Draw Your Dating with Gratitude
Welcome to Your Love Breakthrough! Get Real. Love.
In this edition: Draw Your Dating with Gratitude
Perspective – Grateful thinking outlines and defines reality
Practical Tactics – Strategic gratitude in online dating
DIRECT VIEW OF YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES
Perspective – Grateful thinking outlines and defines reality
Outline and Define Reality with Grateful Thoughts
According to the classic art book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, When you try to draw the object itself, you draw the image as you think it should be—not as it truly is. For example, anatomically, human ears are lower on the head than most of us imagine them. That's what viewing your circumstances without gratitude is like. If you focus on your loneliness, you might distort reality and make it worse than it is.
If you detach your expectation of what an object should look like by drawing just the lines around the shape, voila—you render it more accurately.
That’s what happens when you draw your circumstances with grateful thoughts. If you draw the lines around your loneliness with gratitude, you aren't sanitizing your situation, you're putting it in into perspective.
FRAMED BY GRATITUDE
Case in point: When I was uncoupled, I was cynical about positivity and listing things I was grateful for. It seemed to dismiss the real pain I faced. One day, I decided to not just count my blessings, but take the time to envision each item and feel it, smell it, taste it, remember why it made my life good. A visceral warmth washed through me. It didn't erase my desire to be coupled. It produced a sense of goodness about my current life and hope that I could someday add finding a soulmate to what I was grateful for.
Practical Tactics
Strategic gratitude in online dating
First of all, let’s acknowledge that gratitude affirmation talk is fairly commonplace—so much so that it’s turned into white noise and we want to say “yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that one."
This time, don't just list items you’re grateful for in a cerebral way and go back to your sullen existence...
Get into a quiet space in your surroundings and mind. Then think about those same things, and feel them. Use your imagination to remember them—tastes, music, jokes, what makes the joy real for you. Set aside time for this.
Then live those experiences. Seek them out.
When you write or revise your profile, access those grateful memories to describe specifics. For example, instead of “I’m grateful for my family”, you might put, “My family has the most intense melted cheese pulling contests!” Or: “My trip to Canada reaffirmed my fascination with caribou and love of warmer climates all at once.” (Okay, maybe not those things, but you get the idea.)
If you go through rough patches in dating and relating, acknowledge hurt and disappointment, vent to a friend. That's healthy. Then, move on to set aside some time for that gratitude meditation that you can feel.
Reframe your situation with gratitude.
Want in depth online dating insights? Your Love Breakthrough: Effective Online Dating Strategies is available on Amazon.
What you have you missed? Check out past email messages from Christy Sanborn Grassman.