Safety Part 1: Emotional Wellbeing
Published on November 18, 2015
Online dating is an exciting and potentially rewarding experience that entails opening ourselves to an array of new people and situations. This series is going to explore how to keep it safe while online dating in three parts:
1. Emotional wellbeing
2. Physical safety
3. Privacy
Emotional Wellbeing
Dating requires us to be willing to trust someone new. This trust is demonstrated by opening our hearts to share our inner truths, putting ourselves in a vulnerable position whereby another person will either accept or reject us for who they perceive us to be. To maintain our emotional wellbeing during this process, it is crucial that we continue to love ourselves and give energy to our other relationships and personal goals. If we neglect to care for ourselves and forget to recognize our own beauty and magnificence, it becomes easy to take our date’s opinions of our character personally. This may result in lowering our self-esteem whenever a date responds negatively to us or decides we are not a good match, or we may go on to develop a dependant relationship wherein we rely on our partner to validate our worthiness, our beauty, our capacity, and so on.
Online dating adds an extra dimension to this dynamic because we begin opening ourselves up not on the first date but when we submit a profile. Here we are sharing personal details about our lives, publicly sharing our photos, and broadcasting the fact we are single and looking. We never know who is going to be reading our page, if someone we know from work will stumble across our profile, or how people will receive us.
By tuning into your true, innermost feelings, you give rise to a healthy dating experience. Dating online (and eventually offline) can be an empowering experience that leads to higher confidence and self-esteem regardless of the outcome. Whether or not you and your date hit it off, try to view the experience as an opportunity to learn, grow, and step closer to what you truly want. After all, a relationship is not an end in itself but a means to further self development.
To receive these personal benefits of empowerment, confidence, and fluidity, the first thing you must accept is that your emotional wellbeing is always your own responsibility. In other words, you are the source of your own happiness, not your partner.
To practise self love through taking responsibility for your emotional wellbeing, it is necessary to develop an honest connection with your emotional state. This involves tuning into the feelings in your body and recognizing patterns that evolve in relation to people, places, and situations.
So how exactly does one do this?
1. Tune in to your feelings. Literally feel for them. Feeling is one of the five senses (seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, and feeling), and so one clear way to observe the honest reality of your emotional state is through the body. Tune into your physical sensations as they arise.
For example, while Jane is reading Tim’s profile, she notices her chest becomes alight with a pleasant sensation, reflecting that something just feels right about Tim.
2. Put words to how you feel. Are your feelings pleasant or unpleasant? What is the emotional word for how you are feeling? Is this emotion subtle or strong? Is it understood as positive or negative? The point here is that you are honest about the reality of your emotions and notice how you are judging them.
For example, Jane initiated contact with Tim and they have been messaging for a while. Things seem to be going well when Jane invites Tim to meet in person. In response to the invitation, Tim feels his lungs tighten out of anxiety. He also feels butterflies in his stomach, which he understands as excitement mixed with nervousness.
The reality that several emotions may be present at once does not always make it clear how you really feel. Putting words to the layers of emotions makes it easier for you to see and understand what is going on inside of you.
3. Ask yourself why you feel a certain way. This is giving context to your emotions and allowing yourself to receive the messages they carry. The result is an understanding of yourself and how to move forwards in a relationship.
For example, Tim has identified that he feels fear around meeting someone on the internet. He realizes this reflects that he is not actually ready to start dating again. Following this inner knowing, he politely declines Jane’s invitation for a date and spares himself unnecessary stress. Instead, he chooses to work on himself until he is ready to date again.
Jane also felt fear when she suggested meeting. She understood that her discomfort was arising because she was opening herself to someone new after having experienced a former partner betray her trust. In this case, she decided the best thing to do was to free herself from hesitance and apprehension by transforming hr fear into love and push herself to extend an invitation.
4. While the words and actions of others have an effect on you, always remember that your feelings are your own. As you practise observing your feelings arise, it becomes easier to acknowledge these feelings as coming from within rather than from your date. An easy way to understand this is to realize that someone could be in your exact same situation but could be responding in a completely different way. Where you feel grateful for compliments, someone else may feel uncomfortable. The point is to recognize that how you feel is not the result of someone else but your own inner workings. As such, do not blame someone else for how you feel or assume the role of a victim.
For example, when Jane receives Tim’s decline to her invitation, she feels rejected before remembering that his decision is nothing personal to her. Rather, it is a reflection of where he is at in his own life. Instead of feeling down and feeding a belief that she is unattractive or she will never find someone to love, she simply moves forward and continues connecting with other singles.
In the end, developing an honest communication with your emotional being is crucial for building healthy, uplifting, and loving relationships. Emotions are useful for helping you to identify whether a relationship is healthy or unhealthy. The more you connect with yourself, the more likely it is that the person you choose to build a relationship with is truly a good fit for you and the relationship is one that helps to lift you higher.
Author: Stephanie
Stephanie Arnold is a writer, visual artist and composer who seeks to unveil the working structures of the human psyche. She works to share valuable insights that stem from personal experience and assist in the development of deeper levels of self-awareness, especially in regards to a sincere and healthy relationship to love and loving. The core of her philosophy is that self-love is the root of loving outwardly, and is therefore necessary to develop if one wishes to create fruitful relationships with others. Her evolving portfolio may be found at www.lovefromwithin.org.
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