Do you follow your heart or your mind?

One of the lamest excuses in the world to dump someone is, “i am letting you go, its for your own good”. what does this mean? is this just an easy way of dumping someone and a lousy excuse? i think so.

@john65pennington I don’t want to dump anyone, I am meaning it in the way that do I really make him happy, or should I leave him so he can meet someone he is happy with.

In the matters of business, follow your mind, but do it so no one gets hurt, for all relationships ARE personal.
In matters of the heart, use your heart, but do it in a logical manner, for it dictates how all people interact in all varities of interactions. Above all be compassionate. When you start with Love in your heart you can’t go wrong.

given the fact that a love of mine would be better off (if I truly believed it) with another, I will be driven to let them go (even if I don’t want to, emotionally) because consistency with my philosophical principles when it comes to this matter will win out.

I follow my heart… I mean my mind… I mean my heart.

I have had friends screw up a perfectly good relationship by not following the dating protocol of gifts and Jumping the Gun!

My gut.. the “happy-medium” for my mind’s rigidness and my heart’s emotions <3

Well, a bit of each. In this case you are doing his decision-making for him. That’s bad. You can not be deciding what’s best for him. That’s the short way to a controlling relationship or a codependent relationship. I know you believe in perfect matches and all that, but that does not mean you can read his mind.

The decision is his. You love him and you want him. You think maybe he doesn’t want you. It doesn’t matter. He is the one who has to decide.

Of course there is an underlying issue here and that is that you are not communicating well. You are mind reading instead of talking. It should be the other way around.

I know it’s hard to give up power to your partner when you fear he will leave. You want to have some security. Will he stay or will he go? It’s too hard to be waiting for the ax to fall. I know this because I have been there many times in my life. It drives me absolutely batty. My general response is to start acting badly in order to force her away. It’s just too hard for me to not know what will be.

My anxiety is my own responsibility, as your anxiety is yours. All we can do is be honest to our significant others. It’s easier than acting all weird, but at the same time it is incredibly difficult to do. A couple of years of couples therapy has not made it a lot easier for me, although we have made progress.

The thing is that the mind can lead us astray by anticipating too many things. That’s it’s job. The heart’s job is to keep you focused on what you want. If you want this guy, then you stay and try to work things out. Don’t be voluntarily offering to leave just because you really truly want what’s best for him. That’s just a crock of shit. You don’t know what’s best for him. If you really love him, you’ll let him make his own decisions.

My mind most of the time.

@daloon You sound like him!. I ask him a lot (which annoys him) and he always says the same. He wants to be with me, he plans ahead and we have a great relationship. I know 99% is in my head. I don’t want him to leave me. He’s really good looking and he is a flirt and flirting leads to sex and that just goes round and round my head. I want him to say, everyday, that he wants me, but I know it is getting on his nerves now.

@Dibley I sound a lot like him? Funny. I identify more with you. I’m the one who needs constant reassurance. I’m the one who makes up stupid stories in my head about what is going on in her head. I’m the one who believes I know her more than she knows herself. I’m the one who has a difficult time trusting.

It comes from low self-esteem, which comes from a childhood full of uncertainty that my parents loved me. I’ve been frantically racing to find assurance that I am lovable ever since. There have been periods when I did know I was—one even lasted ten years. But they’ve all descended into constant worry for me.

The odd thing is that I am perfectly lovable. I’ve had many loves and been loved by many. Yet it doesn’t seem to fill the hole inside me. Or not for long. I need to believe and trust that I am loved if I am to not be driven by this absence. It is so hard. Even constant reassurance doesn’t help. It’s inside me. It’s my ability to trust. It’s my ability to believe in myself. Those are the things I have to find a way to cope with.

@daloon Now you sound like me! I know exactly what you mean there. I need to be loved. I always wonder what he is doing, who he’s doing it with. I have a million thoughts going round my head constantly. Even when we are together I wonder where he is really at. I could be completely wrong in all my thoughts, I don’t know. At lunch time today as he was going back to work, I said I would miss him. He didn’t say it back. So I asked it and he said “have we got to say this everyday for the rest of our lives”. He could tell that upset me and then said it. But I made him and now that goes through my head. I really do do everything I can for him. I desperately want to make him happy and for me to be “the one”, I could be already, but I said, I just don’t know.

I’ll tell you this if you tell me it. ;-)

Oh fuck. Who am I kidding? It’s so obvious that you have to trust and be confident about him. You can’t keep on trying to ask for reassurance all the time. Some guys aren’t that demonstrative. You have to trust and be patient. If you ask for reassurance, do it in a confident way, not a pathetic way. Also, explain to him that women are different, and it’s just a little thing he can do to make you much more comfortable.

Of course, the answer to his question is “Yes. You’ve got to say it every day.” I learned that from my wife who needs me to constantly say “I love you.”

You are anticipating the worst as I did. Sometimes that makes the worst happen. Sometimes it doesn’t. Anticipating the best makes the best more likely to happen. However there is no mental switch that will turn you from a pessimist to an optimist. You have to learn how to be with your fear—to know it’s there, but let it go. As you practice this mental trick, it becomes easier and easier to not pay much attention to the thoughts that are fears that are not real. You never get rid of them, but they don’t drive your life so much any more.

This is a practice called “mindfulness” and you can get books about it. You may even be able to get training in your area. Even if not, you can take yoga and meditation classes. Both will help you still your mind and let go of those unhelpful thoughts. It probably sounds weird, but it has helped an awful lot of people.

Do I do yoga and meditation? Sort of. I do yoga irregularly. My meditation is dance and music. I don’t sit to meditate. There are all kinds of meditations. The ones you hear most about are sitting and walking meditations. Look around. There’s something that will suit you. It will calm you if you stick to it.

@daloon Ok, now I’m thinking we are twins!

I know you are right and that I should be happy with what I have, and I am. I know I need to try not to keep showing my fears to him. Other night when we were in bed, I told him I felt he didn’t want me anymore. I didn’t, I just wanted him to say he did! He just sighed and asked what he has done now. I feel sorry for him when I go on. I apologised and he just said it was ok and not my fault how my head is.

@Dibley I think you’re lucky. At least you can express your fears and he reassures you. I went years just keeping it inside, making up stories about what she was thinking, and never checking them out because I was afraid if I even brought it up, she would leave me.

You’re communicating and that’s 75% of the battle. Keep on doing it. Express your thinking about how you feel about needing the reassurance and where you think it comes from (parents who never expressed love, in my case), and learn to put less credence to your thoughts and you’ll be way far ahead of me. I’m almost jealous, in fact. If someone could have explained this to me when I was your age, maybe by now I would have figured out how to make it happen. (Just a warning—learning to cope with this could take a loooooong time.)

@daloon I expect it to take a long time. I’m like his ghost, anything he does differently, even the slightest thing, I wonder why and have to check it out. I know I’m mental, he knows it to, though he does try. You say your married, does your wife help you with your fears? Are your parents still around?You say they never showed you love, what does that mean?

@Dibley My wife and I have been in counseling for two years. So yes, we are working on it. My parents? They couldn’t tell an emotion from an ostrich. Their idea of parenting was to make you always wonder if you had a home to go home to. It created a lot of anxiety and eventually (after a few relationships), I figured that all relationships would end disastrously with a lot of pain for me. So instead of waiting for it to end, I would help it end sooner, so I felt like the pain was under my control. You might have thought I’d stop getting involved in the first place, but no. I found the feeling of falling in love to be addictive.

@daloon My parents divorced when I was 6. My dad used to beat my mum. He never hit me but out of fear, I became a fussy eater and so he would force feed me until I was sick. I even starting developing a stammer and first thing that came out of my mouth when my mum picked me up from nursery was “will daddy be home when we get back”, so my mum left him. Luckily my stammer went and my eating has only just started to improve. I didn’t have a relationship with my dad until I was 21 and I love him so much. He never mentioned anything about my childhood until an incident a few week ago and he just said to me “do you remember that” I said yes and he just simply said “well that’s that then”. As much as I do love him he has no idea what that did to me and I don’t think he thinks that I actually do remember everything being the age I was.

Hmmmm. I can see this helping to explain your behavior in at least one way. Clearly you are currently afraid your boy friend will leave you. So you constantly ask for reassurance. When you think about it, you were the reason your mother left your father. She wanted to protect you from him, but in your subconscious mind, you could have interpreted it as you driving him away, even though you didn’t want him to hurt you any more. You are in danger of driving your boy friend away by being insecure about whether he loves you.

You are probably always worried that you aren’t good enough. That’s how I am, anyway. Maybe if only you had not become a fussy eater, he wouldn’t have left. Although I don’t any hypotheses about how you would have interpreted his beating your mother.

Do you have any eating disorders?

I’m also wondering about loving your father so much now. Sometimes there is this thing where the abused turns around to love the abuser. I don’t know why that is. It is interesting that he asked if you remembered. How do you interpret his response? Could it be a sort of apology? At least he has acknowledged what he did, so you know it was real. That’s important—to be validated.

Still, there could be this empty hole inside you that love should have filled. I have one of those. Maybe you are looking for the love from a father. He was missing for so long. Maybe you never got a sense of yourself as a person who could be cared for by a man. Maybe you don’t know how to trust male love.

Maybe that’s why you are talking to me. If it is, then it worries me because I don’t find myself to be very predictable and I also have a real problem believing anyone can or should trust me—especially when it comes to providing advice. Maybe that’s why I try to give so much advice. Maybe some day I’ll believe that not everything I do is marred with invisible flaws. That’s another one of my legacies from my parents. I never knew what I did that was so wrong they could never praise me in front of anyone else.

@daloon I am still a little fussy. I am quite fat so I do watch what I eat and try not to eat regular meals. But I’m not bulimic or anything, but only because I hate being ill!

I have always fell for older men, whether that has anything to do with things I don’t know. I think much about my childhood, so I don’t really know why I told you. I don’t normally like men but I feel you are being true to me and I feel I can relate to you.

My dads response was not an apology. The situation was this; he was seeing someone who was scared my dad was a woman beater (he hasn’t hit anyone since my mum), so my dad gave her my mums number to prove he isn’t. My mum told her the truth. He then phoned me to say what happened and then realised what he said and asked if I remembered. It was quickly dismissed when I said yes. I’m not saying I wanted to talk about it with him, but maybe would of liked a bit more than what I got.

@Dibley I am telling the truth. This is the one place I can tell the truth, and I have made it a rule to always tell the whole truth here. I almost always manage to make myself do that. There is one thing I can’t bring myself to talk about.

It is good to know there are people who experienced similar things. You and I aren’t alone, either. There are others like us. Many on fluther.

I hope you stay healthy, and I hope you deal with your weight in a healthy way. That’s the only way that will work in the long run. Anyway, good luck!

I was about to ask this question until I saw that it existed already on Fluther!

Sometimes our hearts don’t always speak the truth and isn’t always a reliable source. I’ve stopped thinking short-term. I think this helps.

Alright here are a couple of examples:

Ok so when I see a juicy cake, I want to eat it until its gone. However what does that do. Well, its unhealthy and Ill gain weight. Do I eat it, yes…does my heartthrob to that delicious smell, taste and visual…sure…but is it good for me. NO. If I keep on eating bad foods Ill keep on gaining weight. Do I wanna feel ugly and nasty about myself in the future? NO. So now Im starting a new diet.

Secondly – I’ve come across an extremely interesting, good looking man, who at first I thought to be a complete douchebag. Now that I have a new bf, the douchebag has turned to be a soft, deep and interesting person with a strong passion of winning me over now. Does he make my heartthrob. YES. But will he give me longterm stability, peace and trust that I want? NO. So, will I risk disrespecting my current bf and throw a relationship away over a heartthrob that can cost me loads…NO. Cause if I did, I would have no future and my love story with this guy would probably last 2 months. Embarrassing? I think so.

Our heartthrobs are also impulsions, and I know this because I am extremely impulsive and thinking longterm is not a selfish thing, its being kind to yourself and weighing the pros and cons.