Melissa Lafsky posted this article this week on the Huffington Post that we wanted to share with you, it's her 5 Truths about Dating. It's a great "pick me up" because while dating can be fun...it can be frustrating. Here is her witty take on dating and a good refresher for those gearing up for a date this week:
Truth #1: Remember, dating takes work.
We're taught to work hard to achieve our goals. Study until your eyes bleed, and you'll make the Honor Roll. Take 6 zillion extracurricular activities and snort Adderall before the SATs, and you'll get into college. Stay late and work weekends, and you'll get the promotion. And on and on until you fulfill the American expectation of constant accomplishment (or you die, or both).
Yet somehow, in the midst of all this cultural "can-do-it-iveness," a crucial lesson gets lost: meeting your life partner also requires work. Lots of work, in fact. This reality gets totally scrubbed from the lore of modern romance. We honestly think it just happens. We arrive at a bar on Tuesday night and our beloved is standing there with a rubber stamp on his/her forehead and 2 tickets to eternal bliss. Not true. Even the people for whom this sort of thing "happens" are lying about it -- they worked (whether they realized it or not) to ready themselves and prepare their lives to meet someone, be it by conquering fears of intimacy or overcoming emotional scars that kept them from nabbing the great people they did meet, or just cleaning out all the crap in their apartments to make room for someone other than the cat. And most of all, they got their butts to that bar on a Tuesday night.
So what's the specific work you need to do? Hell if I know. All I know is that if you're dating like a fiend and never getting what you want (more on that later) then there is work left to do. In a way, deciphering what work is necessary for you is like 10th grade algebra -- if you study the same way for every test and flunk them all, then clearly the way you're studying isn't working. And if you're putting on the same makeup/dress/mental state and heading to the same bar/restaurant/speed dating hall and expecting different results every time, same rules apply.
Want to see her other 4 truths on dating? You can find the rest of the article here.