What are single people in their 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s really experiencing? As a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, I became aware, both in my own life as well as in the lives of my single patients, that finding and sustaining a love-life can be quite difficult, if not painful at times. At the present time, there are plenty of opinions about how a single person approaching or actually in his or her middle years should behave in the “singles world.” In recent years a number of articles and books have been published that suggest rules of conduct or offer labels and ready-made solutions to single people in the hopes that this will provide them with the information they need to find love for themselves. Again, plenty of opinions and suggestions, but no one seemed to be asking single individuals how they feel about themselves and the relevance of these feelings for their love-lives. When we started asking this more personal question, we found that our single middle-aged men and women needed to resolve feelings they had about themselves as middle-aged single people. Invariably, these feelings complicated their love-lives. Let me explain further.
The unfortunate thing about all these suggestions and opinions about what is right or wrong for a single person, is that many of the people who follow them are stacking up one disappointment after another looking in the wrong place for the right answer. Many single individuals I talk to during the course of a week tell me about the money and time they spend trying to find the “right” man or woman. A lot of energy gets expended going to places where they might meet other available singles. Weekends, vacations, singles dances, dating services, online dating, etc., all geared toward answering the relationship need by introducing the single person to as many people as possible. Sort of like playing the odds by placing as many bets as possible. The idea is that the more people you meet, the greater the chances of finding someone to love. Compatibility exists somewhere in the numbers. Unfortunately, a long line of disappointed people exist for whom these methods have not worked and for whom no real help has been available.
I know there are scores of single people who have not yet clearly identified the experience of who they are as unique individuals and suffer relationship failures as a result of this delay. Consider the idea that when you are settled inside about who you are as an individual, your relationships with others will naturally improve. No gimmicks or fancy rules are needed. You see, “working-on relationships” can become a defensive avoidance of the real issue, how you feel about yourself and how that affects your dating and love relationship experiences. A better relationship through personal growth is not some abstract clique, but the direct experience of what happens to people when they establish a better relationship with themselves. As an example, everyone knows someone who feels unhappy with himself. Usually such a person does not have a satisfying and fulfilling love-life.
An argument can be made that if you get into a relationship first, this will take care of the self-esteem issue. Relationship first, then I will feel better about myself. This kind of “strategy” may result in the type of frantic dating behavior I sometimes observe among middle-aged singles, dating as if one’s life depended upon it. With the inevitable litany of psychological consequences if it does not work out to one’s satisfaction. Furthermore, this kind of unhealthy dependence upon being loved is often accompanied by attempts to control the one giving love so as to keep one’s self-esteem afloat. So let’s go back to the original issue. How a person feels about herself has everything to do with the quality of her love-life.
Now we’ll tie this into our discussion about being single and middle-aged. My proposal is that many, perhaps most middle-aged single men and women, are ultimately dealing with the need to identify who they are as unique individuals and who they change into when in a love relationship. By this I mean, many middle-aged singles are still trying to settle how they experience themselves on the inside while not allowing those unsettled feelings to interfere or complicate their love relationships. Quite frankly, the most defensive way of doing this is to keep oneself alone and seemingly free of confusion. For some middle-aged singles, these unsettled feelings get concealed behind a very busy work or social calendar. The deeper problem, however, is being unprepared to handle the psychological issues that will most likely arise if the plunge into love is taken. So the individual remains “closed” to love, no matter how involved he seems with dating and social activities.
I will elaborate further on this theme of being “closed” to love since this idea has come up so often in my work with middle-aged single people. I have used this word in the context of trying to understand how a person may be really “looking for love closed.” This means he or she is out there in the single’s world mixing and mingling but really not open to involvement. No problem if our single person has chosen to sew the old proverbial oats for a while. But there is a problem if the quest is to find someone to love. So what kind of difficulty does this pose for the single middle-aged person looking for love?
When we look for love closed, we are protecting ourselves from being hurt again. Sounds simple enough, right? The rationale for this psychological armoring makes sense but its implications are disastrous. A wise old psychoanalyst once said to me, as I was lamenting over the risks involved in getting married, “How can you expect to be in love without getting hurt?” Of course my first response to this question was defensive and I tried explaining why I thought it was important to protect myself from hurt whenever possible. What I did not realize at the time was that the medicine I was applying was vastly more dangerous than the illness. By this I mean that self-protectiveness was now a bigger problem than the experience of being hurt by someone being loved. In a closed and protected state of mind, a person is not really “open” to being in love.
The first step out of this snag is to re-new one’s faith in our natural capacity to heal ourselves if and when we get our hearts broken. Getting hurt does not have to mean the end, and there are ways to bring oneself through a recovery. A big part of the problem is the way in which we all inflate through imagination our fears and anxieties based on past experiences. The result is we anticipate more than reality has to offer and by so doing keep ourselves defensive. This difficulty plays out in more specific ways when people worry about “losing something” rather than “gaining someone” when they enter a love relationship. It is common to experience a troubled relationship as trying to take something precious away from us. Freedom, time, possessions, money, etc., all and more are subject to the feeling of being taken, reinforcing the thought that one needs to be protective and closed. All of this leads us to one of the biggest illusions going, that we can actually lose ourselves at the hands of another person. The reality is, revealed to anyone willing to look more closely, we are the only ones who can sacrifice ourselves and what we have for love.
I like to refer to this illusion as a relationship expectation, one of a set of expectations that guide a person’s behavior in a relationship. Let me be more specific. The way in which I lose myself is to stick to my familiar expectations rather than see what is really happening. If I expect something to happen the same old way, I do not allow for the novelty of a situation to affect me. If I expect that people I meet will treat me the same way as people I have known, I am under the influence of a self-fulfilling expectation. In my work with middle-aged singles I have witnessed all kinds of relationship expectations. They are as varied as there are individuals.
Expectations of this kind restrict the individual from breaking-out of repetitive situations that reinforce protective ways of life. For middle-aged single persons this curse of familiar but unsatisfying relationship expectations can be a major barrier to starting a satisfying love-life. By the time many of us reach our middle years most of us have formed a few resistant relationship expectations that we may not even know we have. These expectations are often generated from disappointments in past relationships. When they guide our love-lives we do not have to do anything new or risk that we could be caught in a novel situation with someone we do not know and could relate to from scratch. By scratch I mean of course without those preconceived expectations that tell us immediately what to anticipate with or without the cooperation of reality.
As we all know but rarely admit to ourselves, we all hang onto these expectations as if our lives depended upon them. Quite the contrary, our lives depend upon letting them go! Then the possibility of novelty and spontaneity can present itself. Otherwise, we have taken the passion and unpredictability out of our relationship experiences. Relating this to our search for love, what better state of mind is there than being open when we are looking for love? From what I have seen, no other state of mind permits the chemistry of love to unfold. Listening closely to single people has taught me that the chemistry of love is more common than most of us think. In the course of a life-time the average person bumps into a number of people who can ignite a spark. The problem is not finding the spark but how the spark finds you! When the heart is closed, sparks never make a fire and the individual remains in an endless search for love. A closed heart, protective, avoidant of hurt, and without faith in the capacity to heal, does not allow love but a long list of disappointments that confirm negative expectations.
At this point in my work with middle-aged singles, or any other singles for that matter, I am sensitized to the presence of this “closed state of heart.” Looking to understand the individualized reasons for a person’s emotional closure is now a primary professional interest of mine. A first step toward change is to increase an individual’s awareness that he is in fact looking for love closed. This followed by a detailed inquiry into the individual’s relationship expectations helps to illuminate the particulars of that individual’s emotional closure. From there, the goal is to open up to one’s inner experience and begin tolerating and working with the felt vulnerability of it. Opening up to a trusted and reliable person or persons who can help define the reasons why emotional closure is retained is the way to work on opening oneself up to love again.
This growth process is further reinforced with an acceptance of being single and the various emotions that acceptance can trigger in a person. At times it is simply necessary to “clear the heart” to get one’s bearings after being in one disappointing relationship after another. This is commonly referred to as soul-searching, a time to find out what it is one truly wants in one’s love-life. From the standpoint of psychological growth, this is a very important time indeed. A time of reflection and reconsideration of whatever course of action one has been taking up to now. People often temporarily leave the singles scene to accomplish this reorientation.
The problem comes when this need for emotional “singularity” is interpreted as a personal failure, a sign that he or she could not handle things in the fast and furious dating world. As a consequence, what commonly happens is that the single person, feeling this self-admonishment, will not permit living and learning through this transitional period in any comfortable manner. Instead, some single individuals accede to pressures to be in a relationship by either getting into a love-less union, compulsively dating, or simply loading on the self-criticism for not having love in their lives.
Remember, how we feel about ourselves has everything to do with the nature of our love relationships. So if working on oneself does not take place when our insides are telling us it is time, the chances of going through the same old disappointment in our love relationships is a very strong possibility. So what interferes with this calling to experience the needed psychological growth as a single person? Again, the interferences are as varied as there are individuals. To try to generalize, I would say that being alone is one of the biggest culprits. Being alone, of course, is just the external description of one’s actual state of life at the moment relative to other people. It does not begin to tell us anything about what being alone means to a particular individual. Many people interpret being alone as some kind of emotional disaster. So disastrous in fact that the prospect of making this period of time a learning experience is lost.
This is when we are most susceptible to what I like to call security relationships. By this I mean a relationship which has the primary purpose of soothing and defending against being alone. On occasion I encounter a single person in such a relationship who tells me he or she grew as a consequence of being in it. For example, if a person goes out with a married man or woman or someone on the rebound from another relationship. In neither case, is the married or rebounding individual ready to be open and receptive to love. The relationship, however, may permit the single person a chance to work something out of her system. As an instrument of growth, or simply a waste of time, either way the relationship is limited and always involves an attempt to cope with the feeling of being alone.
Getting comfortable with oneself as a single individual has a lot to do with finding and sustaining a love relationship. This might still sound contradictory to you, so I will try one more time to clarify the truth in this statement with another example. Let us try to imagine the most constructive way of handling the feeling of being alone. The first thing to understand is why this experience can be so frightful to many of us. I think we are generally hesitant to encounter our true selves since that can be at odds with how we would like to represent ourselves to ourselves and others. Yet this reconciliation of who we truly are as individuals permits us to look for love “open.” We have nothing to really lose if rejection and disappointment come. So what does this have to do with finding and sustaining a satisfying love relationship? It simply has everything to do with it. This is precisely why being single is not just an arbitrary state of living that occurs between love relationships. Unfortunately when viewed in this defensive way its importance as a transitional phase in life and its potential for growth is lost to us.
Currently in our society, we are largely preoccupied with our relationships to others, so much so that we often overlook that most sensitive of relationships, the one we have with ourselves. If we do not like or even love who we know ourselves to be deep down inside, this can create a lot of problems, one of which is a difficulty giving and receiving love. So much for the philosophy, what about practical solutions?
More than ten years ago my wife Victoria and I developed support group services to address these psychological needs in the New York City singles community. At that time we put together groups of middle-aged single men and women for the purpose of exploring their love-lives together. Many of our group members went on to more satisfying love-lives and we learned a thing or two about dating, single life, and love relationships. That support group service has now evolved into a workshop we affectionately refer to as the Love-Life Workshop. Our workshop is a condensed and more intensive form of our earlier singles support service and retains much of the focus that the support groups had. We like to think that we have gotten better at what we do and can do it more efficiently in a shorter period of time. Our workshop objective is to introduce as many people as possible to their often unacknowledged need to talk about their dating and love relationships, and in the process make their love-lives conscious. The workshop itself is always a supportive and intimate experience for all who are sincere about their need to learn something new about their love-lives.
Its 2010 and we are still at it.
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