5 Reasons You Haven’t Found Someone
Let’s define bad dating so we can all stop doing it.
You’ve decided you’re ready. You want to find a real romantic partner. Someone to share your life with, to grow with.
Or maybe you’re not full blown trying but you’re low-key not NOT trying.
But nothing is coming up. Or a few decent dates that turn into nothing.
Or worse, you do find someone and you have a great time for a year or two then it all turns to shit like it always does and you can’t help but feel like you just wasted a lot of time because you both ended up pretending to be something you weren’t (been there!).
You want a healthy, fulfilling relationship. And are convinced the right person is just around the corner. And the good news is they are! But it’s a very specific corner you have to walk around.
And what corner might that be? I’m so glad you asked, because that would be the proverbial self awareness corner.
Understanding how/why you’re operating the way you do is the single biggest self empowerment move you can make in your life. It affects ALL areas of your life. It’s not something anyone else can do for you, and you absolutely need someone who knows more than you in this area to help you figure it out. Because it will really show its head in romantic relationships as a mirror to how you were parented/raised. It goes deep and can be confusing and uncomfortable to understand.
Which is why so many of us get stuck.
Because as far as finding a real partner goes, a lot of us are just swimming in a dark pool of ambiguity expecting someone else to turn the lights on for us so we can see.
And why is this?
For most of us it’s a combination of not knowing what healthy partnership actually looks/feels like and being under the impression that we don’t have to do any work on ourselves to find the partner that will love us through thick and thin.
I’ll get into the second part more later but if you don’t look at your own shit you MAY be able to find someone who will attach to you because they, too, don’t want to be alone. But if you want a real partnership introspection is the only way.
Self-work brings clarity, and with clarity you create structure, and when you have structure you can actually start achieving things you want in life.
Without clarity in our dating lives we will put energy into situations and people that may drain us. We’ll take what we can get. We’ll ignore red flags, we’ll live in what I like to call a relationship Groundhog Day, with one disappointing partner after another. We’ll continue to cause pain to ourselves because we don’t know any better. And we’ll be stuck hoping for that partner to magically show up one day, and they won’t.
The best way to get nowhere with something is to have no clear goals, boundaries, or time lines.
I’m here to put a stop to it. I’ve created some iron-clad rules to go by so you can start developing some kind of baseline for your dating. You can’t fix a problem you aren’t aware of. So if one or more of these proves a problem for you, you now have the gift of a known problem that you can now do something about.
You now officially have a dating problem that requires self work if:
1) You’ve been dating/open to dating and it’s been over 4 months since you’ve had a supportive, fulfilling relationship that felt truly healthy and communicative to you. No matter how long it lasted.
2) You’re going on dates with people and you find yourself questioning how interested they are, and then you find yourself obsessing when you’re going to see them again, or playing some kind of “game”.
3) You find yourself having standards until someone shows you attention and then everything goes out the window.
4) You develop strong feelings for someone who has shown no interest in you. Or you each want different levels of commitment and you aren’t taking steps to move on.
5) You don’t have a solid community of friends/family around you that make you feel loved and supported if/when romantic disappointment falls upon you.
I know this may sound harsh. But I think a few of us (and myself not too long ago) really needed to hear these things so I could stop wasting my time on things I didn’t have control over (what the other person is or isn’t doing), and start focusing my attention on things I did (like paying attention to my relationship patterns).
Okay. So now maybe one or more of these points are resonating with you. You’ve swallowed the hard pill of realizing you might have a something you need to work on.
And you’re going to have to start asking yourself some pretty hard questions, like:
Why am I making excuses for what the past 4 months of my dating life has been?
Why am I obsessing over someone that doesn’t seem that interested in me?
Do I even know what it looks like for someone to have a healthy interest in me?
Why am I interested in people that don’t seem that interested in me?
What kind of ideas do I have in my head of how a relationship should start/be/turn into? How could that be holding me back in finding a partner?
Why do I have the belief that a partner will complete me in some way?
Why can’t I take care of myself in the ways I expect a partner to? Is that fair?
Do I even know how to have healthy relationships? What does my friend/family group look like? How do they handle confrontation, disagreements, or support?
You need to actually writing these answers down or talking them through with a friend and asking “why” until you get to a good, juicy answer (usually something painful from childhood/teenage years). The mind will play a trick on you to make you think you’ve figured everything out in your head. Only in writing or talking it out loud will you really start getting somewhere with these questions.
And if you find yourself coming up blank. It’s time to get extra support.
And I know how scary and uncomfortable that can feel.
Because it means you’ll have to acknowledge something is not working. Or maybe you’ve had a bad experience with a coach/therapist in the past. Maybe one modality didn’t work for you and you’ve lumped the entire wellness community into one group. Maybe you don’t want to admit to your friends or family you’re having trouble with something. Maybe you don’t even realize there’s a problem because your parents raised you to believe everything was “fine”.
Or maybe you just don’t actually want to change. Because change itself it scary. Admitting you don’t know everything about something is hard.
And people often don’t get help with dating because they think someone else should accept them for exactly as they are.
Listen, they should accept you for who you are, to a point. I’m here to argue that if you haven’t done self work - then some of what you think is *you* is not actually you.
Because if you had emotional trauma when you were younger (all of us) that you didn’t heal (most of us), you actually aren’t operating as you. Your trauma is operating for you, and you’ve had it for so long it feels like you. But it isn’t.
It’s part of you, yes. And it’s shaped you in a way that, once healed, will make you stronger. But if you haven’t healed it, it’s will hold you back in the most important areas of your life.
Maybe you’re reading this and think this doesn’t apply to you. You can’t think of anything that happened in the past, maybe there were a few things that you knew weren’t great, but you couldn’t POSSIBLY be operating from trauma.
But that’s how deep it runs. It’s in a part of your brain you are not consciously aware of. It’s attracted to the person who will ultimately hurt you, it’s making you stay small when you want to play big, it’s keeping you from opening up and having a deep but painful conversation, it may even be why you call yourself an “introvert” all the time. It’s running the show and if you keep not doing anything about it it will do run it for the rest of your life.
If you start creating real boundaries and goals in your life and find yourself being unable to meet them, despite your best efforts. It’s time to get support.
Absolutely no one has the capacity for significant change on their own, there’s always someone there in some way, a friend, a book, a mentor, a group, a coach…someone.
If you don’t believe it for yourself, believe someone who’s been there, and come out the other end (hi).
Healthy relationships (of whatever commitment capacity) are built on authenticity and honesty.
So I’ve just made a list of things that are problems. I think it’s also important to make a list of what we’re looking to achieve, because like I said, goals are incredibly important when aiming for something you’ve never had before:
1) Partnership should feel safe and supportive. You should be able to be honest and vulnerable and still feel loved and seen.
2) Healthy partnership allows for healthy boundaries. Each person is able to communicate what works and doesn’t work for them, and the other person hears and respects them.
3) You understand both you and the other person is NOT perfect. There will be disagreements and someone may unintentionally hurt the other. But the two of you are able to come together to talk about it and grow from it, and it does not continue to happen.
4) Each person has open communication about their feelings and you make each other feel important.
5) Each person is able to define their own needs and wants and does NOT expect the other partner to fulfill them all.
6) A certain amount of independence still lives in the relationship. You both feel like you’re two people coming together because you truly enjoy one another.
Every single one of us in this life deserves this list. And if you’re not receiving that in yours, it’s time to start figuring out why.
