Assumptions vs. Odds
Being in the dating pool has been a constant study of social psychology at my fingertips at all times.
Dating is inundated with stories. And the underlying message of most of those stories boils down to “They don’t like me!”
Which is a seriously disempowering story. Imagine if that were true?! If every person you connected with didn’t call or text or suggest a date because they didn’t like you? That would be a tough pill to swallow.
And yet so many do. They willingly choke down that horse pill of an assumption and treat it as truth.
Instead of what it actually is, which is one possibility.
Maybe you stopped hearing from them because they deleted their account all together, exhausted from the rigamarole. Or were already dating someone and decided to be exclusive. Or maybe they moved to another state and felt too awkward to mention it. (Any Sex and the City fan out there will remember Miranda’s date standing her up because…he died.)
My first career was in research and strategy and we were constantly looking at percentages. Proportions. Odds. A lens that anything can be looked at through.
So to my fellow daters out there: what if we did the same? What if we considered the ODDS around not hitting it off? To be able to possibly explain it with busyness, overwhelm, confusion, unexpected turmoil…and then pick a reason (with odds just as good as any other reason) that allowed us to release them back into the pool with well wishes?
And to all those non-daters out there, who realize they might be treating an assumption they have as a TRUTH and not simply odds in a smattering of options…could you imagine another assumption with at least the same odds?
Can we collectively free ourselves from making our assumptions our truths and choose odds instead?
