I learned the meantime romance!

The dating life! It seems so exciting in theory.  Meeting up for a designer martini at trendy bars and laughing about life, work, the future, the world, the hopes of everlasting love and cosmic alignment.  And sometimes you feel like you are really clicking, at least for a few moments, and you think Wow, maybe this guy will be "the one". 

Of course, more often than not, the evening ends up a disappointment.  Sure you didn't like him, but you become plagued with doubt - Should I have kissed him or not? Will he call me or not? - nearly forgetting the most important question of all:  Did you like him or not?

Perhaps, it was only a first date.  Perhaps things seemed to be going okey, before you caught him eyeing another woman at the bar or talking about his last girlfriend in romantic or vitriolic terms.  Or maybe he began lecturing you about his very important job, speaking to you without a trace of irony about his ambitions to take over corporate America one Power Point slide at a time.  And ultimately when you return home alone again, you come to the sorry conclusion that he's not the one after all.

That is until he calls you a few days later and asks you out again, and you think, "Wow, maybe he liked me.  Well, I guess he wasn't so bad really.  Hey, you never know."

Sounds familiar? Welcome to the World of Meantime Romance!

As I am reading Ian Kerners book, I thought to myself, "so this is it! I am not just chasing a stupid dream, I am also hooked up with the Meantime romance!

What are we afraid of?

Are you afraid of you? 

Autophobia is an abnormal and persistent fear of being alone.  Autophobics often worry about being ignored and unloved.  These days, we're probably all a little autophobic.  How often do we define ourselves in terms of others?  we're popular, we're respected, we're well liked, we're leaders, we're team players.  We become dependent on others for a definition of ourselves.

Many of us have never spent any significant period of time alone.  We go from our families to college to roommates and into relationships.  We've become good at dealing with others but often at the expense of learning how to deal with ourselves.  And in today's interconnected, technology-driven landscape (e-mail, text messaging, and cell phones), we can easily avoid that sort of internal dialogue and introspection that forces self-reflection and realization.

Like getting a pet, dating becomes another form of insulating ourselves from being alone.  When we date in the meantime, it's often because we're afraid of dealing with ourselves; we have lost the ability to judge ourselves without the intermediation of others' judgments of us.

So true, I didnt write this article but I would want to share this to people I know that are afraid of themselves!