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Sep 29

How I Found True Love (and 3 Things I Learned)

Posted in Background
This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series 3 Things I've Learned

True love. It’s not just for the Princess Bride. It turns out it’s for me as well.

This came as a big surprise to me. Growing up, I’d never had much of a clue about romance, and although I had a lot of female friends (and still do), I reached the age of 30 without ever having had a girlfriend.

Why am I talking about this now? Largely because one of my readers, who’s turning 30 soon and has never had a girlfriend, emailed me for advice (or really, for encouragement – he knew what action to take already).

That reminded me that I’d never told the story here of how it is that I come to be happily married, when for most of my life I thought that was never going to happen. I think it’s a good story – and maybe it’ll be inspirational, not only if you’re long-term single but if you struggle with any elusive dream.

Meant for someone else and not for me

Let’s start at the beginning. I have a mild form of a genetic condition called Marfan’s syndrome, the main visible signs of which in my case are that I’m very thin, with a noticeably distorted back. I was always self-conscious about my appearance, plus I wasn’t comfortable with emotions. (My family are very emotionally reserved, even for New Zealanders.)

All this meant that I was shy around girls-as-girls (girls as people I was mostly fine with), and asking one out was an impossibly scary thing. I was also very nerdy and unconventional, which didn’t help. I had a strange hyaena-like laugh, deliberately dressed unfashionably, and since my intelligence was the one thing about myself that I did feel confident about, I displayed it at every opportunity. Power tip: This isn’t an endearing trait.

I didn’t have a girlfriend at school, but that was normal in a way, because nor did my two great friends. As it turned out, one of them was gay; the other was just as big a nerd as I was. Once he and I got to university, though, he got a more fashionable haircut, started to dress in jeans and satin shirts (it was the 80s), lost the horn-rimmed glasses (his sight recovered when we were in our late teens), and eventually started dating. I didn’t.

I was very religious at the time, and at least some of the time I rationalised my singleness as a “calling”. Trouble was, I didn’t actually want to be single, deep down, and that led to several years of emotional struggle and internal conflict that didn’t really need to happen.

When I needed sunshine I got rain

And then I created a couple more years of unnecessary pain for myself by falling for a fellow student who only wanted to be friends, not saying anything to her for months, and not taking “no” as her final answer (as I recall, she wasn’t as direct and unambiguous as she could have been, but still).

The two of us then joined the staff of a voluntary organisation that we’d both been involved with at university and went off to Australia to train together, living in the same house. This organisation, incidentally, had a policy that if you were on their staff and wanted to get married, your spouse also had to be on staff already or join, and you can imagine how that distorted things.

I wasn’t over her, but didn’t say anything for more months, by which time I was severely stressed by other things that were happening in my life (like training for an occupation I was completely unsuited for), and I took her second and more definite “no” very hard. I then had to continue to see her almost daily for a few more months, until I left the organisation when it clearly wasn’t going to work out.

Back home, we ended up at the same church. She started going out with one of the other guys from the course – the three of us had been good friends and hung out a lot – and they eventually got married. Still very emotionally vulnerable from severe stress breakdown, I didn’t cope with that well. (I actually turned and fled once when I saw her walking towards me.)

Round and round in little unhappy circles

So that experience overshadowed my romantic life, or lack thereof, for a few years afterwards. It didn’t help that my next serious attempt to start a relationship, with another friend, also got a “no” response. I did go out with a woman for about six months, but “go out” was all we did, and at the end she “clarified” that it had always been on the basis of being just friends – definitely not the impression I had, or the impression that the mutual friend who introduced us had had either. Either I moved too slowly and she lost interest, or her clarification was actually the truth.

There were a couple of times that women did show interest in me. One invited me to a film at the film festival – Blade Runner, which I had watched before and not enjoyed – and it took me a second after I’d said “no” to realise that she’d asked me out. After another second’s review, I decided that my answer stood, though. She was – well, to be honest, she was kind of a female me, and I didn’t find her attractive. (This was back before nerd girls were confident and sexy.)

And then there was the friend of a friend who came on so strong and so desperate that I got horribly nervous, and had to visit the bathroom four or five times during our dinner date at my favourite restaurant. We didn’t go out a second time.

And so I reached 30, having had a total of one date that both people present had definitely considered a date, and it had been – kind of a train crash.

I take action at last

Towards the end of the year I turned 30, though, two things happened that created a shift. The first was something I did. I was aware that I wasn’t good at expressing emotions, though I certainly felt them powerfully enough (my years of romantic hope and disappointment had shown me that – several of those many rejections, even some that were indirect and happened before I’d even asked, had plunged me straight into depression, no stopping, no waiting). So I went and took a community acting class. I figured that if I learned to convey emotions that I wasn’t feeling, I’d be able to translate the skill into conveying emotions I was feeling.

The week before the class finished, the second thing happened: my father died suddenly. I was able to grieve him much better and more openly – the class had done its work – and my emotions began to open up. I also – this feels a little disloyal, but it’s the truth – felt released from the pressure of his expectations, including the expectation of not expressing emotion. He was a good man, but like all of us he had his issues, and emotional expression was definitely one of them. He’d been through the Depression and World War II and had learned to cope by not talking about it.

A fortunate friendship

My father’s death was the trigger for me to get back in touch with a friend I’d made online the previous year. This was the late 90s, when the Internet was still relatively new to most people and a lot of today’s ways of connecting didn’t exist or were in their infancy. But a guy I knew slightly on an email discussion list had started a site for people to meet each other, including as “just friends” with no romantic expectations, and I’d decided, “Why not check it out? What could be the harm?”

A woman had posted there with a very interesting-sounding profile, and she was just looking for a friend, so I emailed her. I was apparently the only normal, non-creepy person who contacted her, and we started mailing back and forth, discussing books, and our personal struggles (including with singleness), and psychology, which she was studying, and everything else that came to mind. But then she started having computer issues, and we lost touch for a while.

When I emailed her about my father, I was also emailing another woman, who had contacted me about an article I had written on singleness on my now-long-gone Geocities website (remember Geocities?). I mentioned this second woman to the first woman, Erin, and she became indignant that I’d been emailing someone else (however innocently). This was my first clue.

We started swapping audio tapes in the mail (this was before MP3s or Skype, and you could only do video on CD-ROM). She has a pleasant voice, and I started to notice an attraction – and started to suspect it was mutual. Summoning up all my courage, I asked. It was mutual. YES!

It was the very early days of Internet romance, and it had a bad reputation. To the initial dismay of her fellow psychology students and her father (“How do you know he’s not an axe murderer?”), we decided it was serious. I went and met her – she lived in California – and then a few months later brought her out to New Zealand for Christmas to meet my friends and family. They approved, not that they got a vote, and we were married in February of 1999.

What I learned

I’ve passed 1500 words here, and I haven’t brought out a personal development lesson yet (which is what this blog is for, after all). So here it is.

If you want a change, make a change. Your life isn’t going to magically change by itself and suddenly work out when it never did before. Work on your confidence, your ability to listen, your ability to connect, your emotional management skills. Worst case: you’ll be a better and more interesting person and you’ll like yourself more.

Secondly, learn to take action. The reader who emailed me has an excellent plan: read some of the books he’s bought about confidence and interacting with women, and then join an online dating site and start practicing. I wasted far too much time having conversations in my head that should have happened outside my head, where I would quickly have learned what was what and had the opportunity to move on.

And finally, don’t take it all so seriously. Enjoy your life as it is now, let go of some of your emotional overinvestment in particular outcomes, and roll with the punches. If you’re working actively on improving your life, you’re taking action, and you’re able to become resilient to rejection, disappointment and loss, eventually things do improve.

Keep the questions coming, by the way. If there’s something you’d like me to write about, or write more about, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or send an email. I love to connect with my readers and write about what you want to know about.

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Jun 22

Mind-Body Connection: How it Works

Posted in Background

How is it that I can sit in a room with someone and just talk to them, and it helps them change the state of their body – control pain, allergies, asthma, blood pressure or even bleeding?

That’s the question I asked – and answered – in my talk last weekend at the joint conference of the NZ Association of Professional Hypnotherapists and the NZ Association of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

I’ve been putting my main focus on this site on the personal development side of hypnotherapy lately (and branching out from hypnotherapy into other personal development tools and techniques, as well). But if the body and mind are one system – and I argue that they are – then taking care of your physical being is also part of your personal development.

So here, in a break from the continuing How Not to Change Your Life series, is some background on mind-body interaction and what that means for your ability to take charge of your own wellbeing.

It’s not a recording of my exact talk (and the people who were there participated in a Q&A session afterwards, which was excellent – I definitely was not the only person with relevant knowledge in the room). But it’s based on the slides I used, with minor changes, and my narration over the top.

Most of my colleagues don’t have a lot of scientific background (and I’m just a well-informed layman myself), so it should be accessible to you even if you aren’t a professional in the field.

Next week, back to the How Not to Change series – I’ll be talking about letting the urgent override the important. Don’t miss it.

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Dec 14

3 Things I Wish I’d Learned Earlier

Posted in Background
This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series 3 Things I've Learned

This is part of my occasional life lessons series, Three Things I’ve Learned, but with a small twist this time. It’s also part of an internet-wide Life Lessons Series started by Abubakar Jamil, in which personal development bloggers (like me) reflect on things we wish we’d known earlier in life.

I’m a lot happier now than I was when I was younger – I experienced depression intermittently from my late teens until about my late 20s or early 30s. Life lessons are often things that you can only learn by living them, of course, but here are three that I wish I’d learned sooner.

1. Exercise is good for your brain

As I mentioned last week in Conveniencing Ourselves to Death – or Challenging Ourselves to Life, I’m reading John J. Ratey’s Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain at the moment. He starts the book by talking about a revolutionary approach to physical education in a particular school district in Michigan, USA. Reading about it, I really wished that I’d been taught PE like that.

See, when I was at school, the emphasis was on sports. There were people who were good at sports and people who weren’t, and I was one of the people who wasn’t. I still had to do the compulsory fun run (nobody could ever explain to me why, if it was fun, it had to be compulsory) and all the other sporting nonsense, with the outcome being that I became convinced that a) I’d never be any good at sport, b) it wasn’t enjoyable and c) I would stop participating in it as soon as possible. Which I did.

The approach Ratey describes has the emphasis on fitness. The teachers set out to teach the kids, not rules of sports that they’ll never play again, but how to work with the bodies that they have to get the best out of them. Even if that is never going to be running as fast or jumping as high as some of the other kids.

They put heart rate monitors on the kids, and rather than measuring how fast they’re moving they measure how hard they’re trying. You get marked based on your physiology, not the physiology of the next kid who might be a future Olympian. And the teachers expose the kids to as many options as possible to find something that they’ll enjoy doing that gets them moving, breathing, and increasing their heart rate.

Because it turns out that when you move, breathe and increase your heart rate, you get better at learning and produce more brain cells. Your body and mind both become more efficient, and your mood generally improves as well. And you have more energy (something I always struggled with).

If exercise had been sold to me like that when I was 13, I might have done more of it when I didn’t have to. I’m now getting fit with the 100 Pushups challenge and kayaking, and thoroughly enjoying it (I’ll have more to say about fitness challenges next week). But I missed out for years.

To be fair, nobody really knew any better in 1985, but I still feel a bit cheated.

2. Emotional expression is OK

My family were never very good at emotions. My father lost his father at the age of 9, during the Depression, was raised by a very strange mother who was mentally stuck in the Victorian era, and then fought in World War II, and he had a lifetime’s practice at avoiding his emotions. My mother aided and abetted him in this.

When I was 30, I figured out that I wanted to be able to express my emotions more freely. My solution was to take an acting class. It worked pretty well, too, and just as well – right about the time the class finished, my father died suddenly.

I was able to grieve much better than I otherwise would have. What’s more, over the following two years a friendship I’d had with a woman I knew via email became a romance (the first real one I’d had) and then a marriage – a marriage which I’m continuing to enjoy today. I’m pretty sure that both the acting class and the emotional shock of my father’s death enabled me to open up and become someone who could have an emotionally intimate relationship.

A lot of things would have been easier earlier on if I could have done that at a much younger age.

3. Suffering is only pointless if you learn nothing

I’ve done some very stupid stuff, and it’s been immensely educational, though usually in retrospect. Was it Oscar Wilde who said, “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want?”

The worst time of my life came just after university, in my early 20s. It’s pretty difficult not to do stupid stuff at that age. I made some major mistakes – not the kind that kill anyone, fortunately, and most of the harm came on me, but at the time it all seemed pointless.

My favourite episode of Star Trek (TNG, naturally) is when the all-powerful alien Q gives Captain Picard an opportunity to change history so that he didn’t make a particular youthful mistake. The thing is, though, it turns out that without the mistake, instead of becoming a bold leader, Picard ends up a hesitant, unpromotable junior ranker of no great significance, and he pleads to have things put back the way they were. I love that episode, because it’s the story of my life too.

Without the bad decisions that plunged me into stress breakdown for a couple of years, I wouldn’t be very kind, very gentle or very understanding of others’ struggles and failures. I was an arrogant young pup, not smart enough to know that constantly showing yourself to be the smartest guy in the room isn’t a formula for success or happiness. Though I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone, I also wouldn’t wish to have avoided it – because I’d have had those lessons to learn sooner or later. (Or, far worse, not learned them at all.)

It might have made it easier, though, to get through those times if I’d known that.

How about you? What do you wish you’d learned earlier?

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