Pressures from parents and family to get back into dating.

This post looks like I’m talking about dating, but it’s ultimately geared towards marriage, so please bear with me ;)

I’ve been single now for about three and a half years and during this time, I’ve taken my time to grieve, heal, experience, grow, evolve, experience, learn, evolve some more, and so on. I’ve regularly reflected back into my childhood years, the years spent with my ex-wife, and the relationships between various other family members and this process has proved to be the greatest learning experience of my life.

This will sound mean, but it’s the brutal truth; I come from a family of Neanderthals. These people who served as my initial teachers of life, love and relationships have proven to be some of the most primitive people I’ve ever known. But in looking out into the world around me, it seems that these primitive people I speak of are rather common to say the least. Does this make me arrogant, self-righteous, narcissistic, ego-maniacal, or, does this simply mean that I’ve exercised a healthy degree of self-respect and bothered to put forth a genuine effort to break from the perpetuated cycles of some very toxic and dysfunctional behaviors that have been passed down though the generations?

I can sense that my parents would very much like for me to once again engage in a relationship with a woman, and it’s not so much that a relationship wouldn’t be nice, but my parents demonstrate a very noticeable degree of ignorance in their understanding and awareness of love and relationships. Granted, they’ve been married since wooden ships sailed the seas, but just because they’ve been married for so long doesn’t automatically mean that they truly have a clue what it really means to be happily in love.

The more I study personality disorders, love, relationships and spirituality, the more I realize the importance of various things like relational compatibility, the importance of nowness, the depth and true meaning of commitment and relational direction. These are things that my parents really don’t have a clue about, yet they put subtle pressures on to me to get back into dating and seek out a relationship. But doing so is absolutely much easier said than done as our divorce rates clearly show that just “hook’n up” is something that regularly fails to work out well between most couples.

So seriously, how does one maintain peace with their family in a situation like this? How can I tell my parents that there’s more to love and relationships than just “hook’n up” without coming off as if I’m accusing them of being stupid? How can I express that because I’ve taken the time to learn the things I have, I don’t want to end up in a relationship like theirs without implying that I think their relationship is one of the more dysfunctional relationships I’ve witnessed first hand?

Very much looking forward to your input and I wish everyone a beautiful day!

Peace, Love and Harmony,,, Shawn