Regarding dating, I think a lot of us start dating for the wrong reasons, like we hope it'll help us move on quicker, or maybe it's to feel like we're getting some revenge on our WAS. The reality is we should not date until we have moved on from our sitch and are 100% content and comfortable with being ALONE in the world. Learn to love yourself again before you start trying to throw your love at someone else.
One of the many books I read said it's bad to "need" a mate in your life but perfectly fine to "want" a mate. The difference being if you want someone, that means you are OK whether you have that person in your life or not. You are free, independent, healthy, self-sufficient. You just want someone else along for the ride. But if you need them then you are trying to fill some void in your life and that's not healthy. Fill the void yourself first.
I started dating about a year after BD. It seemed like enough time had passed, but it was a tough time for me. You'd think it would be full of excitement and possibilities, but I had been with my ex over 20 years and I actually had a lot of guilty feelings about dating, like I was the one having an affair. And dating isn't easy, especially online dating. You'll see profiles and think "oh wow we would be perfect together" and you type out meaningful messages and never get a response. It's a game of numbers, you get rejected dozens of times for each success. You learn that it's just how the game works, but if you're still raw from BD then getting rejected over and over again in the dating pool can set you back even farther.
I'm not saying not to date, or to wait for years and years. But just be prepared for it to be yet another difficult transitional period for yourself.
Originally Posted by burned
ST, you're yet another of the people who say they've seen this play out in real life. Before I got to DB, one of the first books I read was "Rebuilding" by Fisher & Alberti. I was totally floored when I got to the part that said "the dumper (WS) frequently comes back talking about reconciliation, right around the time the dumpee (LBS) is "making it," and the most common response is for the LBS to not take them back. Why? "I'm happy even without them, and they didn't seem to have changed much." Maybe AS is actually one of the authors. He won't admit it though. :P
Hahaha! No, never heard of it. I'm just coming from the angle of someone who has been here a long time and seen LBS's come back with updates, sometimes years after their last post and share that their WAS did eventually try to recon. I've also talked to quite a few people IRL that share similar stories. It happens a lot, but mostly it's YEARS later and that is the problem. I think if I told you "Burned, your W will truly repent of her actions and want to reconcile in 23.2 months" then you would probably wait, but all I can really tell you is she may want to in 2 years, or maybe 7 years, or maybe never. And what LBS is willing to wait 2 or 7 or 10 years just to see if -maybe- the WAS wants to recon? I can't imagine there are many. So we get over them and we move on and we build new lives for ourselves. Then when they do approach us, we're a new person with new interests and new goals and slotting them back into that can be very tough indeed. My whole spiel isn't that we should wait for them forever, it's just to say that the sad truth of it all is they will probably want to recon AFTER we don't want to anymore.
