I’ve been single for a long time.
When I hear men and women complain about dating and how hard it is to find someone I can totally relate. What I learned about complaining, after reading Will Bowen’s “A complaint-free world,” is that it is an absolute waste of time.
The funny thing is I didn’t need to read the book to know that and writing it in this post doesn’t make it suddenly true. It is true.
What complaining does do is bring awareness and attention to certain situations that we just can’t stand and that get on our got damn nerves. And let’s face it, complaining is kind of fun. Rants are fun and ranters are hilarious.
Complaining is a lot like gossip. It’s just so dangerously, scandalously, salaciously wrong that doing it feels good. We know that we shouldn’t but single men and women do complain and just this once I’m giving you a pass. Only because in those many, many complaints I want single people to finally figure out what they really hate about their dating life and fix it.
As much as I love dating, I do complain about men. I couldn’t imagine being a woman and not complaining about men, sometimes men suck. My biggest complaints and why I am not in a happy relationship and/or married to the millionaire man of my dreams.
The reason I have to go on so many dates yet still can’t find a partner.
“Men are boring”
“Men don’t look good enough”
“Men are too insecure” (yeah I said it)
So there, the complaints are out of the way and nothing has changed but I feel a little better. I can’t do anything about men being boring and out of shape. I can’t do anything about men who don’t trust me or feel I should wear pants more often. I can only try to attract men who are more of what I’m looking for, whenever I find them.
The problem with any habit is that when it is no longer useful it becomes detrimental. Complaining may have been an outlet for frustration at some point in your life, maybe it still is but for many singles complaining is a breeding ground for inaction. It’s a way to shirk responsibility for the personal contributions we’ve made to our dating failures.
I can condone complaining about the things that singles can’t change since complaining doesn’t change anything anyway. Bringing to the limelight what bothers us can be therapeutic. The only stipulation I have to add, if you must complain, is that it be about aspects in dating that are out of your control.
As adults I can’t let single men and women distribute blame when it’s mostly their own fault. I can’t accept complaints when singles need to face the facts that it is through their own choices, actions and behaviors that they’ve created their crappy situation.
Even though you may have steered yourself wrong so far, you are still in control of whether your love life is a good one or a bad episode of ‘The Young and the Restless.’
What men and women can control, that maybe you didn’t know before, are the only two elements of dating that matter; how people treat you and how you treat yourself. Once you can accept those responsibilities there should be very little left to complain about.