For me—and I would hope all women—The Bachelor is more of a guilty pleasure than a template for a healthy love life. But this week, one of the contestants made a move I can totally get behind more women making: peacing out when they know they aren't into it.
After spending a night with bachelor Juan Pablo in the "fantasy suite," contestant Andi Dorfman said that she couldn't wait to for the night to end, because, guess what? She just wasn't into him. "Not once did he really ask anything about me," she told the cameras. "I'm not unsure. I know he's not the one."
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It might sound silly, but this is pretty huge in the reality-show dating world. It's the first time a female contestant on The Bachelor has just come out and said, "Yeah, I'm not feeling it." Seriously. While other contestants have left for personal reasons and Sharleen Joynt left earlier this season because she wasn't sure she was emotionally ready for an engagement, Dorfman is the first contestant to flat-out say the dude wasn't all that and a bag of chips.
While the fact that this is a TV-first seems more a sign of how backwards "reality" dating is than anything else—we all could learn a lesson from Dorfman's bold move.
Sure, the average woman isn't in such an overt contest for "the one," but dating can far too easily feel a competition. We've all felt the pressure of trying to stand out amid the throngs of women that fill bars and online dating sites alike. We've all tried to charm our way to a second date. And we've all felt the twinge of jealousy that comes when our friends post their engagement rings online. (You can deny it, but I know you're lying.)
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All of that pressure can make it easy to get caught up in an "is he into me?" mentality, rather than an "am I into him" one. And we need to start asking ourselves the latter.
As Terri Orbuch, Ph.D., relationship expert and author of Finding Love Again, says, women are often so busy trying to "sell" ourselves to the person we're dating that "we don't step back and ask, 'Is this the person for me? Are we compatible?'" Her advice? Identify what you want and need in a partner (you can even break out the pen and paper if it helps!), and don't shy away from communicating and expecting that from your beau. Now's not the time to settle. And if you do throw in the towel, know the time you spent dating wasn't wasted, says Orbuch. "You learned. You grew."
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