I made the same mistake when I was young. And it is difficult in retrospect to find out exactly why. I don’t remember hearing or reading this explicitly, but somehow I got the idea that first you need to figure out who is your “true love” and then you need to ask them out and… hope that the feeling is reciprocated?
Which is why I have wasted lots of time worrying about how I truly feel about some person, and when I finally felt sure this was the right choice, I got rejected and was emotionally devastated.
And when I put it like this, of course it sounds completely stupid. If you want to figure out whether someone is a good fit for you, you need to interact with them, preferably in many different situations. And you should also interact with people who maybe don’t seem like a good fit but also don’t have any obvious red flags, because maybe you will change your opinion after you learn more about them.
The very concept of “true love” probably needs to be thrown away, because liking/wanting another person is not necessarily a symmetric thing, so there is a high chance of getting rejected; a better concept would be something like having a pool of “potential loves”, people you feel you could be happy with, and if a few of them reject you it’s perfectly okay because you only need one of them anyway. (Unless you are poly.) Plus, as you meet new people, he pool of “potential loves” can grow.
Another thing I wish I had understood better is that experimenting with romantic relations is not only ethically acceptable (as long as you do not hurt other people unnecessarily) but probably also necessary. You may sincerely think that someone is a good match for you based on the data you have at the moment… but as you start dating, you find out more about the person, and maybe you learn that they are actually not a good match. It may feel like tricking them, and you may actually get accused of having tricked them, but it’s just learning things that you probably could not have learned different way, e.g. because people are different in public and in private.
Rejections are an indicator of progress.
You can make the same mistake hundred times and get rejected hundred times, that is no progress.
Also, you can use an approach that works in 10% of situations, you try it 10 times, get rejected 9 times and succeed once. Here, persistence led to success, but calling it “progress” feels kinda incorrect.
each rejection is valuable new data on what to do better next time.
People are different; sometimes two people want different (or even opposite) things.
I guess it makes sense to distinguish between improving in general, and adapting to a subculture. Some things seem to be always good, except some people care about them more, and some care less. (For example, I spent a lot of time and effort improving my dancing skills—some women were highly impressed, some didn’t care at all, but I haven’t met anyone who would consider dancing skills a bad thing.) Other things can be admired by some people, and hated by other people, so if you do more of that, you increase your changes with the former, and decrease your chances with the latter. Here you need to figure out which type of people you want to impress. It probably helps to be flexible, to be able to do something, but also to stop doing that, but you still risk accidentally making a wrong first impression. This is further complicated by the fact that some people are in denial about what attracts them.
I made the same mistake when I was young. And it is difficult in retrospect to find out exactly why. I don’t remember hearing or reading this explicitly, but somehow I got the idea that first you need to figure out who is your “true love” and then you need to ask them out and… hope that the feeling is reciprocated?
Which is why I have wasted lots of time worrying about how I truly feel about some person, and when I finally felt sure this was the right choice, I got rejected and was emotionally devastated.
And when I put it like this, of course it sounds completely stupid. If you want to figure out whether someone is a good fit for you, you need to interact with them, preferably in many different situations. And you should also interact with people who maybe don’t seem like a good fit but also don’t have any obvious red flags, because maybe you will change your opinion after you learn more about them.
The very concept of “true love” probably needs to be thrown away, because liking/wanting another person is not necessarily a symmetric thing, so there is a high chance of getting rejected; a better concept would be something like having a pool of “potential loves”, people you feel you could be happy with, and if a few of them reject you it’s perfectly okay because you only need one of them anyway. (Unless you are poly.) Plus, as you meet new people, he pool of “potential loves” can grow.
Another thing I wish I had understood better is that experimenting with romantic relations is not only ethically acceptable (as long as you do not hurt other people unnecessarily) but probably also necessary. You may sincerely think that someone is a good match for you based on the data you have at the moment… but as you start dating, you find out more about the person, and maybe you learn that they are actually not a good match. It may feel like tricking them, and you may actually get accused of having tricked them, but it’s just learning things that you probably could not have learned different way, e.g. because people are different in public and in private.
You can make the same mistake hundred times and get rejected hundred times, that is no progress.
Also, you can use an approach that works in 10% of situations, you try it 10 times, get rejected 9 times and succeed once. Here, persistence led to success, but calling it “progress” feels kinda incorrect.
People are different; sometimes two people want different (or even opposite) things.
I guess it makes sense to distinguish between improving in general, and adapting to a subculture. Some things seem to be always good, except some people care about them more, and some care less. (For example, I spent a lot of time and effort improving my dancing skills—some women were highly impressed, some didn’t care at all, but I haven’t met anyone who would consider dancing skills a bad thing.) Other things can be admired by some people, and hated by other people, so if you do more of that, you increase your changes with the former, and decrease your chances with the latter. Here you need to figure out which type of people you want to impress. It probably helps to be flexible, to be able to do something, but also to stop doing that, but you still risk accidentally making a wrong first impression. This is further complicated by the fact that some people are in denial about what attracts them.