Foundations Episode 10

This article has been replaced and expanded by a couple of better versions(sorry, non-video) on my new blog: RDC Coaching

Here is the new article: Why ALL Relationships are Risks
New Podcast: Common Relationship Cycle #2 - Walking Away



You can still watch the old video on my youtube page here.

How comparing yourself to others affects your relationships

This week’s article is on a subject I feel everyone can relate to: Comparing ourselves to other people and how it relates to our relationships with others. I’m sure you have experienced it before, when your friend gets blessed with something in life and you feel like they don’t deserve it. Or you wish that you were as successful as someone else.--You wish you had a boyfriend/girlfriend like all of the other people your age.--You want to feel loved by another person and have those passionate feelings for someone else. But comparing yourself to other people is bad because it limits you from reaching YOUR potential.

Here, let me explain:
Everyone is different, everyone is unique. No two people experience the exact same life or go through the same ups and downs. Our lives are carefully guided by the creator who desires for us to reach our potential and continue learning and growing. You will experience specific situations that only YOU could grow from, and they will happen at a time when you need to learn those lessons the most. You may be given trials or hurdles that you need to overcome, or you may be given barriers that prevent you from advancing at the present time. But these things are for your benefit. And they may be things that others never have to experience, but guess what? –That’s the beauty of this life: Your life is YOUR life.

The relationships in your life can be severely affected by your perceived need to be equal to others around you. After all, you fill your sphere with people who are supposedly at the same level as you are, right? Not necessarily. You fill your life with people who may share commonalities in personality, and have similar interests, but that doesn’t mean that they are on the same level as you are. We’re talking about maturity. Even as an adult, you will find that not all adults are on the same level of maturity as you are. Again, this goes back to life experiences.

We are shaped in life by the situations we are put into. Imagine your most challenging experiences in life and picture what your life would be like if you didn’t have to go through them, would you be the same as you are today?

So how does all of this relate to comparing ourselves to others?

When you compare yourself to other people and feel as though you need to be doing the same things as they are, having a boyfriend/girlfriend, traveling the world, moving away from home, buying a house, going to school, etc. You set yourself up to miss the important aspects of having these things in order to 'measure up' to your peers. There is an old saying that illuminates this principle: “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” –Having a boyfriend/girlfriend is good, but merely having one to say you have one misses the point. Traveling the world can be fun and grand, but if all you do is go to the location, take a few pictures to brag about it later, and then return home unchanged, you have missed the mark on why traveling is so exciting. Moving away from home can grant you a lot of freedom, but it also comes with responsibilities and if you are not prepared for them you can get into a lot of trouble. –I think I have made myself clear: Just because others are doing it does not mean it is right for you.





The opposite can be true as well: just because others are NOT doing it, does not mean that it is right for you. When others are postponing marriage or choosing to not attend additional schooling, etc. you still need to decide for yourself what is right for you.

But how does all of this relate to having good relationships???

Good relationships are not an end result. In other words, you can’t merely arrive at a good relationship one day. Having a good relationship is a constant process, it is the “journey”. In order to have a good relationship with someone, you both need to be heading in the right direction—you need to be working towards the same things. If you are heading in one direction, and the other person is heading in the other, then you really aren’t going anywhere together—you’re just brushing paths occasionally!
Being specific: When you are out to have a relationship with someone just so that you can say that you are dating someone, and they agree to date you thinking in their mind that the two of you could have something special going on, then you both aren’t heading in the same direction. He or she is heading towards the settling down stage and you are heading towards impressing/pleasing those around you who wonder why you are not dating anyone.

Remember that the purpose of dating is to find someone to marry. Just because your friends are getting married, or because they all have girlfriends and boyfriends, that does not mean that you are ready to do so. Maturity is crucial here.

Yes, you should be working towards getting married because it is as much a part of life as moving away from home is; but you should not get into a relationship just because other people are getting into them or merely because you want to have a girlfriend/boyfriend. Instead, you should get into a relationship because you have found someone who you can spend eternity with.

Marriage isn’t a destination, just like a relationship isn’t a destination; it is a part of your journey through life. You will need the assistance of another individual in order to continue progressing, growing, and reaching new levels in life.—No one is meant to go alone through life, you will need someone to help you meet specific challenges head-on and overcome trials. This isn’t something you can simply “obtain” or “reach”, it is a continual process. In order to have a good relationship, you will need to continually nourish that relationship. Just like a plant cannot continue to grow and will likely die without your support in feeding it water and sunlight, in order to have a good relationship you need to continually nourish the relationship because without nourishment, it will fade away and die.

So next time you see your friends and peers doing things that you wish you could be doing and you start to compare yourself to them wishing desperately that you could have the things that they have, or do the things they do, just remember: they are at a different level than you are (they may even be at a lower level and you have grown passed such things), and they are on a different path than you are—you’re heading where you need to go, and they are heading where they need to go.
If you make the effort to look for it, you will find that there are plenty of the opposite sex heading in exactly the same direction as you are (progression wise), you just might need to take a side-quest or an alternate route in your journey in order to compensate for them so that you can continue your journey together.

Why Relationships Matter So Much

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As you read from the many articles on this website, you might reach a point where you ask yourself this question: “Why is having such an in-depth understanding of dating, relationships, and marriage so important?” But, when you understand the importance of these functions, you will recognize your true potential, see the big picture, and you will have a desire to achieve success in this area of your life. It will make your life much better, you will be happier and you will enjoy your life much more.
Having an understanding of how this complex system called “relationships” works and how you can take the most advantage of this social system will help you make educated, conscious choices. It will empower you and help you to refine your character. It will make you into a better person and can help you gain the skills to change other people’s lives for the better.

I have divided this article into three segments: Marriage, Relationships, and Dating. It is my hope that these segments will provide you with an in-depth understanding of the significance of their functions. You need them, and you should approach them seriously.

Marriage
Aside from any obvious reasons why you would want to get married, there are several reasons why you need to get married, and the sooner you do so the better your life will be. You are incomplete without the opposite sex; without a husband or wife, you will reach a point where your progression halts; and without the opposite sex it would be impossible to fulfill ALL of your physical, mental, and emotional needs.
Progression is good, and you have a natural tendency to desire progression because you are a child of God and naturally want to become like him. When you choose to postpone marriage, or even to put it off entirely, you hinder your own progression throughmissed opportunities and failing to have certain experiences. Hard experiences build character, and having a spouse can by very trying on your patience; but God wants you to have those trying experiences because it will help you progress and become like him.
You cannot do everything in life on your own. There are many things that you simply cannot do at all but need the vicarious help of others in order to accomplish them. Particularly, you cannot have and raise children properly if you do not get married. Children benefit immensely from having both a father and a mother who love each other, worship God, and love them (the children). If you do not get married, you will remain incomplete and incapable of doing many things in the best way.








In order to fulfill all of your physical, mental and emotional needs, you will need the help of the opposite sex. Physical (particularly sexual) desires are a sacred, necessary, and beneficial aspect of life. They lead you to use heavenly powers to procreate and help bring God’s spirit children into this world. Mental desires work in the same manner: you have the desire to be among equals intellectually and to be working with others towards common goals; having these desires help you to progress and, as anyone who has experienced the addictive feeling of learning something new will understand, the more you learn the more you will want to learn. Emotionally, you have the desire to build trusting relationships with other people. Without a close group of people who you could trust, you would suffer from loneliness, depression, and other emotional problems.
You have an innate need to fulfill these desires and without the opposite sex you will be left unsatisfied. Any attempts to fulfill your physical desires on your own will leave you forever wanting and can lead you to severe problems. The same is true with people who advance intellectually but are unequalled in their intelligence: they recognize that knowledge serves no purpose when it is not applied and it is kept to their selves; and you would have a challenging and conflicting life if there was no one you could trust. Regardless of the specific outcome of failing to fulfill your needs, the general result is sadness; you will be unhappy whenever you fail to fulfill those desires at the time they come knocking.
There is no need for you to postpone marriage; in fact, it should be something you work out quickly. You will find, after marriage, that not everything about your wife or husband is what you expected. Part of your progression is learning to look past your wife’s or husband’s faults and support them when they struggle. No two people are really “perfect” for each other when they start out; it takes several years for two people to truly “fit” (the common estimate is 7 years).
When you look at your life on the eternal spectrum, this life is a very small speck, barely noticeable compared to the billions of years before and after. Your soul is eternal and the hundred years that your life on earth contains are very minor. You will spend many more years of your existence married than you spend single. If you really want to be married for eternity to someone, it would be better for you to enter that stage of life sooner than to post-pone the inevitable. Imagine the ‘married stage’ as your final state, just like a frog starts as a pollywog and morphs into a creature with traits of half-pollywog-half-frog before turning into a frog, you have no need to teeter in both worlds when you could as easily reach your true state. Again, you are incomplete without the opposite sex; it is expected for you to one day marry for eternity to reach your “completed” state. (This is often why people who are newly married claim their spouse “completes them”)
In a good marriage, you can fulfill ALL of your desires, you will not be limited in your progression, and therefore you will not be “incomplete”. Your physical needs will not have to be completely bridled. You will be able to learn from one another and help fulfill each other’s mental needs. Also, you will always have someone who you can trust and turn to for emotional support.
Marriage is a specific type of relationship in which the ultimate level of trust is agreed upon by both parties; that means that when you agree to marry someone, you agree to the highest level of trust. Complete fidelity helps maintain your emotional, physical, and mental needs by ensuring that you will have a reliable source capable of fulfilling those needs. When you remain single, you hold things back from those you date because you lack that high level of trust, even if only on a subconscious level. You also spread yourself thin when you continue to date multiple people because you cannot fully commit to any of them and so none of them are given the chance to see all of you.

Relationships
“Relationships” is a loose term that includes acquaintances, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, fiancés, and husbands and wives, among other things. Forming relationships is a good thing. Humans are social animals; they require the help of others in order to survive. The type of relationship that you have with another person is based on your interaction with that individual and the type of “compacts” you have formed with them. You subconsciously make generic connections to people that reference the type of relationship that you have with them. With this subconscious understanding, you are able to respond to their actions in an “acceptable” manner. For example, you do not passionately kiss your friends the way you would with your spouse.

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How to Visualize your Ideal Realtionship

This is a simple video on the importance of visualizing your ideal relationship, or the relationship that you want to have with someone in the future.

Times When your Brain Shuts off

Even when your subconscious or conscious tell you one thing, you should persist towards your goals and seek after the best opportunities in life.

It starts out simple enough: a guy lacks female interaction for a lengthy period of time [take for instance those who join the military, or serve a mission and spend most of their time without women] and then finally returns home and is looked up to by the opposite sex and given excess amounts of attention. Or perhaps a young lady who is not used to getting attention from guys [or a specific type of guy] suddenly has one shows interest in her. Both the male and female reactions to the above situations are the same: their brains shuts off and emotions take over.
You might find this humorous, but situations like these trigger three specific responses in your brain: 1) Critical thoughts are shut off. 2) Judgment is impaired and decision making skills are skewed. 3) The individual feels an overwhelming level of excitement and euphoria. I describe this as “brain dead behavior” and although it has its benefits, there are also many problems to this behavior. It is a part of infatuation and passion, which people will often confuse with "love". And many love and romance films have been produced about characters who go into this “brain dead” state; but have you ever realized how frequently this happens in real life; maybe it’s even happened to you?

Not everything is bad about this behavior, if we didn’t have this triggered response, falling in love would not be as great or exciting as everyone claims it is. It brightens your life and helps you feel optimistic and hopeful. It gives you a desire to have more of this emotion, which in turn helps you to care for (& develop love for) the other person. Since the beginning of your relationship sets the foundation for the rest of the relationship, having the subconscious ability to shut off your brain allows you to more easily get comfortable with another person and proceed with the important matters of your relationship without interference. It is one of many survival tactics that our human body comes pre-programed with to help us continue socializing even when times are bad.

But understanding the negative side effects of brain dead behavior, and the ability to recognize when it is happening, can help you have a more successful dating life. First, it can help you by keeping you away from unwanted relationships and second, by not entering into relationships before you have the proper foundation in place that will help the relationship last.

The following are symptoms that maybe you have had before:

1) Critical thoughts are shut off – When you first experience this feeling for another individual, your brain finds it very easy to overlook obvious negative aspects of the other person. It can lead you to overlook mental, emotional, and physical flaws that, under normal situations, neither you, nor your friends and family, would see as acceptable flaws.
Take for instance an abusive relationship; when you brain shuts off, you believe that you are going to be perfectly happy with the way things turn out in the future only to later realize all of the verbal or physical abuse that you are bearing in the relationship and you have no way out.

2) Judgment is impaired and decision making skills are skewed – You will find yourself engaging in bizarre behavior that is not healthy for you emotionally, physically, mentally, or spiritually.
You might stop spending time with your friends which will ultimately cause you emotional damage when you no longer have regular friends, or it can cause you to turn against your family. Physically, you could deprive yourself of food or exercise simply because you would rather spend time with this person (who is the cause of your brain death). Mentally, you might find yourself losing focus at work or school because you would rather think about your developing relationship, which in turn causes other problems. Spiritually, you can be led to commit serious sins simply because they don’t seem as bad when you are "in love". *(But what you are really feeling is one form of passion.)
--I know, all of this sounds pretty extreme, but being “brain dead” is THAT powerful and surprisingly it causes all of these problems on a regular basis to most of the world.





3) Being overwhelmed by euphoria and excitement – Although it sounds wonderful to be this happy, it can cause you a few unforeseen problems when the feelings end. Later down the road when your relationship has progressed and the feelings have ebbed, you might sense that “something is missing” in your relationship or that the “excitement” just isn’t there.-–Obviously this is because at that point you will have finally snapped out of the brain dead behavior.
The problem with this is that it can lead you into thinking that you NEED to build excitement in your relationship or else you won’t be happy with one another.--But you don't NEED excitement in a relationship as long as you care for one another--It can lead you into ultimately separating from one another because you think the "magic" is missing, or it can lead you into pursuing addictive behaviors that only temporarily allows you to feel "excitement" and thereby force you to always be looking for exciting things you can try.

Yet another side effect that this euphoric feeling can create is that if your relationship ends, then the extreme high that you get on from your brain turning off will become an extreme low as your body realizes that you can no longer have those feelings.—-in other words it makes you feel and plants thoughts in you mind like "I'll never find someone like them again" or, "My soul mate doesn't exist".

A word for the wise:
Remember that success is how you define it; failure is the opposite of success. Failure can cause you to lose hope and feel as though you will never succeed. It is good to set goals and to define what success is to you. NEVER LOSE SIGHT OF YOUR GOALS AND DREAMS. The reason I point this out is that when you become brain dead, it is easy for you to “settle” for the person, or with their poor behavior because of the psychological feelings you are getting from the relationship. It can cause you to forget about marriage and settle for a live-in relationship because of the confusion it puts you in. It can also cause you to lose hope of ever having a loving spouse and family and from becoming happy; and once the feelings abate you might become “trapped” in a poor relationship.
Going brain dead can cause you to abandon other relationships because you assume that you have found “the one” when in reality you are selling yourself short. It can even cause you to lower your standards (called “settling”) in order to make yourself feel as though you have obtained some success in your dating life. Ask yourself: is this really the person of your dreams, or is it just your body telling you that you are tired of looking for something better?

Be wise about who you are building relationships with and in what way they are developing. The more control you have over yourself, the easier it will be to ensure that your relationships progress towards what you really want, and need to have, and not just what your body tells you.

The Big Picture

 EDIT: (1/20/2011)
I just added the option for you to receive updates on this blog via email. You no longer have to remember whether or not there is a new article this week or if it is next week, it comes to you in your email!

Also, don't forget that there is a facebook page set up to sending out reminders, so like Dating Zion on there as well.


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The Big Picture
The decision to get married may be the most important decision of your life. It is one in which you probably look forward to making, but also feel nervous and uneasy about. It might be one that you are anxious to make or it might be one that you keep postponing for other things.
However, before you proceed with this important decision you should understand the Big Picture: There is more to life than just marriage; and although marriage is essential and should not be put off or hastily initiated, you should focus on changing yourself to become the best person possible. If you are doing everything possible to become a better person and you are making reasonable steps towards the goal of marriage, there will be nothing stopping you from getting married at the right time and in the right place.

You have been given, agency, or the God-given ability to choose your own life. If you work at it, you can accomplish anything; but remember the old adage “work smarter, not harder”. -–That’s right, sometimes working hard isn’t enough; you also need to know how specific things work in order to work better. For example, before the Wright brothers built their first airplane, they had to learn a few principles about physics (lift, thrust, drag, equilibrium, etc.) Yes, they worked hard, but they also learned well.
With that in mind, it is easy to see the power that God has given you to act in this life: You literally have the world at your fingertips and if you work and learn, you can make all your dreams come true.

In the rest of this article, you will learn how every principle previously presented on this blog works, and how they are all related. And, after reading this article, hopefully, you will begin to see much more of The Big Picture.

(Click the numbers for a specific Dating Zion article written on a similar topic.)

1. Resolve to Work	-- Before you even start on your journey, you should answer this questions, and be completely honest with yourself while: Are you really willing to do the work necessary to succeed? Do you have the self-control to give up anything that might stand in your way? To do this, you will need to weigh your options and determine what things you value more. Pertaining to marriage, is getting married more important to you than worldly success? Is it more important to you than popularity? What about being a good person, is that more important than having friends? Is devoting your time and energy to the cause worth accomplishing the task? No matter what your answers are to these questions, you now know how much you are willing to give in order to get what you want. If you were completely honest with yourself, it will be easier next time you need to put forth the time and effort for your goals. Choose today to go to work; don’t put it off till tomorrow because you never know whether something else will come up tomorrow. Resolve to work.
2. Set Goals and have Dreams	-- At the same time as you are resolving to work, you need to decide what you really want. The more specific you are about it the better. Your wants and desires that are general, are only dreams; your wants and desires that are specific are goals. All goals need to have a time limit. Some goals are quantifiable, meaning a number can be attached to them. Above all, goals and dreams need to be personal. Some people say: “You need to make it your own”. In other words, you need to do things for yourself, not because other people want you to. If other people want you to move out of the house and get married, you need to decide for yourself whether you want to move out and you want to get married. No one else can make goals for you, but they can help you once you have set them. If you want to get married, that’s just a dream; but if you want to get married in the next 3 years, that’s more of a goal. How can you measure that goal? –One option is to count the number of sub-goals that will help you reach your long-term (3 year) goal; but not every goal needs to be quantified. Some goals can be conditional, meaning yes or no. With conditional goals, you need to clarify the conditions. For example, having the goal to “be comfortable around the opposite sex” isn’t necessarily quantifiable.-—sure, you could set a goal to talk to 75% of the people you come within arms distance of for more than 3 seconds, and then every day tally up how many of those you actually did, but it would be better if this goal was conditional: when you reflect on the day, did you get nervous about talking to someone and if so, why? How can you improve? A major part of the big picture is setting and reaching goals and dreams.—that’s part of your eternal progression, which is part of the big picture.
3. Plan and Prepare	-- Now that you have goals, both short term and long term, how are you going to accomplish those goals? What steps do you need to take to reach your goal? If your goal is to save up X amount of money so that you can get on your feet once you are married, what does that require of you? How much of your paycheck will you need to devote to this, and what will you do without that money? Some plans are just about self-control and additional mini-goals, but other plans are more complex. Take for instance a time where you needed to learn something before you could accomplish your goal. Your options might be to go to classes to be taught those skills, or to hire a tutor, or to simply read a book on the subject. Which will you choose? Which will give you the best learning experience? Which will cost the most? These are the kinds of questions involved in planning and preparing to accomplish your goal. Think about everything involved and how you will accomplish it. Write all of this down. Write your goals down, write your dreams down, and write your plans down. And every time you feel impressed to add to or change your plans, write them down immediately before you forget them.

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