Man, let me tell you, I was absolutely cooked. My relationship with Sarah had imploded—I mean, spectacularly imploded. I’d poured years into that mess, and when it finally went south, I didn’t know which way was up. I wasn’t just heartbroken; I was financially gutted too, paying half the rent on an empty place for three months just so she wouldn’t trash my stuff. I was bouncing off the walls, desperate for some kind of sign. I remembered my crazy old neighbor used to mess with the I Ching, or the Book of Changes, so I dug up his dusty old copy and those three damn coins. I needed an answer, fast, even if it was just mystic nonsense. My goal was to leverage the damn thing for dating advice, because my own instincts were clearly garbage.
I threw those coins six times on a Friday night, drinking warm beer and feeling sorry for myself. And bam. Hexagram 17, Sui, Following. The commentary was all about adapting, moving with the current, not trying to force anything. Sounded great, right? Like permission to just chill and let the universe deliver the next soulmate straight to my door. But I didn’t trust that fuzzy crap. I needed data. I decided to treat Hexagram 17 not as prophecy, but as a rigid practice guide. I committed to documenting every single romantic interaction for the next six weeks based on this ‘Following’ mandate.
Establishing the Practice and the Rules
I pulled out the rusty old composition notebook and started sketching out the framework. I needed to document not just the date, but the feeling, the outcome, and, most importantly, the compliance score: 100% Following (Sui) or 100% Leading (Rejection of Sui). I was going to beat this cosmic game. I opened up a new spreadsheet and categorized every interaction. Did I initiate the contact? That was ‘Leading’ (Failure to Follow). Did I wait for them to text back, agree to their plans without modification, and let them define the pace and even the conversation topics? That was ‘Following’ (Hexagram Compliant). My methodology was brutal. I had to suppress every single instinct I had.
The first few attempts were painful. Remember Hexagram 17 is all about ‘The Retinue’—following the flow. This meant utter surrender. If someone suggested dinner at 9 PM on a Tuesday when I had an early meeting, I said yes, full stop. If they canceled five minutes before we were supposed to meet, I simply responded ‘No worries, let me know next time,’ without rage-texting. I was trying to become water, man, and I felt like a damn sponge being squeezed dry.
- Week 1 Tracking: I logged one disastrous date where the guy insisted we go for a ‘hike’ in the city park. He literally brought a compass and map, treating the small loop like Everest. I followed him silently for an hour, documenting my rising irritation in my mental log, 100% compliant. Result: Extreme boredom leading to mutual fading.
- Week 2 Tracking: I spent two whole weeks dating nothing but passive-aggressive bores, all because I refused to suggest a better movie or a different bar, strictly adhering to the “Let others define the direction” crap written in the book. When I ‘Followed,’ I attracted people who needed a doormat—the clingy types, the ones who had zero initiative. My role was reduced to that of an interested nodder.
- The Cost Analysis: I charted the emotional cost column, and every time I achieved peak Hexagram compliance, the emotional cost spiked into the deep red. It was a clear trade-off: cosmic guidance for personal misery.
The Shift from Prophecy to Observation
I continued to meticulously record these pathetic interactions. I kept this madness up for a solid month. The data started stacking up, and it was confusing as hell. When I followed the mandate religiously, the dates were predictable and totally boring. When I tried to cheat and lead—even suggesting a slightly different cocktail bar—the whole interaction combusted instantly and ended in immediate ghosting. I felt like I was stuck between two extremes: be a follower and be miserable, or be a leader and be alone. I scrolled back through the entries, noticing the common denominator wasn’t the hexagram’s advice; it was me trying to fit my messy life into a rigid, ancient instruction manual.
The hexagram didn’t predict a damn thing. What it did was give me a framework for systematically observing my own dating patterns. After five weeks of tracking, I dumped the idea of ‘Following’ and just started acting like a normal human being, mixing leading and reacting based on genuine interest, not mystic mandate. And guess what? The chaos stopped.
But here’s the kicker: the real insight didn’t come from the deep meaning of Hexagram 17; it came from the sheer absurdity of logging my emotions and choices into an Excel sheet. That intense focus on documentation forced me to look at the patterns I was creating, totally detached from the spiritual nonsense. The I Ching didn’t fix my love life; the spreadsheet did. I realized the only thing I needed to follow was my gut, and that my gut was documented perfectly right there, in column B, showing how badly I reacted to passive partners and how much I hated giving up control. That whole process of trying to force prophecy sucked the drama right out of dating, leaving me with cold, hard facts about my own poor choices. Screw the ancients; give me a database any day.
