In Dating Trap #1, I talked to you about showing up as your real self. Staying away from the temptation to do an extreme makeover to get a woman’s interest. In Dating Trap #2 you put the onus on the other woman. You’re completely focused on the wrapping paper, not the real gift underneath.
We are taught by our media addicted world to focus on the wrapper when it comes to people. We make decisions about people in a split second in our little lesbian worlds (I know, people everywhere do the same thing but let’s just talk about our little lesbian world for now.)
In this trap, you focus on other women’s packaging more than anything else and in particular on the packaging quality that attracts you most strongly and then you wonder why the relationship didn’t work. Time to wake up from your slumber and get conscious about the choices you make.
Our culture commonly objectifies people based on age, gender, sexual orientation, clothes, hair, weight, job, finances, car, jewelry, eyeglasses, and so many other external characteristics that it can be mind-boggling. Right after we check to see if a woman has the right hair and eye color, we move on to making other generalizations about who she really is based on what our eyes tell us. That’s a movie in our heads, not reality my friends!
Yes, this works both ways. There are women rejecting you based on your packaging and you are doing the same to them. Ouch, can you say vicious cycle?
When we don’t know someone, we focus on the packaging in hopes that this will tell us something about the person. It’s easy to see the wrapper. If their packaging doesn’t immediately meet our rules and immediate attraction needs, we stop right there. The outside package doesn’t fit our notion of what we want and are attracted to, so we are off to the next woman to check out her wrapper.
You know what that feels like right? Can you say online dating? Yeah, I thought you could…
What’s wrong with this anyway? Well… if our goal is to find an internal experience – such as fulfillment, emotional connection and genuine love – we have to learn how to balance what can’t be seen with what we can see. We’ve got to have some tools that help us investigate the potential of relationship and love at a level that goes deeper than the outside package. Right! Cause every package has something on the inside of it. Do you want that part too?
Dating Math Equation #2
You can’t fake a spark = You can’t fake attraction
We all have certain requirements related to packaging such as age, race, height, even body type or weight. One thing that is awesome about the lesbian world is that the definition of beauty is so much wider, varied and deeper than in the heterosexual world. Not only do we have so many different ways that we chose to look, that freedom extends out to the way we chose to live differently in a very straight world. Congratulations to all of us for owning our specialness! Hurrah for breaking out of the confines of those little straight world boxes!
Sometimes we pick the packaging we do because it makes us feel better about ourselves to be seen with someone we view as having some special external quality. It can be everything from her looks, to financial status, social connections, professional prestige or even her car, motorcycle, or dog!
We pick wrappers that we hope are leading us towards a relationship dynamic we like and want. Some of the wrapping we see is an intentional communication device. Just think about the femme-butch dynamic. Still one has to go beyond the external wrapper to figure out if that drop-dead handsome take your breathe away butch is the right one for you.
I’ve got a dear friend who dates butches. She’s gotten very into the femme dynamic and loves how it allows her to express herself both privately and publicly. She met her dream butch woman online and got involved in dating her. It was long distance, which adds a certain high expectation to dating because you are spending a lot of time and money to even see each other. And let’s not talk about security lines, delayed flights, ticket prices… Then there is the tension of not seeing each other for long stretches and all those long phone calls, skype sessions, texting, sexting and emails. Yeah you get it, maybe you’ve done it. Did I mention there is a lot of making movies in your head when there is a lot of distance. Unfortunately those movies are a set up for trouble.
My dear friend, I’ll call her Isabella, would share with me how the conversations were going during those first few months. She was very excited about this woman and she also shared how worried she was also. Does that make you wonder… she was worried right at the start? Yeah. Maybe a teeny tiny itsy bitsy red flag waving there?
What Isabella heard the other woman, who’ll I’ll call Sam, saying was that Sam wasn’t much of a commitment person. Sam liked her freedom, liked her lifestyle choices and liked having multiple lovers.
Isabella started traveling to see Sam whenever she could get away. Of course it started out being fabulous. And it seemed to continue that way for a while. Isabella was loving feeling all that femme energy and gushing about Sam’s butchiness and it was really so very sweet. Along the way, the red flags kept showing up and getting bigger. Not so tiny anymore. Yes, in the end it all fell apart at the worst time for Isabella as her father passed away. Sam decided that was the time to break it off. They’d been doing the long distance thing for a year or more but even Isabella admitted it had been deteriorating for many months. I think Sam communicated honestly at the start but Isabella wasn’t listening deeply to both Sam and herself. Yes, Isabella was devastated but she was caught up with the package. It was hard for her and for her friends who watched her go through this relationship at the same time as her father was dying.
That extremely sexy butch package Isabella picked didn’t include the relationship muscles to give her what she needed or wanted in the long term – a committed partner. Someone who’d be there in life’s truly difficult seasons.
I am not picking on butch women here, I am not saying they are the bad girls, the story is about our expectations of what a package will give us. Some of the most loyal, committed and dedicated partners I know are butch women. We love them! I love them. Love their lifestyle perspectives adding color and flavor to our little lesbian and gay girl world. I want to thank my butch friends for providing me an easy way to tell the story about the wrapper.
Dating traps are about how our fears drive us to make unconscious choices. We pick someone with a “special quality” because it makes us feel special. We might know that this woman isn’t all we’d hoped she’d be but we are so attracted to the package and attached to some idea of what it’s giving us that we can’t let go or we won’t dig deeper and we ignore those little red flags. We might know we will never love her or that she’ll never love us, but we want to be with her to make ourselves feel all that specialness.
One of my go-to statements about relationships is that you can’t fake a spark. You can’t fake attraction. It’s either there or it isn’t. When it shows up it’s great but don’t sell yourself short and don’t sacrifice your relationship requirements. Those kinds of choices always come back to haunt you. Before you give your heart away to someone, do the work of unwrapping that package and see what’s under that hood. Agreed?
When I think of wrappers, I think of Christmas and birthday presents. We pick them up, shake them and try to guess what’s inside. Many moons ago, my niece Lisa, had a passion for coloring books and crayons. OK, she was about 7 years old at the time. That was all she wanted for Christmas. How exciting that she could pick up a holiday wrapped gift and know by its shape that it was a coloring book. We all watched her rip into her presents, saying even before she opened it, “I know it’s a coloring book!” And then just as happily waving around her new possession and saying over and over, “It’s a coloring book, it’s a coloring book!” And yes, this happened about 5 times in a row that year because everyone got her coloring books. She was equally happy with each one.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could have those same results with that sparkly shiny pretty gift wrapped gay girl that’s standing in front of us. But we can’t pick her up and shake her to figure out what’s inside.
So my Gay Girls, Dating Trap #3 – OMG There’s Not Enough To Go Around if part of my 14 Dating Traps Mini-Book. If you want to get my mini-book with all 14 dating traps then I invite you to use the form in the upper right corner of this page and opt in to receive the mini-book as my gift.
- Learn why dating so often fails and should!
- Learn why knowing your requirements for a relationship is the most important key to picking the right person
- Learn how dating traps lead to relationships that blow up
- Get the insider secrets to what is happening in the early stages of dating
- Find out how to recognize dating traps in the beginning
- Discover what it takes to keep a relationship together for the long run.
Do it now, get this free mini-book. Written by me, just for you!
PLEASE leave a comment on this page. Tell me your stories about this dating trap. Have you been the victim of going for the package only to discover she wasn’t what she appeared to be? Share your gay girl wisdom right here.
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Ok, so go hug a Gay Girl today!
Mary
Your Gay Girl Dating Coach!
