How Many Dates Before You’re Exclusive?

In my experience, there is no one size fits all relationship. There is no set amount number of dates that will guarantee a long term future with a potential partner. Every relationship that I’ve had was different.

I wanted exclusivity with a guy that valued me. I felt that if I wasn’t able to get it sooner than later that it somehow lessened my worth as a person.

I went on several great dates with a guy I liked about five years ago and then he dumped me and moved on.

There was no amount of dates that could have saved the relationship. Our goals in dating and what we wanted in a partner were completely different.

I focused on finding out life goals, commonalities and interests with my next potential partner. Attempting to find out if there was already natural compatibilities to build on for a potential relationship helped to reduce stress and effort in making our lives work.

There were struggles that I had to face and work around in terms of arranging times to hang out, traveling farther than I wanted to and being tired from work.

I found that if your overall life goal is in alignment with the other partner’s that it is much easier to be with that person. My current partner and I have similar life goals and even though we still struggle with getting to the end result of what our big dreams are, we have less resistance in being with each other because we are not desiring totally different things in life.

I learned that you can have amazing dates with someone and really enjoy the time that you spend, but if your life goals are not similar, it will always create resistance. It will make it harder to align your life with that person because you will always be reaching and putting effort towards different end results. That creates a natural resistance to what you ultimately want to be doing.