What Do I Have to Offer?

I apply for a lot of jobs. That is a rather unfortunate thing to have to admit, but I do so in service of a larger point.

One of the ideas that comes up in job hunting is “distinct value add.” Basically, what do you bring to this company that no one else does?

The problem for many of us, of course, is that in most casesa truthful answer would be something along the lines of, “probably not much;anyone applying for this job has much the same skills I do, and unless you havea pulp fiction or Catholic theology division that I don’t know about, my uniqueskills probably aren’t going to be very relevant.”

Cynical sarcasm aside, I think this is a bit of a stumbling block for most of us in online dating as well, probably even more so; the question of “what, exactly, do I have to offer this person?”

Dating, obviously, is a different matter from job applications. But the trouble is, many of us end up approaching it with a similar mindset. We pull up someone’s profile, and she’s beautiful and has a lovely description of all the cool things she’s into, and pictures of herself doing amazing things, and then we look at the mirror and wonder why someone like that would be interested in someone like us.

We know our flaws, we know our failures, we know how, well, uninteresting we are. So, what do we have to offer? What is our “distinct value add” to this person’s life? And all too often, if we don’t have a good answer, we let the opportunity pass by.

There are a few things to be said about this.

In the first place, don’t take the image presented in the profile at face value.

Not that she’s lying, but remember that this is a dating site and she is (presumably) trying to make herself appear as attractive as possible to draw the interest of people like you. The "coolness" gap is probably not nearly as wide as it appears at first glance.

The second is the simple fact that this isn’t a job interview. Or at least it shouldn’t be. The central question is not, “what can I add to this person’s life?” The question is, “who is she and who am I?” It is not a matter of offering a certain service, but of sharing the whole of yourself.

We hear this sort of thing a lot from Christian circles, but I find it’s a difficult concept for us moderns to really grasp. We live in a world of impersonal contracts, of numbers, of materialistic standards of value, and it is difficult to step outside of that, even when we believe there is an outside to step into. This is because the totality or essence of "self," a thing, by definition, cannot be contained in mere words.

Even words themselves can’t be fully expressed in words (who could express everything that can be found in the word ‘red’? Not just the color itself, but also all there is of fire and blood and energy that may be expressed by that simple formation of sound?).  

In short, any real thing, even a simple thing, is more than the sum of its parts, much less than what can be said of it.

As St. Thomas Aquinas put it, “all the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.”

Now, what is being offered and asked for in romance is that; the sum total of being. The full life, not this or that service, but that each person shares himself and all he is and has with the other. If you insist on asking, “what can I add to this person’s life?” the answer is “yourself”. That probably doesn’t seem very valuable to you (frankly, it would be concerning if it did), but fortunately, you aren’t the one who decides.

The important questions, therefore, are, “what do I fundamentally value? Where ought my life to be leading?

And does this person fit with that? Does she see what I see? Will she be able to share with this and help me to get where I am going?”  

In short, don’t let your search for romance devolve into an application process where you are matching your credentials against what you think the other person wants. Of course, take into account what she says about herself and how you think you would get along, but don’t become fixated on points of detail or "qualifications" and forget the real, complete person on the other side of the screen.

That is what you are pursuing, and the one on this side is what you are offering. And you cannot know ahead of time how she will respond to that. It may be that you are precisely the man she is looking for: you’re not really in a position to judge.

There’s only one way to find out.