Choosing a romantic partner (of ledgers and lists )

I want to re-post something I brought up in a different section of SOLO. Eventually I want to show how I went about determining some of my must haves and nice to haves. Maybe others might be willing to share the same.

Part of the original post:

I think the “ledger approach” (in my case a list) is an excellent approach. You do need to identify explicitly what it is that you want in a partner but you also need to make sure you are determining that rationally. That is the difficult part, knowing what should be included in the must haves and nice to haves columns, especially if you are currently in the stage of working within possible mistaken premises when determining your ideal.

Even that is just a start (if your goal is a long-lasting, life affirming relationship).

Identifying whether your prospective partner shares your core values is important but the matching of “sense of life” is just as important (in fact with the “sense of life” I think here is where the “ideal” person comes across.

You don’t necessarily have to find out one before the other but I think it is impossible for a healthy relationship to develop from opposed explicit fundamental core values.

One thing I want to point out though is that you can find out a lot about yourself if the shared fundamentals are there but you feel no chemistry. As well as with the situation where the “sense of life” connection is incredible but the shared fundamentals are diametrically opposed.

If I was in either type of those relationships for the long-term I would have to ask myself why I am settling. It also would give me clues to whether or not my original list was rational and/or if I was being honest with myself when it came to what I really valued in a woman.

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I have been refining my “list” for the last 2 years. One benefit I want to highlight to this

“ledger” approach (list) is when I had my top 5 must haves, I had to be honest with

myself and say “Do I offer those top 5 right now for this prospective lover”.

I expect the best, but do I yet deserve the best.

 
This encouraged me to continue vigorously with the psycho-epistemological work that I was doing. The desire for this “ideal” partner was not the primary reason for my self-improvement but it did make clearer one of the tremendous benefits of becoming “clean”.

Marcus,

Do I have things that I have done in the past that I am not proud of? Definitely. Have I worked on addressing and correcting many of those premises that led to that behavior? Definitely.

When I talk about “becoming cleaning” I mean uprooting stored irrational premises.

Let me give a somewhat benign example:

Up until about 7 months ago, I had not worn jeans for about 6 or 7 years. I wore shorts, warm-up pants, or dress pants. I had been equating jeans with a disheveled appearance and a disheveled mind. I felt like I always had to be on and I did not want to give the impression (by wearing jeans) of being lazy. I was concerned people would draw the conclusion, lazy appearance, lazy mind (one that I was subconsciously drawing about a lot of other people, but not all). 

Another negative of this is I think I came across as someone that did not just relax (maybe too serious) in general. I realized that I could be serious about ideas/values and still wear jeans. My mind is sharp and wearing jeans does not diminish that :-)

This problem also made me realize that, partially at root, I was being second-handed in caring about how people saw me.

This made me examine other areas to see how this second-handedness was playing out. I came to realize that just how prevalent this problem was (I actually think this is the biggest problem for most people) and took (and taking) actions to correct it.

I hope that helps clarify what I meant.

Aquinas

When I talk about “becoming cleaning” I mean uprooting stored irrational premises.

At one point, a few years ago, I realized that the things I wanted were not yet deserved, and would thus have to wait.  The "cleaning out" of which you speak is not only relevant, but necessary.  It is unfair to seek the unearned.