RELATIONSHIP-SEARCHING ETIQUETTE

By Bill Cottringer

     We are entering into a very precarious time in life were our basic needs of security, safety, and certainty are all being challenged to their cores. Since we search for these things in a relationship, there are a few searching rules of etiquette that deserve due consideration. Here they are:

1.  Be as clear as you can be on your own secular and spiritual wants in the other person, as well as taking an honest inventory of your own assets and liabilities in these two main areas. Try to know what will be a good match on the most important wants you have and don’t settle on the important things, but be realistic on the others.

2.  Learn to communicate these things clearly and openly without allowing yourself to get too hurt when you and the other person aren’t in agreement with all this. More than anything try to be sensitive and kind if the other person is behind in your mind. Tread slowly and carefully in this area.

3.  Grow your mind and heart to know and be firm on the few deal-breakers that are not negotiable and learn when and how to quit wisely and when and how to be willing to continue allowing another person’s potential good to develop. Most of the time, we quit too easily and too quickly or stay too long.

4.  Don’t do anything you don’t want the other person to do like not being completely honest or hedging your bets by continuing to play the field in the background. This is just another way of phrasing the wisdom of focusing on your own self first in what you are saying and doing and less on what you want and expect the other person to say and do. Successful relationships always require a willingness to put the other person first.

5.  Carefully redefine key terms like love, success, a healthy relationship, good communication, honesty, etc. to allow for the maximum amount of these things in yourself and the other person. How you define something determines how much or how little of it you have. This is one of those abstract notions that has very big consequences in every day living.

6.  Beware that face to face communication is nowhere near perfect, that phone conversations are even less so, and that electronic communication is the worst of all. The main faults we are all guilty of are making too many assumptions by adding a paragraph of interpretation to a single word, and not putting forth enough effort to clarify misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Make the one assumption that all communication if flawed because we add too much meaning to words we don’t like or understand.

7.  The timing for two people to be at the right time and place to make the connection is against all odds, but it happens enough to make it real. But this doesn’t happen without much patience and the best possible communication.

8.      When the time is right, warn the other person about your liabilities and hope you have developed enough rapport that he or she won’t reject you. If they don’t. you are safe to move to the next level of relating.

9.  Be clear on the level of relationship you are seeking from the beginning and are able to fulfill given your own desires and situation.

10.  Final rules of engagement:  Be real, likeable, polite, empathetic, non-judgmental, positive, non-controlling, equal-minded, funny and flirty. But be you more than anything.