Robin Crotty discusses a soft reset to clearing emotional clutter this spring
Whether you’re happily in love, recently heartbroken, stridently single or casually dating, most of us carry bad habits, baggage, and misconceptions into our love lives. Dating is often viewed as pivotal to college life, to having the fullest experience of young adulthood; but when it starts to become the centre of your life, or when it's creating more clutter and chaos than it's worth, it's time to reframe, regroup and reset.
Take a look at the bad practices you’re carrying with you. For instance, should you really be friends with that ex? Is that truly something to carry into the brighter, warmer, sunnier months ahead? And stalking your ex-boyfriends-new-girlfriends Spotify: is that adding to your quality of life? It could even be an idea to finally end that long-term-situationship that’s been plaguing you and your friends that are forced to hear about it, now that we can emerge from hibernation.
The reasons you might have for engaging in the dating scene could be due for review in this spring clean. Are you afraid of being left behind by your peers, and are therefore following along without considering what you really want or need? Have you fallen into back-to-back relationships and now don’t even know what being single might look like? Most of us have some instinct for when we’re dating, staying or leaving for the wrong reasons. Writing it down, speaking it out loud and making small steps can make the issues manageable.
It's a truly terrible idea to get everything - or more accurately, to try to get everything - from one person. And if you begin to believe that it is only this person that can make you happy, comfort you, understand you- your significant other, your ex, the person you’re pursuing- that will inevitably become true. Finding joy in different people and more importantly, in yourself, is so important to learn how to do.
However, it's not always that easy! If you're in a happy relationship currently, or you were in one recently, that type of comfort, validation and reassurance is not going to be replicated exactly in your platonic relationships or hobbies. Things might feel muted outside of the relationship and searching for that exact feeling in other places will only disappoint. But that feeling, of loving and being in love, being desired and desiring; these are far from the only all-consuming, life-affirming feelings that you can feel. Turn up the volume on the smaller joys, emphasise the parts of your life that we are falsely told are not as vital as love and sex.
Your love life should never be your greatest project. There should be a multitude of other people, projects, purposes, that all combined, fill your life. Dating, falling in love; those should be additions, not the foundations or the focus. To be fulfilled both in yourself, in how you fill your life, to be able to find happiness and reassurance in a variety of people and places. Those accomplishments are much more meaningful than successful, or interesting, love life.