Because of expectations, ladies and gentlemen. Because of expectations.
When you resolve in your heart to go on a diet, you have three mental advantages over the person heading out on a date.
One. You know it will take time.
Kilograms do not fall off within twenty-four hours. And correspondingly, feelings of affection, care and commitment also take some months to develop.
Nobody abandons a diet because they were not thinner by Thursday. A great many people abandon a person because they did not feel enough by the second evening — applying, to a slower process, a schedule they would consider absurd for a faster one.
Two. You understand that most of it depends solely on you.
You choose the salad over the pastry. You go out and get out of breath.
Whereas when we agree to a date, we place all our hopes on the perfection of the other person. Mistake. Big mistake.
The diet is understood as something you do. The date is understood as something that either happens or does not — which converts you from a participant into an assessor, and assessors do not build anything.
Three. You accept that the challenge is concrete, not psychological.
Success in a diet is not connected to overcoming childhood pain. To be thinner you have to talk in calories, kilograms and kilometres.
But bring the same person to their romantic life and every difficulty is immediately reinterpreted as something deep and characterological — an attachment style, a wound, a pattern — which has the enormous advantage of being impossible to act on this week.
Try running the diet framework on it for six months. Concrete actions, a slow timescale, and full responsibility for your own half. The results are frequently embarrassing.