It’s very easy to look at love with rose colored glasses. You’re getting swept up, romanticizing it into this mystical, mysterious thing that we all hope to find and experience. While there’s certainly an emotional component to love, there’s also another side to love that most people don’t pay attention to.
Practicality.
Emotionality and practicality help you experience love fully and authentically. Practicality should come first, then emotionality.
Being practical will allow you to look at your dating life from a realistic and sensible point of view. This helps support you in making smarter and better decisions for yourself.
You’re unapologetically holding yourself accountable to what you want and what you expect from your potential partner. You’re looking at the good and the bad that we all come with and evaluating it objectively.
Making decisions which truly align with your gut instincts as opposed to emotional based decisions doused in fear, the need for acceptance and negative patterns you create will lead you to much better decision making and in turn selecting a more appropriate partner for yourself.
If you’re dating someone who treats you badly, intentionally or not, we’re very good at tapping into our emotional side and justifying it away and sweeping it far under the rug to maintain balance and comfortability, even if it’s manufactured.
We also have a tendency to have our blatant fears and doubts become minimized by our partners each time we become disappointed. This helps the cycle repeat time and time again.
Being practical, you don’t tolerate that behavior. When someone wrongs us, it causes a negative response both emotionally and physically and yet most of us don’t say anything and in turn, the behavior continues. This is where the problem occurs. You’re not being honest with yourself and you are not asking the important and difficult questions.
Ask yourself and your potential partner concrete questions in order to explore whether this relationship is functional and mutually beneficial for both of you.
We should be focusing on:
- Whether our needs are being met
- If the relationship feels balanced
- If your separate lives mesh well together
- If you two have similar morals and vision for the future
- If this person benefits and enhances your life
If you don’t have conversations about these important topics and confirm it feels like a good fit, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment and failure.
If you push off the conversation to get the answers that you both need in order to see if it would be a good fit, you’ll end up dating each other for a while and when you have a serious discussion about the future, you’ll both realize then that you shouldn’t have dated in the first place. This is why being practical is necessary to protect and advocate for yourself in order to make the best and healthiest decisions for yourself.