056 Intuitive Dating 101: How to Build Stronger Relationships by Tapping Into Your Authentic Self

056 Intuitive Dating 101: How to Build Stronger Relationships by Tapping Into Your Authentic Self – with Jenna Birch

Being able to trust your own intuition, your gut instinct, and to really trust and be able to listen to yourself is crucial in navigating your dating journey and attract the right kind of person for you. Today we are going to talk about how you can learn to trust your intuition, to save you time and energy and heartbreak, and why we so often ignore or go against our inner voice and end up sabotaging ourselves, getting into relationships – even marriages – when we know in our gut that it isn’t right for us. My special guest Jenna Birch, author of The Love Gap: A Radical Plan to Win in Life and Love, a guide for modern women navigating the new romantic landscape and also Co-founder and CEO of Plum, a new dating app that mixes accountability and smart matching for a better online dating experience. A longtime journalist and columnist, Jenna's work appears frequently in print and online publications including Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Self, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, Health, and Yahoo, among many others. Backed by extensive data, research, and in-depth interviews with experts and real-life relationship stories, The Love Gap is the first book to explore the most talked about dating trend today. By identifying four key dating profiles you’ll encounter online – and off – The Love Gap offers a complete plan for navigating modern relationships as well the tricky, new gender dynamics that impact them.

If you are somebody that’s constantly being told or asked “Why are you still single?” or friends, family and even guys that you’ve seen are telling you you’re such a great catch and yet nothing much is happening in your love life and you’re starting to wonder what on earth is going on – I absolutely recommend Jenna’s book. I think you might just find some amazing insights in there and practical steps for your to implement in your own life.

Today we are going to talk about how you can learn to trust your intuition, to save you time and energy and heartbreak, and why we so often ignore or go against our inner voice and end up sabotaging ourselves, getting into relationships – even marriages – when we know in our gut that it isn’t right for us. Jenna also shares a lot of practical steps and tips for you to practice tuning into your intuition, to help you spot red flags, make choices and decisions and set boundaries that are good for you and help you filter out people that aren’t right for you on your dating journey. If you have stories around using your intuition in your dating journey, I’d love to hear them in the comments below <3

Defining “Ready”

While researching her book, one of the biggest things Jenna discovered was just how many men weren’t ready, or felt like they need to be ready for the kind of connection a woman was looking for. What does it take for a man to be ready? What’s important for them?

The interesting part of being “ready” is what it means for a man who isn’t ready, and what it means to a man who is ready feels completely separate.

When a man’s not ready, he’s thinking, “I have to have my life together. I need to have a steady career. I need to put down roots in the city. I need to play the field” – whatever it is that he thinks is a single man’s lifestyle, he needs to be able to live that out and feel like he’s in this stable place to sustain a long-lasting relationship.

The guys who are ready – it’s kind of funny, because that state of readiness is somewhat of an illusion, and I think that the guys who get ready, they are kind of stable, but they come to the point where they accept that relationships require vulnerability, and they might fail. But they’re going to try their hardest to make it succeed.

They’ve also accepted the fact that “ready” is a little bit of an illusion, but they’re going to go for love anyway.

Why We Go Against Our Intuition

We know what we should be doing, we almost always know how we feel about certain situations, if we’re uncomfortable, or if we are enjoying the company of another person. But why is it that women tend to go against their gut instinct?

I was shocked by the number of people who said that they have a lot of trouble when somebody close to them, whether it’s a family member – mom or dad – or their best friend tells them, “Oh this is a bad decision. You shouldn’t do that.”

They are swayed in that direction where they’re like, “Maybe this is stupid and I don’t want to be the one to look bad.”

I think that the perception of how you look in those external factors in your life is also a big reason that we go against our intuition.

A lot of people are afraid to trust their gut, and are much more inclined to trust mass opinion, which is tricky.

Dating cannot be about risk mitigation; it has to be about making authentic decisions that you truly want to pursue – whatever that is.

Some Of Jenna’s Practical Tips To Tap Into Your Intuition

I think this is one of those situations where you can start small.

One of the things that's most important is that you really ask yourself before you make a decision, even small decisions, if you want to keep dating somebody.

I have a friend who I had been preaching intuition to. She’s highly motivated, really successful, really bright, but also very logic-oriented and detail-oriented that way.

She always goes out with guys, and it takes her forever to realize, “Maybe I don’t want to be in this.” Sometimes she just lets them end it, and then she doesn’t care at all. She’s like, “I was never interested anyway!”

So I've really been getting her to tune in, think, “What do I really want? Do I want to be here right now? Do I want to go on this date? Do I want to date this other person?”

Recently she was on a third date and she realized they were going to move to another location, everything was how a normal date should go that’s going okay. And it suddenly hit her, “I don’t want to be here right now.”

She said, “I'm really sorry, but I have to go home,” and it was such a big step for her. It was a third date, it was somewhat small, there might have been some disappointment on his end, but it was something where she finally decided pretty quickly and was finally decisive.

“Hey, this is what I feel right now. This isn’t going to work. I don’t feel a connection. If I continue this onward, I don’t think it’s going to go well. I don’t want to be here right now so I'm going to end the date and I'm going to save us both time and emotion.”

Which I thought was so great! And it was such a little thing.

Continuously asking yourself, “What do I want? Do I want this?” That’s an important thing, to check your decisions.