When You Don’t Know If You’ll Ever Find Love
On our new podcast episode, Matt and I talked about people’s biggest fears.
One of the most popular: “I’m worried I’ll never find love.”
Few of us cannot relate to that feeling. Especially in the worst throes of heartbreak and repeated disappointment. But I would wager that although great love feels (and is) rare, it’s actually not as rare as we make it out to be.
Belief is a funny thing: If we are optimistic, we are not guaranteed success. But if we’re relentlessly pessimistic, we’re almost guaranteed to fail. So it pays to be an optimist here, as it does in the pursuit of any goal or dream.
To help with this, I think it pays to remember two basic facts:
1. You are deeply loveable
2. There is an enormous amount of love out there
The second one is true by definition of just how many people in the world feel they have an incredible supply of love to give. The first one…is trickier. But that’s where the work comes in.
I’m not one for believing you have to have all your shit together to find love. That would be an insanely demanding task, and we know many people out there who are a hot mess in many parts of their life internally and externally, but still manage to secure a happy family.
What you do need though, especially if you want to hold down a healthy and long-lasting relationship, is to have some foundational beliefs. You need some sense of worth, an idea that what you have to say is worth hearing, a sense of confidence in your own appeal and desirability as a partner.
That might mean we have to do work internally i.e. to crush negative scripts in our head that say we are undeserving, or it requires the external work of making our life a beautiful world for someone new to enter, or at least one filled with passion and the possibility of stability, growth, fun, adventure, and friendship. To paraphrase Charlie Munger: “The best way to attract a great partner is to deserve one”. Read More…