13 May

Hot Chick/Player Syndrome: The Current State of Love in America

Vishwanath Iyer

Vishwanath Iyer

Often described as a maverick, rebel Yogi, speaker, author, actor, workout junkie, coach and entrepreneur, Vish is a rare cocktail of spirituality, science and business. His own 30-year meditation practice - combined with a Brahmin family lineage that has produced several generations of Vedic Yoga scholars & masters - has instilled in Vish a diehard belief that solutions to all human problems (including finding romantic love) lay in Yoga meditation and the Yoga lifestyle.
Vishwanath Iyer

 

“Men don’t look at me anymore.” A client once told me about
fifteen minutes into a coaching session. I asked her why she felt this
mattered. In reply she told me she believed because she was getting older that
men no longer found her as physically attractive. This, of course, was not the
truth. The problem was she had allowed her mind to tell her that because she
was aging she was no longer as worthy of finding love. There are millions of
men and women out there who believe similarly. Thus, the Hot Chick/Player
Syndrome has emerged and taken hold in American society.

Here in America we have some very obvious, but skewed,
standards of what makes a person desirable. For a woman it is all about how
physically attractive she is and how much she flaunts her sexual desirability
to the opposite sex. For a man it is all about how many notches he has on his
belt, how many women are at his beck and call, and how many of them he has
slept with. No matter where you go women are living the Hot Chick Syndrome,
believing that if they are not physically attractive and sexy enough they won’t
find true love. Men are given this player image, or Player Syndrome, and told
it is the epitome of manliness. It’s no wonder that society believes the myth
to be truth. Men are taught the standards are “How much fun can I have? How
much can I score and how best can I go about it?” The Player Syndrome holds to
the belief that there is no permanent love. The Hot Chick and Player Syndrome
are the male and female equivalents of the same thing. Both the Hot Chick and
Player Syndromes are all about mastering the outer game. But the truth is you can
never master the outer game without the inside as well.

This is what I believe to be the state of love here in
America. The myth is presented everywhere from pop music, film, advertisements,
and even books. So what has brought about this myth of how to achieve true
love? There is little to no reference point for love. Many grow up in homes
where loving relationships were not modeled for them for various reasons. If a
person has not had that model of what a healthy and loving relationship looks
like then they have no real reference point to go by. Another reason why this
myth has become the state of love in America is we have an enormous amount of
freedom in this country. While our freedom is a wonderful blessing, it is
frequently abused, especially when it comes to love. Freedom in love without
responsibility is much like giving a toddler an open can of red paint and
leaving them alone in a room full of white walls. Before you can blink much of
that red paint will be all over the room! It is the same way when it comes to
abusing our freedom when it comes to love. This is why having a model for
healthy and loving relationships is so important. Otherwise we are just going
from one myth to another, getting no closer to true love than we were before.

How can we apply Yoga wisdom in these situations? First we
must ask ourselves a series of questions.

1.      
What is love?

2.      
What is marriage?

3.      
Why is marriage important to me?

Yoga has very clear answers to these questions. Yoga teaches
you to work on the inside and everything you need is already inside you. All
you have to do is just got to take off the layers and remove the veil. The way
you achieve this is through yoga techniques.

Yoga Wisdom:

·      
The Hot Chick/Player Syndrome is the male and
female equivalents of the same thing.

·      
Both are about mastering the outside. But you
cannot master the outside without first mastering the inside.

·      
We need to find role models that can show us
what a healthy and loving relationship looks like.

·      
We need to create a balance between freedom and
responsibility.

·      
We need to be able to answer 3 key questions
about love and why we are seeking a relationship.

·      
We need to use Yoga techniques to remove the
layers on the inside so that we can have clear answers to these 3 questions if
we do not have them yet.

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