Taking a Break from Dating

Take three or so minutes to listen to this song, dance around to it, whatever, just listen to it, it'll add to the rest of the post.

 A couple of my loveliest readers left a couple of good questions on my post "Lean into the Discomfort"  here is the answer to Beka's question.  Proceed knowing that I'm no professional.

Is "Taking a Break" from dating a bad idea?

I love this question because I have been there so many times and for so many reasons that I can't even say.  But let me give it to you straight here, while risking sounding like a hypocrite: No, I don't think it's a good idea.  Maybe I just don't have all the facts about why you're considering taking a break because I do think that there are some situations, and by "some" I mean two, that it may be an okay, if not a good idea.  The first situation is after a particularly hurtful breakup (even if it was "your idea").

If your heart is all mashed up and hurt and you're not sure how you're going to get over it, or if you even want to, dating is a bad idea. Here is a link to a post I wrote about how to get over a breakup. No one wants to be your rebound (no one good that is, only users want users). Chances are that in your attempt to get over your heartache you'll (unintentionally) be like that elementary school bully and pick on someone else, inflict your pain onto them all in the name of trying to feel better about yourself and your situation.

The second situation that I'd say may be okay is if you are that person that is always in a relationship.  It's never a good idea to bounce from one relationship to another, you need time alone to figure yourself and your garbage out. Take a break for your own sanity!

If you're not just coming out of a relationship, or if you've been on a break from dating for awhile you need to allow yourself the risk to love and be loved or to hurt when you're not feeling loved.  If you don't, you're just on the run, and if you're not the Boxcar Children just trying to stay together by running from child services after the tragic death of your parents (if that reference completely alludes you it's time to go to the library and fill that void in your childhood, you can thank me later).  If that's not your story, you have no business running from life.

Life is too short and has too much potential to be buffered or avoided.

Yes, love is a risk, and being disappointed by love hurts, but isn't hurt better than feeling nothing?

You'll spend much of your life remembering the past, the fixation on the future ebbs away with time (ask your grandparents). You'll sit and remember this time in your life, wishing you could feel as purely and as intensely as you do now.  When we're wrinkled and gray remembering feeling disappointed and hurt will be the same as remembering feeling in love and whole, because it will all be remembering life and what it was like to feel alive.

As Jane Austen's character, Mr Bennet, so aptly pointed out, "next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then. It is something to think of.  It gives her a sort distinction among her companions." Enjoy being crossed, and enjoy the potential of love.

"It is a risk to love.  What if it doesn't work out? Ah, but what if it does?" -Peter McWilliams.