The Land-a-Man Plan
The Land-a-Man Plan
On Creating the Conditions to give your dreams your best shot
Hey party people! I’m starting a new monthly feature (reviving it, actually, from my pre-Substack days). It’s called Practice for the People. Once a month, I’ll be sharing a practice with an opening story to set the scene. The story is free. The practice is for paid subscribers. If you’d like to access these practices or make requests for future practices, become a paid member and support this work! If you cannot afford it, send an email to connect@cheladavison.com and I’ll comp you. No questions asked.
There was a time when I was single but refused to mingle.
If you were creeping my behaviour, you’d assume I wanted to be single. Hot damn, you’d think, she’s revelling in singleness! Not doing a dang thing to remedy this single sitch. Woman roaring!
I was not.
I wanted to be partnered. I had a man list! I had a vision board!! I was reading “Calling in the One” (without doing any of the practices). But I would not date. I didn’t even hang out where men might be, like bars, hardware stores or the dream of dreamy dudes, libraries. I wouldn’t let people set me up because that felt awkward. Internet dating seemed…transactional. I worked from home and went to yoga and sure, there were some man buns up in those classes, but pickins were slim. Magical thinking told me I could call in my person while hiding in my cozy Vancouver apartment drinking gin and watching Mad Men.
An honest friend finally said, “The only way you’re finding a man is if your appliances break and you hit it off with the repairman. Do you like older guys? How ‘bout your landlord, he can’t be a day over 90.”
I choked back that hard-to-swallow pill. It was true. Hoping and wishing and manifestation juju was all a crock of hooey without creating the conditions to actually meet somebody. So I got busy. I swallowed my pride and stopped pretending to be cool about it. I got out there.
It took a year. A year of active online dating. A year of responding to thoughtful messages even when they clicked the “atheist” box which rubbed my “spiritual but not religious” box in all the wrong ways. Yes, that innuendo was intentional, thanks for noticing. A year of asking and saying yes to being set up. A year of going on dates with people I already knew wasn’t my person and I didn’t want to waste an outfit on but I’m going to give this an honest go dammit. A year of dodging dick pics. A year of feeling the yeses and the nos in my body. A year of actively reprogramming my annoying attraction to unavailable men. A year of doing embarrassing shit like wandering around Canadian Tire looking cute and outdoorsy.
It took a year of going all in on what I truly wanted to meet the atheist who would take me to the library on our first date and who is now my husband.
Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of that date. We met on OkCupid. He was travelling so we couldn’t meet in person yet. We both had enough experience with online dating to know we should meet right away. You can’t start falling for someone you haven’t smelled. But we sent emails anyway. Over 3 weeks, those emails got so real and so long that when I printed them out for our first Christmas together, they made a full-length book of our courtship.
Over dinner on that first date, he told me he’d been dating in every province in the country. Talk about creating the conditions to meet someone! He travelled for work and lived in his van (which somehow did not register as a red flag). Then he said, “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been looking for you?” Yesterday, I reminded him of that line. He doesn’t remember saying it but he got that same glint in his eye. ”I said that!? Damn, I was smooth.”
Of course, this is a romantic early love story. We live a reality story. Now we play rock paper scissors to see who will sort the recycling. Our decade together has been beautiful, bewildering, healing, satisfying, excruciating and very, very real. And, together, we continue to co-create the conditions to be in the partnership we want.
There’s so much that’s out of our control. But there’s also a lot we can influence. When we’re calling in new dreams, the kindest thing we can do for ourselves is create the conditions to give ourselves our best shot.
This year, I want to go all in on a creative project that’s catalyzed massive change in my life. It terrifies me. It’s impractical. It’s a whole new direction. I don’t know if it’ll work. I’m scared it’ll be mediocre. But it’s bringing me so astonishingly alive that I’m creating the conditions to give myself the best possible shot.
To kick off this new monthly series of Practice for the People, let’s practice…Creating the Conditions…