Once I healed after my divorce and re-entered the dating world, I also knew that combining my career, taking care of kids as my priority and building a new relationship was already going to be tough enough. I was clear on what I wanted for myself and the boys. I didn’t want to date anyone who would have wanted kids of their own. Ideally, I wanted somebody who already had kids of their own and understood and behaved like they were a priority too. All in all, that pretty much left out anyone without kids, wanting kids.
People in therapies sometimes ask me when is the right time to talk about this. First date? Once we get intimate? Once we are officially dating? Everyone is different, but my life experience has taught me that some differences and incompatibilities are difficult to bridge, no matter the amount of love there is. It just often becomes a more painful decision somewhere down the line. Also, I tend to be a very direct person and it had been working in my favour most of my life. I honour honesty and openness, even for the price for some awkward moments.
So, I didn’t wait for the official dating stamp, nor the sex. Hell, I didn’t even wait for the first date. It would be one of the first questions I would be asking any boy with whom I felt a distant mutual interest. And still to this day, I have some amazing male friends in my circle out of that exchange, which put them into the “strictly friend only” zone as soon as they said no and yes respectively to the “Do you have kids?” and “Do you want kids?” questions.
I prefer to manage expectations straight up. I don’t tend to beat around the bush. Life is too short for me in that respect. So before I start sharing more here, I would love to let you know what you can or cannot expect.
I do the same with my clients in therapy sessions. We manage expectations from the first session and then check on them regularly, because the biggest disappointments come often from just that – mismanaged expectations. By far I am not perfect in this, but I try. And this is my go at it with you, in this space.
As therapists, we are taught not to promise our clients miraculous healing. I guarantee you that if a therapist was able to do that, you would see the line for their practice from the outter space. But then the lines of cooperation become more blur, with every school and every therapist developing their own approach.
The space we have here on this blog and at www.oumai.cz, with me writing and you reading, provides very limited opportunities for the collaboration I encourage my clients to engage in when working with me. However, I would love to try. So, you will not read articles like “10 ways you can improve your sex life”, “7 guaranteed advices to improve your orgasms” or “5 things to avoid for a happy marriage”. I don’t believe advices from me will change your life and the internet is full of them.Instead, I will invite you into my world which consists of
· my personal experience – yes, I will be getting personal here every now and then, just like I did today.
· my professional experience from working with clients.
· my extensive reading which at times probably became way too many books and stiffing through way too much research that would make my head spin.
· doing intervisions and supervisions with colleagues who follow similar topics, picking each other brains.
· gathering inspiration through life stories that I find useful as a metaphor.
I hope you can join me on a journey full of exploration where I will be offering you different perspectives and most likely will be asking you more questions than providing answers, so that you can yourself dive into knowing yourself a bit more. We will deconstruct before you reconstruct.
I am also hoping that soon in the future this will be a two-way channel, so that the inspiration can be mutual. I am interested in your thoughts and processes. I am eager to learn about the experimental journey you embark on with me, if you choose to do so.
We all evolve, and I am certain that this journey I am embarking on with you will be forming me as well, so don’t be surprised if I need to re-manage the expectations.
In the end, I did find the boy, who had kids and wanted no more. Bingo! Only to realise that we were both craving to have a child together, out of pure love. An urge we found ourselves fighting with for good three years of our relationship, alternating in resistance and craving, until we resisted long enough to enter the age where it doesn’t really make any sense to us. Lucky that we resisted the urge to have child of our own or not? We will never know, but that is also the beautiful thing about life – we will never know what could have been, but we can damn try to make our shot at it be the best one.
Questions from me to you:
1. How do you manage expectations in your personal life? Please, portray that on a scale of 1 being “I expect people to second guess my expectations” to 10 being “I don’t beat around the bush with my expectations”. Where do you stand now? Where would you like to be and why?
2. When you disclose your expectations, how open are you regarding your expectations on one situation? 1 – I only the necessary, 10 – I disclose all that is on my mind in that moment.
3. When the idea of managing expectations occurs to you, how long does it take you to approach your partner/others about them?
4. If you were able to learn one skill and do one thing different about managing expectations, what would it be?
5. In what way would your life be better with that new skill?
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