You feel trapped in a movie theatre, resent having to go to a dinner party, and would rather be at home and work. Without understanding what is happening, you feel guilty and ashamed or assume there is something wrong or unhealthy about the way you are.
You seek authentic relationships and attribute different meanings and weights to sex or dating
Creative and entrepreneurial endeavors call for solitude, space, and dedication. These are things that can come into short supply when one is in a committed partnership. You may try to negotiate with your partner but they may not be able to understand your needs, and the unique challenges you face when dating as an intense person.
Instead, when you are trying to meet your own needs they feel left out, sidelined, or ignored. You may both get resentful or even passive-aggressive, resulting in unhealthy relationship dynamics.
Being gifted, intense, and sensitive, you have myriad physical sensitivities and a unique need for a balance between stimulation and restoration. Challenges of dating as an intense person often overlap with the problems faced by those who identify as being highly sensitive (HSPs).
You have a heightened response to stimuli such as noise, visual images, strong colors, caffeine, smells, and rough surfaces. You may get overwhelmed by things that excite your partner, and as a result, are not able to do things or attend certain events together.
You may find their music too loud, their taste in humor too abrasive, their perfume overpowering. Your sensitivity doesn’t equate with weakness. It is merely a reflection of your innate drive to optimize your environment so you can spend your energy on better things.
If your partner does not understand your needs, they e you. This doesn’t help, but simply makes worse all the problems you already face. Worse, if you then internalize the blame, you start to edit and restrict yourself and lose the ability to express yourself freely and authentically.
You may feel like a burden and would rather hide your true preference. This leads to an unsatisfactory life and burnout, and resentment inevitably bottles up.
5. You Search For Deep Meaning In the Modern World
As worded in psychology literature, intimacy in relationships is developed “through a dynamic process whereby an individual discloses personal information, thoughts, and feelings to a partner; receives a response from the partner; and interprets that response as understanding, validating, and caring”(Laurenceau, Barrett, & Pietromonaco, 1998, p. 1238).
This process requires time, patience, and blog the willingness to go beyond shallow exchanges. Our modern dating culture, however, moves rapidly. With a million options ‘a swipe’ away, people are always looking for the next best thing. Physical intimacy becomes something that could be likened to eating fast food.
Research has found that social pressure dictates that people represent their ‘ideal self’ more than their authentic self online. In fact, research has found that people tend to lie on dating sites. (Ellison, Heino, & Gibbs, 2006; Toma & Ellison, 2008). Your need to be understood and accepted as who you are and the desire to know the other person truthfully means internet dating may not be rewarding for you.
The problem is that your values are often not honored in the world. Reality falls short of your expectations, and what you think of as ‘normal’ is deemed as being ‘too idealistic.’ When dating as an intense person, you look for purpose and meaning behind everything you do.
All your life, you crave connections with people with whom you can relate deeply. Relationships that remain on a superficial level are unlikely to last very long.
