The Relationship Pedestal

Something that has been coming up with my clients recently is the “relationship pedestal.”

It’s a pattern of thought that limits the amount of joy you can receive from areas of life outside of dating.

For example, one of my clients is a high achiever and she has created her dream career.  Her friend was congratulating her on that, and my client was just dismissing her friend’s comments.

She wasn’t letting it soak in how awesome all her accomplishments are.

She had the thought, “It doesn't really matter because I haven't found my partner yet.”

Dating is a place where we go to give, and we get the energy to give to dating from the rest of our life.

We get dividends from our career, our health, our friendships, and our experiences.

Then we get to show up in dating and make those investments in new people with the hope that one of those connections will grow into something amazing.

If you're not collecting the dividends from the other areas of your life, it makes dating so much harder because you'll be going into dating trying fill that void.

You won’t feel as joyful, alive, happy, and excited as you could be.

With the relationship pedestal, here's this hierarchy where you can never fully feel satisfaction from a friendship because that person doesn't meet the criteria of family, blood relative, or romantic spouse.

We limit ourselves to only getting 10% of what we could have gotten from that connection because we dismissed it as not as good as a relationship.

A romantic relationship is super important and amazing, but it’s as though the only way for us to make sense of that is to say friendships are less valuable, money doesn't matter, and a promotion doesn't give you as much without a partner.

We put the relationship on this pedestal before we even have it and therefore diminish everything from every other area of life.

We do this with so many experiences.

We see a beautiful sunset and instead of appreciating it we think, “I wish I had a partner to enjoy the sunset with.”

We go to a wedding and can't have fun because we are single.

We can't enjoy a vacation with our friend because really we just wanted to have a vacation with a partner.

We can't enjoy buying a house because we were waiting on a partner to buy the house with.

But all of these things could make your life so awesome and therefore make you so attractive and magnetic to the person you want to attract into your life.

Multiple things can be important. You can have the goal of a relationship without canceling out the joy of a friendship or diminishing your accomplishments.

I hope this helps you to reflect on where you're closing off some of the benefits of other areas of life and instead let that joy in more fully.

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This content was originally published on the Women's Dating and Confidence Podcast. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.