How to Stop Rushing Into Love

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Everyone likes the feeling of falling in love. They relish the sensation of giddy butterflies and how every text from their new beau makes them smile. You probably know the feeling when every moment with your new love is a priceless treasure. You might also remember feeling like every second you were not with your new significant other was a second that was being wasted. You were planning the wedding by the third date because you felt you two were so perfectly matched. Maybe you even moved in together after knowing each other for only a short period of time despite the concerns of friends and family who believed you were moving in with a person who was, essentially, a complete stranger.

Rushing into love is not an uncommon phenomenon even though it can be an enormous problem. Falling too far, too fast for another person can lead, at best, to a broken heart. When you decide to move in with them or are convinced that marriage is just around the corner, you might find yourself holding the bag for a two person apartment or dealing with a baby neither of you were really ready to raise. Simply telling yourself to slow down, however, is not always enough. You may simply be the sort of person who always wants to throw themselves headfirst into a romance. If that is the case, do not despair. There are still steps you can take to stop rushing into love.

Set Boundaries Early

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Have you ever babysat a child and started out as the “nice babysitter” who lets them watch all the TV they want and eat plenty of sugar? While this may work for a while, when you try to get them in bed, they will not listen to you. It is always harder to tighten restrictions or increase boundaries later than it is to simply set strict ones in the beginning. The same principle applies to your love life. It is much easier to set boundaries and decrease them than it is to try and set them after the fifth time your beau eats the leftovers you told them you were saving for lunch. Even if you are willing to bend over backwards to make your new love happy, you have to set boundaries. It can be something as simple as “don’t call after midnight on weeknights.” Set the boundaries early so you avoid falling into bad habits that are difficult to correct later.

Be Mysterious

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When you meet someone special and really begin to feel like you have a connection, you want to do everything you can to strengthen that connection. That usually means you decide to simultaneously put your best foot forward and tell your new love interest everything about you. You essentially dump the entire contents of your brain on top of them and hope that it makes your connection grow. In reality, this can do the exact opposite. Most people do not like listening to others monologue so long stories about your childhood can leave your beau thinking you might be a closet narcissist.

In addition to leaving your new love suspecting that you are self-absorbed, emptying the entire contents of your brain onto your new love could actually build you up too far. If you monologue, you risk accidentally creating an idealized version of yourself in your new love’s mind. This vision of you is what they will be measuring the actual you against, and you are unlikely to ever measure up. To avoid this, keep a bit of mystery about you. Share things as they come up naturally in the conversation instead of delivering a monologue.

Keep Your “Me” Time

When you rush into love, it can seem like any moment you are not with your love is a moment that is wasted. You want to share everything with them. You want to eat dinner together every night. You want to go see all the same movies. You want to take part in each other’s after-work activities. You just want to exist in the same space as your love. This, however, is actually counterproductive if you want to form a long lasting relationship. In a long term relationship, you will need to be able to balance your life as part of a couple and your life as an individual. If you devote all your time to being a couple, you may struggle to regain some individuality later. You might also find that the friends, relationships and activities you left behind to focus on your new love are not there when you reassert that you are an individual as well as a couple. To help prevent this from happening, keep something that is just for you from the beginning of your relationship. Whether that means that you take a pottery class alone or that you and your love watch Netflix separately is up to you. The important thing is to make sure you do not lose your sense of self to the relationship.

Outsource Your Common Sense

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Being in love can make you lose all sense of perspective, especially when you are in the honeymoon phase. As such, if you know you are prone to rushing into love, it is a good idea to outsource your common sense. Tell your friends or family that they are going to be your common sense. Their job is to speak up when they feel like you are completely losing perspective. To you, it might make perfect sense to leave behind Chicago and move to sunny California with your beau because they asked you to join them out West. You two are going to be together anyway, so the move is not a huge deal. Your friends and family, however, can act as your common sense and tell you that, no, moving cross-country with a person you have only been dating for a month is not romantic. It is utter insanity.