As a rule I’m a fairly positive person, I try to look on the brightside and always see the good in people. I’ve always viewed this as a good thing (unsurprisingly) but found myself questioning this approach earlier this year.
I decided to dip my toe into the world of dating and found what I thought was a nice guy. This is where my glass half full attitude let me down, so determined was I to view him in a positive light that I ignored my gut. My gut told me fairly early on that something wasn’t right but I kept silencing her with my “he’s a nice guy, it’s all fine, you’re just out of practice with how this all works.” Of course my gut turned out to be right, he wasn’t such a nice guy after all.
When everything came to light, although I was angry at him, my overwhelming annoyance was at myself. My glass half full attitude had made me ignore my instincts. After a couple of days of berating myself I put it to bed, promising myself that in future I would listen to my gut and not let my need to look on the brightside warp reality. It seemed like a sensible approach but in practice not so much.
I didn’t think I was going to have to worry about it for a while, I wasn’t planning on returning to dating sites any time soon but then something unexpected happened.
One DM led to another and suddenly there’s a new man in my life and while this is definitely a wonderful thing it quickly highlighted some flaws in my previous plan. Without my positive outlook I was left feeling fairly cynical, fearful of letting someone in to just have the rug pulled from under me; but this is incredibly unhelpful when you are trying to get to know someone and massively unfair on them.
So I’ve scrapped the old plan and instead am going for what is always the best option, honesty. I explained to him what had happened, why I initially seemed so guarded and of course, because he’s a goodun, he got it; he reassured me and I believe him. And not because I’m just putting on positivity goggles but because I’m listening to my gut, and she is giving me only happy vibes.
I can’t and won’t let one bad experience turn me into a negative grump, that isn’t me and I have to be true to who I really am. I am a positive person with something to be happy about and that is a wonderful thing.