It’s my belief that the only newcomers to FA who have no problem with the non-dating commitment are already married. Me? I balked like a mule when my sponsor first mentioned it.
Back then, I was fifty years old and had already suffered through a decade or two of not dating. I didn’t welcome the suggestion not to date.
After a few months of struggling with my sponsor about it, and after I had lost the bulk of my weight, I attended my college reunion, solo. During the cocktail hour, I began to chat with a classmate. When dinner was called, he said that he would come find me when the dancing began.
His statement threw me into a panic. It was all I could do to choke down my meal and then race out of the hall at a dead run. In the parking lot, I tried to get my bearings. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe—just maybe—my sponsor was right. The truth was that I was terrified of dating and all that went with it. Right then I knew that I should commit to not dating for one year. I needed to be well grounded in abstinence and recovery in order to handle the rollercoaster of dating.
Dating can be stressful. As a food addict, my default position is to eat. Once, after a difficult romantic disappointment, my first thought was: What can I eat? I needed to learn a better strategy for handling hurt feelings, like picking up the phone. Under stress, I need to be careful that I don’t automatically turn to food.
Dating takes time, and in early recovery I never had enough time. I needed an entire year to get my program schedule firmly set in place, and to form good habits around work time and family time before I added dating to the mix. Failing to do that and dating would leave me vulnerable to missing meetings, abbreviated quiet times, and no phone calls.
The extra time spent building my recovery foundation was important. I had to have a very strong commitment to my abstinence and a solid FA network in place in order to start dating. After I started sponsoring, I was able to rely on my daily schedule of calls from my sponsees and my fellows to keep me right-sized and on the recovery track. Then I could ride the highs and lows of dating without eating.
Sometimes even one year of not dating is not long enough. It wasn’t for me. After a wonderful year, liberated from the pressure of looking for a date or from worrying if I’d ever get one again, I was in no hurry to leap into the social swing. My sponsor and I decided that I should wait until I completed the Ninth Step in my first AWOL.
My non-dating commitment turned out to be eighteen months. Socially, the world treated me differently when I was thin than when I was fat. At first I was overwhelmed. In retrospect, I needed that extra strength to cope with the new pressures that dating presented.
Before recovery, my mind and body were in the “fat girl place,” and I anticipated rejection at every turn. I was a terrible shopper in the “relationship store.” Riddled with insecurity and self-doubt, I was unable to set healthy boundaries or make sound decisions. I stayed in inappropriate or unhealthy dating situations because I didn’t think I deserved better.
But the gift of that time to heal during the non-dating commitment let me adapt mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to a normal body size. That experience is what I pass on to sponsees who dread such a suggestion.