You know yourself to be passionately dedicated to living from a sense of purpose and meaning. You have spent your adult life cultivating the knowledge and skills that allow you to serve life and thrive. You have friends and colleagues who admire you and trust your integrity and care.

And you know you want to share your life with an intimate partner who brings mutual love, care, and respect, yet you don’t feel confident about dating. You’re not sure if you can discern who would be a fit for partnership with you. You feel apprehensive about losing your center and getting caught in old patterns. And you certainly don’t want to suffer from giving your heart to someone and not having it held with care. 

In the context of dating, it’s important to recognize that you have a certain amount of conditioning about what romantic love is, who you are attracted to or think you should be attracted to, and how you expect a partner to be. There is a complex mixture of ideals, judgments, and longings.

Amid this complexity, you have the challenge of sorting out what actually sustains a thriving partnership for you. There is no one right way to sort this, but three fundamental considerations can help you stay grounded in the process:

1. Resonant purpose

2. Choose your challenge.

3. Priorities in giving and receiving
   
   

1. Resonant purpose

Rather than finding someone who checks all the boxes from some list of ideals or who stimulates some certain feeling in you (which may have more to do with reactive patterns than true resonance), notice the focus and direction of your life energy and ask yourself, “Is this person’s life energy flowing in the same direction as yours? Are you pulling at the same cart?”

At this level of resonant purpose, it is not about the specific strategies for living one’s sense of purpose. Rather you are observing how a dating partner relates to their own sense of purpose and meaning. Is it a priority? How does it show in the decisions they make and the way they spend their time? How does it show in the people they socialize with and the way they take care of themselves? How does it show in what they get excited about and what touches their heart? Do you feel a resonance with how they approach their work in the world (which may or may not be how they earn income)?

Do they recognize and celebrate how your own passion about serving life lights you up? Do they get curious about how your passion lives for you? Do they inspire you to live fully into who you are?

2. Choose your challenge.

Every partnership will present some challenges. There's no right or wrong decision about what type of behaviors or challenges you accept in a given partnership. What's most helpful is to explicitly communicate about the challenges you will bring, those the other person will bring, and those that the dynamic between you will bring. If you notice that a dating partner struggles with their own sense of autonomy and quickly hears your requests as demands, this is a particular kind of challenge. Do you and they have the energy and willingness to work with it? Remain mindful of the impulse to imagine that you will help them change or that with your love they will magically improve on a particular skill or capacity.  You are not the director of a potential partner’s personal transformation process. Promises to work on something later are often a form of smoothing over what you don’t want to see. If being in relationship with them depends on them changing quickly or in a particular way by a particular time, this is a sign that you don't likely have the energy or willingness for this kind of challenge. 

You might find that when resonant purpose is strong with a partner, there are many challenges you are willing to accept without attempting to gloss over them. 

3. Priorities in giving and receiving

For you to thrive in a partnership there are likely two or three needs that you want to have met with your partner specifically. For example, perhaps for you, partnership isn't a partnership if you can't play with your partner. You know that for you to thrive in partnership, play has to be a priority.  It's important that you know what these two or three needs are for you and assess whether or not a potential partner is willing and able to commit to attending to those needs.

Of course, the same is true in reverse. Are you able to identify the top two or three needs for your potential partner? Are these needs you are willing and able to attend to in a partner?  

In the big picture, whatever partner you choose there will be gifts for you about love and learning and expanding your sense of what you're capable of and who you are.

Practice

Take a moment now to identify the people in your life with whom you experience a sense of resonant purpose. Perhaps when you are in their presence you feel a buoyancy about your own life's work or sense of clarity about what's next for you on your path. Perhaps you feel inspired. Perhaps you feel the desire to celebrate and envision what's possible in creating a better world.