for you, and when you meet that person you will know it, and he/she will know it too. Respect the secret magic.

Fundamentals of Emotional Intimacy: Learning Not to Judge

For me, these past couple of weeks have been dominated by the theme of judgment. It just seems to be coming up everywhere in my life. Because of the economic situation, we have an environment of uncertainty and absolutely unavoidable budget-cutting at work, and this week I listened to one of the leaders of our institution telling me, almost tearfully, how very hard it is for them to make those tough decisions and be considered "incompetent" because of it (it's a college, not a financial firm, in case you're curious). I also was quite a bit annoyed with my husband yesterday, an annoyance primarily caused by my strong belief that he shouldn't be the way he is--in other words, an annoyance caused by my judgment of him.

One thing that's becoming much clearer to me is that people, including me, use judgment as a way of reducing anxiety. When you're in a situation where something unpleasant or painful is happening to others, it's very natural for your sense of empathy to kick in, and you start to feel their emotions. If you don't want to go down this path, you can stop it with a thought that separates you from the other person. Typically, such a thought is like, "This (bad) thing is happening to them because of something they did, and since they essentially brought this onto themselves, they don't deserve my sympathy. I'm not like that. I don't do those kinds of things, so the bad thing won't happen to me too." In other words, when you judge, you categorize someone else as "not like me", and you make yourself feel protected. Then, having created this sense of separation to protect yourself from the discomfort of really understanding their feelings, you turn around the next day and wonder why you feel so lonely and isolated.

So, the impulse to judge really arises from the desire to avoid pain. This is one of the things that make close personal relationships really challenging. When you're intimate with others, and you expand your self-identity to include them, you get an emotional stake in the events of their lives. Then, when they become involved in a difficult situation, the desire to pass judgment may intensify for you because their pain is your pain. The intimate relationship prevents you from disengaging from the emotional connection, so you try to reduce the pain with the limited tools that are available to you, including judgment. It's often easier for us to listen to acquaintances vent about their problems than it is to listen to our most beloved friends and family. With a casual acquaintance, you know that at the end of the conversation, you can get up, go home, and be comfortable again. It's much easier to willingly let yourself experience someone else's pain if you know it's for a limited time, and you feel like you're free to break away when it starts to get rough.

But, here's the good news. If you commit to the practice of accepting, allowing, and fully feeling your own emotions, even the unpleasant ones, without resistance, then you are also practicing the skills needed for a fulfilling intimate relationship. When you can allow yourself to experience your own discomfort without turning away from it, then you also have what it takes to allow yourself to fully empathize with the pain of others without passing judgment. When we refrain from judgment, as John-Michael so eloquently wrote just a couple of days ago, we create "an open and receptive Space that welcomes" others. Being able to offer that kind of precious space, where people feel free to reveal their vulnerabilities and imperfections without fear of being judged or labeled, will deepen your relationships in ways that are amazing and beautiful.

As you make judgments today, can you go deeper and see what emotions you're trying to protect yourself against? Can you be courageous enough to experience those emotions just as they are?

The Challenge of Overcoming Shyness

Shyness is a problem that I’ve lived with for most of my life, and still live with now, but to a far lesser degree than in the past. I’ve always felt self-conscious and awkward in social situations, but one of the biggest problems for me has been making phone calls. I never had any trouble answering the phone, it was just making calls that terrified me. If I made a call, the first thing I had to do was explain why I was calling. I had to sound calm and professional, and make sense. I found that really hard to achieve when I was sweating profusely, breathing at twice my normal rate, and shaking like a leaf. Fortunately for me, email came into common usage around the time I began my professional career. I found that I could easily substitute email for any phone call. Well, almost any phone call. Every now I then, I had someone coming in with a name and a number on a little slip of paper, saying “I told this person that you would give ‘em a call.” Ughhhh!

The turning point came when I decided to sign up for a research study on social anxiety. Of course to get into the study, I had to make a phone call and set up the initial appointment! (Here’s an important word of advice to anyone out there trying to recruit volunteers for a social anxiety study: USE MAIL-IN CARDS!) Having overcome that one big obstacle, the experience went very smoothly, albeit with lots of paperwork for me to fill out on every visit. I met the diagnostic criteria for social anxiety disorder, which seems to be distinguished from shyness only in that it must have the additional effect of causing a person distress or of being debilitating in some way (so people who are happy with their shyness wouldn’t qualify). The study’s purpose was to investigate whether a combination of medication plus therapy was more effective than medication alone or therapy alone. I was randomly assigned into one of five treatments: fluoxetine alone, therapy alone, fluoxetine with therapy, placebo with therapy, or placebo alone. I received a container of pills, so I immediately knew that I was either in the fluoxetine group or the placebo group. At first I wasn’t sure what I taking, but after about two weeks of pills, I went in for an evaluation. The psychiatrist asked me many questions about whether I detected any difference in my anxiety level, and I could tell by the way she reacted to my answers that she’d concluded that I was in the placebo group.

After several weeks, the study ended and I was officially told that I had been taking a placebo. However, the study stipulated that every participant was entitled to a real treatment, so at that point, I was offered a choice between six weeks of therapy or six weeks of fluoxetine. Since I personally dislike taking any medications, and I wanted a permanent change, I chose therapy.

The cognitive-behavioral therapy had two basic components. One was to examine and counteract my negative self-talk, and the other is to confront my fears in a graduation and controlled way while the therapist provided lots of encouragement and positive reinforcement. I was asked to write down my thoughts when I got anxious. Many people with social anxiety talk to themselves in a negative way: “She’s not going to like me. She thinks I’m an idiot”, and so on. I didn’t have very much of that, although I do tend to assume that people won’t be very interested in what I’m saying. The second component was more useful for me. It consisted of making a list of goals. I had to write out the things I was afraid to do, then rank them in order from easiest to hardest. Then each week, I had to do one or two things from the list, beginning with the easiest, and report back on how it went. So, I began making phone calls. The easiest kind of phone call for me to make is the short business phone call, so I started by replacing some of the interactions I would have normally done by email with the phone call. One really useful thing for me is mental rehearsing. If I was having trouble making the call, I would relax, breath deeply and imagine what I would say in detail. I would also imagine getting a courteous response. After a few iterations, I was able to feel calmer about making the call. I moved from there up to making social calls, but just with the intent of asking a question, not extensive chatting. My therapist and I got along quite well, and she kept asking if I wanted to keep on coming, which evidently wasn’t a problem within the constraints of the study, so I ultimately had about 20 sessions with her.

One the most valuable things I gained from the therapy experience was getting reassurance that my social skills are actually pretty good. I had this lingering fear in the back of my mind that maybe I grated on people somehow, that it might actually be unpleasant for them to talk with me. But I asked my therapist that, and we had practice conversations, which both of us seemed to enjoy greatly, and she told me that my social skills are fine. Knowing that it’s someone’s job to tell you the truth means that you can have total confidence in her answers. My hangup is just fear really, and the only way I’ve found to diminish fear is to do the thing I fear and see that it’s not so scary after all. It was really helpful to me to go through the experience, and to learn that my fear really doesn’t know best. The fear was telling me that something bad might happen, but when I pressed on through the fear, the bad thing never came. I learned to challenge my fears and not be ruled by them. I’ve also come to distrust strong emotion in generally. I find if I’m feeling calm and relaxed, my intellect and my intuition work pretty well and can be relied on, however, if I’m upset, fearful, angry, or even highly elated, then my judgment needs to be questioned much more carefully.

What’s been really helpful to you in overcoming a fear or negative experience in your life?

Emotional Balance

You may recall that on January 19^th, in my post The Goal, I said that I wanted to take a closer look at why I don’t share particular thoughts with others, and question whether my reasons are valid. I’m happy to report that I’ve been doing that, and finding that I’ve often held back for no good reason at all. Once I started examining this self-censoring process at the level of individual thoughts, I found that I either couldn’t think of much justification for holding back, or I had a vague sense that someone might react negatively to my comment. If I had the fear of negative reaction, I’ve generally challenged myself to reword the comment in another way to make it less objectionable, or to just say it to see if I really would get the reaction I was expecting.

Because I’m now examining my thoughts and feelings in greater detail now, I’m also noticing something else that’s really important. I’ve become aware of how I shape my own emotional states through expectation. I’m finding that if I say or do something expecting that it will have a positive result (like someone will be pleased or impressed), most of the time the reaction I get falls short of the expectation, and I feel disappointment. On the other hand, if I have a negative expectation, like someone will frown at me in response to something I say, then I tend to restraint myself. If I don’t actually say it, then my assumption never gets tested, and it’s as if I did get the negative reaction (thanks to my own imagination) because I never gave reality the chance to disprove my belief.

By being able to observe these states inside myself, I’ve been developing emotional balance, and I can feel when I am emotionally centered, and when I am starting to get off-balance. When I sense myself beginning to imagine a specific positive outcome from something I’m doing, I now know that I’m setting myself up for disappointment. When I sense myself beginning to imagine a specific negative outcome, I now know I’m setting myself up for fear and self-restraint. The ideal state seems to be uncertainty. In the state of uncertainty, I am receptive, curious, and sensitive to meaningful feedback. In the state of uncertainty, I can change my plan in appropriate ways as new information becomes available. But one of the many hazards of being human is that humans don’t like uncertainty. When we’re trying anything new or different, we like to have some sense of what the risks are, and what the payoff will likely be. We like to be secure in thinking we understand the probable consequences of our actions. But, ironically, thinking we already know the likely outcome may keep us from seeing the actual outcome, or may lead us to disappointment because the small positive we achieve fails to measure up to the big positive we expect.

Staying emotional balanced means not letting yourself get too far into either a positive or a negative expectation. If you can’t maintain an attitude of uncertainty, at least try to balance out the positive and negative expectations. If you’re imagining you’ll get a big reward from something you’re working on, stop to think about what could go wrong and how you might deal with it. If you’re imagining a negative outcome, stop to ask yourself why you think this will happen, and whether you could possibly be wrong.

What strategies do you have for staying emotionally balanced?