How will I Know When I am Ready to Date?
Life is short and I would just say to you, do it now.
For those of you seeking a loving partnership, we have some fun planned for you. This is the first in our five-video series offering tools and inspiration for finding love. We asked the Real Love Ready community, “If you had an hour to sit down with Celebrity Matchmaker, Rachel Greenwald, what would you ask her?” The questions came pouring in.
For those of you who do not know Rachel, she is a NY Times Best Selling Author, Speaker, Matchmaker and Dating Coach. She has been Matchmaking for two decades and is responsible for 857 marriages. When it comes to LOVE, Rachel knows what she’s talking about. She gives practical and effective guidance and walks her clients through clear strategies for finding love.
The first question we asked her was, “How will I know when I am actually ready to date?”
Here is Rachel’s response:
“You’re never going to know that you’re actually ready to date because you’re never actually
going to be ready.”
There’s no magical time where somebody is ready to date in every sense of the word. There’s emotional readiness, there’s physical readiness. There’s structural readiness in your life where your calendar is clear and the stars have aligned in all different ways. I think you just have to take the plunge. Certainly, if you are dealing with severe emotional or physical issues such as, you are crying all the time and you can’t stop talking about your ex-husband who devastated you. Or, physically you need some surgery and you’re going to be recovering. Of course there are some extreme examples where you might want to pause to reflect and get some help or take some time to recover from whatever it is, but don’t think that you’re going to arrive at a magical moment in time where you just wake up one morning and you say, “I’m ready! I’m 100% ready.” It’s just never going to happen. People are always coming up with an excuse to postpone looking for love. Wait until I lose 5 pounds or 10 pounds or 50 pounds. Wait until this next project at work is over – then I’ll be ready. Wait until the Spring when I can wear my cute sandals and get a great pedicure; that’s going to really make me ready. Whatever the excuse is there will always be another excuse.
“Don’t think that you are going to arrive at a magical moment in time where you just wake up one morning and you say, “I’m ready! I’m 100% ready.” It’s just never going to happen. People are always coming up with an excuse to postpone looking for love.”
You just have to know that this is a situation where you’re going to jump off a cliff and you’re never going to be ready, but you have to have a leap of faith that there will be somebody out there for you who is amazing and wonderful. I often hear that the question, “When will I be ready to date?” is really an expression of fear and also an expression of not wanting to be rejected. It’s sort of a self-protection mechanism, because it is scary to put yourself out there. So, when someone asks me about readiness, what I really hear underneath their question is something deeper about insecurity or worthiness or all sorts of other issues around protecting themselves from rejection and from disappointment, too. Of course, if you are over 40 or 50 years old or beyond, you’ve probably had a lot of disappointing experiences with men. You’ve had break- ups or people have let you down in different ways. And so it’s understandable that you may not be excited about dating or confident about dating, but that’s ok. You just have to rip the band-aid off and get back out there.
Life is short and I would just say to you, DO IT NOW.
“This is a situation where you’re going to jump off a cliff and you’re never going to be ready, but you have to have a leap of faith that there will be somebody out there for you who is amazing and wonderful.”