Are You Too Busy? Here's How That Can Hurt Your Dating Life
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When it's time for a change of pace...
Whether you’re single, dating, or engaged, now is the time to embrace the unstructured time in your life and schedule.
What is unstructured time, you might ask, and why is it important?
Unstructured time is time that you don’t fill with plans, especially time that you spend just being rather than doing. Unstructured time might look like a Saturday afternoon without commitments, or a Tuesday evening ‘date’ to simply sit with Jesus in Adoration.
If you’re single, making space for unstructured time in your schedule provides an opportunity to come face-to-face with yourself as you really are and to become aware of things you might need to address or work on. If you’re dating, spending unstructured time with your significant other can clarify your discernment about a future together.
If you’re engaged, it’s excellent preparation for the inevitable ‘slowdown’ that comes somewhat with marriage and definitely with having children.
Who am I when I’m not distracted?
After graduating college, I worked the night shift at a hospital in my hometown for a year before moving an hour and a half away to live on my own, just one month before my husband messaged me for the first time. While we started dating a few short months later, since we were long-distance for eighteen months I largely kept up my regular schedule of commitments in between our every-other-month visits, and that schedule was always full.
I was consistently on the move, and I would have given any number of reasons as to why that busy-ness was good and right at any given time. At first, I was settling into living on my own, and there were shopping and decorating to do, people to meet, a gym to join, Bible Study to attend, family back home to visit, and so on.
Coincidentally or not, my prayer life wasn’t much to speak of when I was so busy.
Oh, I went to daily Mass several times a week, to Confession at least once a month, and to Adoration at least every other week, and I recited certain prayers every single day. But when I sat in Adoration, or in the pew for a few minutes before Mass started, my mind was always somewhere else, planning or organizing or strategizing.
I was not ‘present,’ and furthermore didn’t know how to be. I wasn’t sure what to ‘do’ with myself after my lists of petitions and prayers of thanksgiving were exhausted, or once I’d finished journaling or reading the spiritual book I’d brought.
Since I didn’t have a smartphone back then, there was at least mercifully little distraction coming from that direction, but the busy-ness and perpetual motion of my single lifestyle provided plenty of cover for my lack of self-awareness, my inability to sit quietly with myself for any length of time.
Some of the questions I didn’t have to answer because I kept so busy included, ‘what is the vocation God is calling me to?’ ‘What are the deepest desires of my heart?’ “How is my heart responding to x or y or z stressful thing happening in my life?’ ‘Why do I feel anxious so often?’
When I met my husband, on the other hand, I met someone who was very self-aware.
Growing up four hours from the closest city, he had spent much of his life and free time outdoors, camping or fishing or otherwise being in nature. Even as a football and baseball coach and full-time teacher, he still spent plenty of time on his own, just being present to whatever was around him rather than always looking ahead to the next thing.
By virtue of years of just ‘be-ing,’ by the time he met me he knew who he was and what he wanted from a relationship. He was quite clear on his vocation. And as I got to know his family over time, I saw that the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. They too did not rush from one activity to the next, and on the weekends they sometimes even took naps!
The necessity of ‘Carefree Timelessness’ in relationships.
When James and I help with PreCana marriage preparation classes for our diocese, our team director uses a glass jar with oil and vinegar in it to illustrate the value of unstructured time in relationships. He shakes the jar repeatedly and then shows the class what looks like salad dressing. But once he stops shaking and lets things settle for a minute, the ingredients separate out and the oil comes to the surface.
He likens dating and being engaged to jar-shaking time. When we are keeping busy, metaphorically moving and shaking, especially during a long-distance relationship where lots of travel may be involved, everything can look good and cohesive. When we are living out a highlight reel one whirlwind weekend to the next, for instance, or simply just always on the go together, we’re likely to miss out on the downtime version of ourselves and of our significant other, which is when the ‘oil’ in our hearts and minds can come to the surface.
The ‘oil’ might be something big like a red flag, or it might be something that’s not a deal-breaker but is still valuable to see, such as bad habits or painful areas of our life where we may need healing.
A deepening intimacy.
Beyond bringing negative things to the surface to be addressed, spending unstructured time together helps us positively build intimacy in relationships. Catholic speaker Matthew Kelly speaks of ‘carefree timelessness,’ described as having “nothing to achieve other than the enjoyment of each other’s company.” Regularly spending carefree timelessness together primes us to discuss the deepest things in our hearts and on our minds, and to dream together.
Carefree timelessness allows us to relax with the other person and, when we have seen what the other person is really like in their ‘natural habitat,’ and they us in ours, we are freer to discern whether this is the person we want to spend the rest of our life with.
And if we do discern that the person we’re spending carefree timelessness with is ‘the one,’ making a habit of spending quality time together while engaged prepares us for the inevitable slowdown of marriage, and especially of having children, when our schedules merge and change and likely involve a degree of ‘settling down’ or going out less as our priorities and responsibilities shift.
Learning to put our phones down and our planners occasionally aside now, to see ourselves and eventually our significant other as we and they really are, and then to make a habit of regular, open, honest communication with them all pay dividends both now and in the future.
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