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Reality check

By Eileen Edwards

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 06Jun2009 Word count: 1106 Viewed: 176 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

About three weeks after we met my friend Lisa ( not her real name) rang me with some really exciting news, She had met a special man, In her words the "most wonderful man that she had ever met." At the time we were both twenty something divorcees and I was happy to hear her good news.

Three weeks later it hadn't worked out. The man in question wasn't wonderful anymore. He was terrible according to Lisa. "How could she have been so wrong"? I listened and attempted to help. This was before I had decided to completely change the way that I handled my own relationships. I was just beginning to acquire the knowledge that would lead me to formulating a system that would transform my relationships from disaster to success.

The phonecalls and face to face conversations with Lisa to the effect that she had met her ideal man happened often. Followed a few weeks later by her telling me how wrong she had been and what a shock it was to realise that her idol had feet of clay.

It soon became obvious even with my then limited knowledge of psychology that Lisa had a pattern of behaviour, which she repeated when meeting a new man that interested her. That pattern is called "projection". Lisa had a mental image of her ideal man 'which she would project onto men she met who interested her. What Lisa saw in these men had little to do with who they were. It wasn't about them but about a mental picture of an ideal man that existed only in Lisa's head. Hardly surprising then that these males disappointed her as she expected them to live up to being someone that they weren't.

Lisa's pattern of projecting caused her much disappointment. However she was doing one thing right. She had formulated a mental image of her ideal man that moved her one important step ahead of many women in finding him; it was what she was doing with the image that caused her problems.

You can't have anything until you define it be it a new outfit, home, car or holiday. If you doubt this try going to your local Railway Station and asking for "a ticket to somewhere" Even if you add "a ticket to somewhere nice" or "somewhere where I'll be happy" this won't help. You'll get nowhere until you define where you want to go. . So how was Lisa getting it wrong?

A phonecall she made to me at about eleven thirty one evening provides the key. Her voice sounded high on excitement and she wanted to know everything I could tell her about Tom K (not his real name). Tom was an acquaintance of my then boyfriend and I had met him on two occasions so knew little about him. Nevertheless Lisa chattered on excitedly for roughly half an hour about her meeting with Tom.

He had been amongst a group of people from a social club she and I both belonged to who met some evenings in a pub near her home. They had chatted about photography an interest, which they shared and he had promised to show her some landscapes he had taken. This was supposed to happen the followed week when the group again met in the same pub. Lisa saw this friendly conversation as the start of something big the start of a great relationship to be precise.

What happened next was becoming predictable. She had arrived at the pub on the night of the next meeting no doubt after taking a lot of trouble with her appearance. Tom had been there as expected. However he had barely acknowledged Lisa and simply gone on talking to others in the group. Eventually she had plucked up the courage to ask him about the photographs and he had simply said that he didn't have them with him. Lisa had an enjoyable conversation with Tom the previous week no more no less. However she had invested a significance in this that didn't exist for Tom. She had started to build romantic dreams around it.

Imagine going out to drive from A to B you know your destination and your route but totally ignore the activities of other road users. This was exactly what Lisa was doing when it came to relationships. She knew her destination, which was finding a life partner. She even had a route planned in that she knew the type of man that she wanted to share her life with. However she totally ignored the road conditions around her. In other words the fact that the territory that she was passing through did not resemble her inner map. The men she met did not fit her ideal.

Lisa when meeting a potential life partner could have kept an open mind and checked out how they measured up to her ideal as she got to know them. Instead she immediately assumed that any man that attracted her would have the qualities of her ideal man leading to frequent disappointment.

Let's take another analogy, A common sight at airports is the taxi driver holding up a piece of cardboard with the name of an incoming passenger on it. This is a fairly obvious way for two strangers to recognise each other. Let's say our incoming passenger is Mr Right. He sees the sign with his name on it and heads towards our driver.

Or maybe the driver spots him first and indicates his sign or goes over to speak to him. Either way the two people who need to meet succeed in doing so. They are then able to proceed together on their journey. The sign may in some instances contain more information such as a company name or the name of the hotel that the passenger is heading to. All this facilitates taxi driver and our passenger Mr Right meeting up with each other.

Imagine however instead that our taxi driver had simply rushed up to male passengers at random declaring you must be Mr Right. Perhaps by luck or law of averages he would eventually find the man he was seeking.

Or Mr Right may have simply left the terminal and found another way of getting to his destination. In any event it would be a long drawn out process causing much frustration for both driver and potential passenger. Actually checking out that we have found Mr Right rather than just assuming saves stress and annoyance. Even more importantly it saves precious time, time that you will enjoy spending with Mr Right once you are sure that you have found him.

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