I Can't Keep Dating Like This

Chapter 1

The Person in Your Mind

She walked into my office, sat down, and began to cry. “I thought he was the one! I thought he would be different! I didn’t know he was like that!” How many times have I heard that! Many guys and ladies have graced my office with pain in their hearts, no money in the bank, and tears running down their cheeks. The story is always the same. A woman has fallen for the man in her mind. The man in her mind is the perfect gentleman. He has great credit. He has never been married. He is an avid exercise freak who knows how to set boundaries with his mother. He has his own house and car. He makes enough money to care for his future wife because she should not have to work. I know you’re smiling right now.

The guys are looking for a woman with a perfect complexion and lovely teeth. She has the apple bottom accompanied by perfect breasts and little to no waist. She doesn’t have any kids, and she has her own materials to bring to the table. Don’t forget that she is a freak under the sheets and a lady in the streets. She is unselfish and looking for the guy who’s perfect for her. This is the ideal woman for the perfect man. This sounds great!

The issue is that the woman or man in your mind doesn’t exist. These characteristics have been collected over a lifetime of watching movies, soap operas, and sitcoms. This is the person in the magazine who smiles relentlessly at you, and you secretly smile back, hoping no one is looking. Unknowingly, the image stays in your head and becomes compiled on your “suitable mate” list, which is stored in your subconscious. You don’t realize it’s there until you meet someone, and then you compare him or her to this unrealistic list in your head. Now you’re thirty, forty, or even fifty, and no one seems to come close to this scroll of criteria because the person you are seeking in your mind doesn’t even exist on the planet!

I ask people all the time, “What kind of mate do you want?” Although many say they are not sure, most of the time the stereotypical imagery surfaces. The truth is, at the age of forty, a man or woman who fits the criteria in your head is as rare as a Komodo dragon. This, in fact, is why many people are single in the world today. They are searching for someone who exists only in their heads. When they realize that the person in their head is a part of their imagination, they have to recalibrate to determine what they really want. Before you get to that point, let’s stop to examine what’s on your proverbial list.

Whether we know it or not, we all have a list. The list forms long before you lay eyes on the person. The list determines how you date and whom you allow in your life, and it even dictates your behavior once you think you’re in a meaningful relationship. This list forms during the early years. It has criteria such as educational-attainment requirements, desired religious tradition, recreation compatibility, and type of affection, just to name a few. These are great characteristics to have in a mate. We all form this list based on our observations, teachings, and experiences. This hidden scroll of criteria is like a blueprint to measure each person who is a potential mate. Some people go as far as to write the list down and literally compare each person to it. Finding an individual who fits the list is about as likely as picking the winning numbers for the state lottery. Let’s take a deeper look at the list and how a person accumulates the criteria.

As a person matriculates through school, many things begin to shape his or her list of standards. The issue is that many of these criteria are pulled from unrealistic sources. Developing standards from a silly source creates unrealistic demands. Those demands, in turn, create impossible outcomes. We have all seen how perfect sitcom celebrities appear through the lenses of Hollywood cameras. Makeup covers their natural identities. Camera angles camouflage their flaws, and they are playing roles from scripts. You don’t realize that outside the studio, they go through arduous divorces, and their realities in life don’t match their personas on the screen. As I’m writing this book, the legendary Bill Cosby is experiencing the conflict of a Hollywood celebrity. His character was one of the most celebrated dads on television. Many men today have modeled their families after Dr. Huxtable’s. Reality paints a different picture. More than forty women have come forward with allegations of drugging, rape, harassment, and assault. Although these are allegations, the canvas on which The Cosby Show painted Bill is different from the one that many of the women are using.

Another influential component of your list is the relationships of those who are close to you. Your sibling’s husband, mentor’s spouse, and best friend’s mate can have an underlying influence on the type of people you date. Instead of desiring the perfect person for you, you want the kind of person who was perfect for them. Because you are on the outside looking in, you don’t know the hell that your sister’s husband is taking her through. She is miserable, but the Mardi Gras mask she wears at the family reunion to avoid her mother’s “I told you he wasn’t right” speech has you thinking this is the type of relationship you want. Sadly, many of your mentors and friends may be in the same boat. You have to be careful about coveting someone else’s lawn, because you don’t know the maintenance it takes to keep the weeds out.

Growing up, every athlete wanted to be like Michael Jordan. He was considered one of the greatest basketball players to ever play the game. Years ago, a video went viral. It was of a relatively unknown rapper who had an opportunity to meet Michael Jordan for the first time at a party. He described Jordan as a mean, egotistical jerk who was very unpleasant to be around. He said, “I wanted to be like Mike until I met him.”

Sometimes we fall in love with the facade of someone’s personality, skill sets, image, and likeness, but in reality, it is not who they really are. These facades form conclaves in the basements of our cerebral makeup. The false images cause us to sway from reality and develop unrealistic images that ultimately shape what we think we want in a mate.

By the time people, women especially, reach their midtwenties to early thirties, the list of criteria for an ideal mate begins to dwindle. He no longer has to have the perfect credit score. He can have a little stomach. At this point, it doesn’t even matter how many kids he has from a prior marriage or relationship. By the time many women knock on forty’s door, he just has to be a man and like women. By the time a man turns thirty, generally he can look past the superficial qualities he sought in his twenties. His list still exists. However, it has been reduced to basic criteria that should have been the foundation of his list from the start. Daters are often looking for qualities and standards in others that they do not possess themselves. People are asking for a nine or ten on the proverbial mate-rating scale when they are threes at best. The reality is that you may remain single because your standards are too high. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have any standards, because you should. You need to take a real assessment of what you have to bring to the table and what standards you may have to compromise. After all, a successful marriage is about compromise. Because women do not factor in this simplistic notion of facing their own reality, they often miss their Superman because he looks like Clark Kent.

When my daughter was about eight months old, we bought her a toy that required her to nicely fit each shape into a rectangular box. The box was colorful and became her toy of choice. One day, I watched her as she purposely worked toward placing a circle-shaped block into a square. After twenty minutes, I suspected she would grab another shape, but she didn’t. She became frustrated and angry. She was failing in her attempt to make the block fit, even though the circle wasn’t designed to go into the square hole. This is the story line of many dating couples today. Women will try to make men fit into their lives when they were not designed to fit. Guys will attempt to change ladies using manipulation and other witchcraft-type behaviors. No matter which way she turns him, Mr. Wrong will never be Mr. Right, and she will never be what he wants. Certain people were not designed to fit into that hole, no matter the effort you make in trying.

When I was in college, someone gave me an old Lincoln Mark VII. It was a free car. Who turns down a free car in college? Plus, I wanted to take on the challenge of fixing it up. I believed that with a little TLC, this car could be a significant investment. Little did I know, Lincolns were not easy to fix. Each week, parts of the car would begin to break. First, it was the front-wheel shocks. Next, the windows’ electrical system failed. With each passing week, those parts accumulated, and they became too much for my college budget. Being in a fraternity, having a girlfriend, and working, I realized that taking on this car was a bit much. It began to consume my time, my money, and my peace. I quickly realized, in my juvenile thinking,...