Want to NOT fall in love? How can you do that?
Find out with Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com and Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com
Cathy: What if you don’t want to like someone? What if you don’t want to fall in love? This is Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com.
Reid: This is Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com. Are you trying to tell me something, Cathy? This is basically like how do I get good at hating people and staying hating them?
Cathy: No. It’s about how not to fall in love if you don’t want to –
Reid: Ah.
Cathy: – which is very different and a very useful technique.
Reid: Go to ReidAboutSex.com/slutprotocols. Trust me on this. I actually have a little handout, a checklist on things that you can do to help not fall in love with people. There’s a whole way to delay imprinting and the chemical tripwire of, “You’re dreamy.” You can learn what your triggers are. It’s almost like falling in love could be considered asthma and how to avoid an asthma attack.
Cathy: It can be addictive.
Reid: Yeah and which some people think that is not romantic at all. That is absolutely the opposite of falling in love but at the same time, if you actually have a conversation with people about have you ever fallen in love with somebody who is a horrible fit for you –
Cathy: Been there, done that.
Reid: – and if you could do it differently, would you? So in my geekiness and my own kind of exploration of like how to not fall in love but still be connected and feel intimate and be nice to people, especially if you’re being sexual with them, how do you leave the campsite better than you found it when, if you unintentionally fell in love with each other it would complicate things?
Cathy: Can you tell us one thing from your sheet?
Reid: Yeah. I would say the biggest bit of advice, as somebody who’s coached a lot of different people on “casual sex” and just dating and friends with benefits, the challenge is, because no one talks about this, how do you – Because most people are taking their casual sex too casually and then they just kind of stumble into falling in love, the easiest piece of advice is if you’re going to sleep with somebody you sleep with them once a month and you don’t… this is the second piece of advice so this is a bonus. Don’t sleep over. No sleepovers. See them once a month. That will help most people not fall in love.
Cathy: One thing I did with my sisters when they were dating is I would invite them after they come home from a date and they’d be like, “Oh, it was so dreamy,” it wasn’t that they shouldn’t fall –
Reid: Tie them to a chair and smack them around?
Cathy: Yeah, exactly. How did you know? It wasn’t about them not falling in love but it was about them making conscious decisions and not getting swept away. I would ask them to tell me three things they didn’t like about that person, three things they noticed. One of my early mentors gave me really good advice, I thought. He gave it as a marriage focus. He said before you marry someone you look for every reason you shouldn’t be married to them and after you’re married to them you look for every reason you should be married with them. It was really sweet.
Reid: That’s good.
Cathy: I would ask them. They’d come home from a date, it’s like, “Oh, he was so dreamy.” I’d be like, great, and I’d let them go on for a little while. Then I’m like, “Okay, now tell me three things you didn’t like about them,” because there’s always –
Reid: Sober them up a little bit.
Cathy: Yeah. There’s always a couple things we don’t adore about somebody and just letting them keep their feet on the ground I think helped make – They made more conscious choices.
Reid: Understand that two things are happening for a lot of people out there. One, they’re socially starved, so when they go on a date or when they have a casual hookup or even a not casual hookup, they’re basically “food shopping” while starving. There’s research for this. People who are hungry make worse food choices when they go into a grocery store.
Cathy: The stale bread looks really good.
Reid: Understand that there’s that that’s happening and I forgot the second point, which was going to be a brilliant point, which will come back to me. The idea of – Oh, it’s this. We have science for this, as well. The centers of your brain that are active when you start falling in love and when you’re in Love, Love, with a capital L, they are the same centers of the brain that are active when you are addicted to cocaine. That whole, “They’re dreamy,” is the beginning of the high where you’re now stoned on basically the same chemistry in your brain and in your blood system as if you were high on cocaine. Most people haven’t practiced being high and realizing that what they’re feeling is the chemicals, not necessarily the person. They’re just your drug dealer and you’re stoned and you think that you guys are soul mates. If they are really your soul mate, they will be your soul mate three months from now. There’s no rush. You don’t have to get the U-Haul this weekend. When you combine that not understanding that you’re stoned with being starving, you get the U-Haul and then it’s 3, 6, 8, 18 months later, 5 years later, 18 years later when you realize that you made a mistake.
Cathy: It’s a great question and I love having control over those kinds of things, like, wow, I really want to fall for that person but let me ground myself and go, there’s some things that would be bottom lines if I wasn’t high, so to speak.
Reid: Yep. Go to ReidAboutSex.com/slutprotocols. The reason I call them slut protocols isn’t because I don’t think the word slut is a bad word, it’s about how you get really good at not falling in love when you don’t want to, which also means you can consciously fall in love and just be more mindful. Use these powers for good, never for evil. Anything else?
Cathy: No. Please leave comments. What works for you?
Reid: Click the subscribe button. Miss none of the rest of the future golden nuggets that fall out of our mouths. Bye.