Relationship “experts” usually annoy the heck out of me.
I don’t think there is such a thing, first of all. But aside from that, a relationship “expert’s” opinion is usually heavily influenced by his or her past experience. While this is perfectly natural, the simple truth is this makes them inherently unreliable.
Why, you ask? People tend to gravitate toward familiarity: It’s a trait of human nature. It’s part of why people often find themselves in “ruts,” or why they sometimes get restless. It’s because they tend to find a comfortable groove and stick with it.
Let’s face it, change is a scary thing.
It’s this very trait that makes relationship experts unreliable, though. Their past experience creates their template, which they then apply to every situation they encounter.
This doesn’t just happen with experts, though. We all do it, myself included.
I remember a movie quote about hunches. The problem with a hunch is that, once you have one, you only tend to see things that reinforce that hunch.
The same thing goes for your relationship template.
Sometimes you go into a relationship with an expectation, and the first thing you see to support that expectation completely cements your perception of the relationship. Sometimes you don’t have an expectation and your opinion is shaped by the first thing that falls into your sphere of experience.
Your sphere of experience is the collection of things you’ve experienced in your life. The more experience you’ve had in an area, the stronger your opinion gets with respect to that area. The stronger your opinion, the more unlikely you are to change it.
That’s dangerous in relationships because no two people are alike. You can spend years getting to know someone and still not see the entire picture. I don’t mean that in a bad way, either. Sometimes you peel back countless layers to reveal something truly beautiful inside.
Relationship experts do the same thing. Their opinions are based upon their sphere of experience, which cannot possibly take into account the nuances of every relationship on Earth. It seems illogical to stereotype people and relationships based upon a tiny sliver of what composes that person or relationship.
If you ask my opinion, they’re completely useless.
Well, I can see I’ve gone off on a tangent. Truth be told, I didn’t write this column to rant about relationship “experts.” I guess I just get carried away sometimes.
I actually just read an interesting article about relationships. This is unique, first, because I generally avoid reading articles about relationships. Their misguided lunacy tends to drive me nuts. It’s also unique because I happened to like this one.
The article was about positives you can take away from a bad date. It gave a list of 12 reasons why a bad date can be a good thing. The list ranged from getting dating practice to getting out of the house to networking.
I’ve always been willing to go out on a date, even if I know the odds of a second date are slim. I saw a lot of my reasons mirrored in this article, especially the most important one: You just might learn something.
Every experience we have, good or bad, teaches us something. We learn lessons about ourselves, about other people and about life in general. Our sphere of experience grows with every new experience we have, making us better able to understand things that happen to us.
On the flip-side, our confidence in our intuition grows, as well. That makes us more likely to prejudge people and situations. Sometimes we’re right and sometimes we’re wrong, but when we’re wrong we end up closing ourselves off to a good experience.
This all goes back to my most important reason for dating: just to date. Everything you do that expands your sphere of experience is a positive. We can only grow from our experiences, and the more varied they are, the more we grow.
If you try something you don’t think you’ll like and do it with an open mind, you just might learn something. Kind of like how I learned something from reading that article.
Hmmm … Maybe all relationship “experts” aren’t completely useless after all.
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