If you don’t particularly enjoy being single (and that’s your right), you’re probably wondering why you haven’t found the right person for you! Whether you’re coming out of a long-term relationship or have faced setback after setback, it’s time to pause and analyze your situation because continuing on the same path will lead you nowhere, or at least nothing new!
Attachment and comparison to past relationships
The first mistake we all tend to make when we meet new people is to compare, more or less consciously, the men we meet with our ex or to compare a budding relationship with our last one that lasted 3 years. However, we must compare apples to apples. We don’t behave the same way when we’re at the beginning of a relationship as we do when we’ve been in a couple for a longer time. Give yourself time to discover the other person, and don’t seek a copy of your ex in an improved version because it doesn’t exist. Having impossible expectations that can’t be fulfilled will lead to great disappointments.
Beyond comparing two individuals who have nothing to do with each other, it’s also important to understand that using your last relationship as a yardstick is counterproductive. If that relationship ended, it means that mistakes were made at different moments, by you and/or your ex, and it would be wiser to build a different story, accept that it is different, and change your approach. If you’re not satisfied with your recent results, consider changing your method 😉
Lastly, comparing your intense love story with Antoine from your college days to your new encounter doesn’t make much sense: firstly, you’re no longer the same person; you’ve changed as you’ve become an adult, and the emotional imprint you’re comparing your current feelings to is not entirely accurate: the memory of an emotion is not the emotion itself; it tends to embellish under the effect of nostalgia.
Are your criteria the right ones?
We’re not all very perceptive when it comes to romantic compatibility. Out of fear of being alone or because we listen more to our desire than to our head, we can make poor choices in our encounters. This can lead us, for example, to be involved with people who don’t share the same values as us, which often leads to failure.
That’s why it’s important to take a moment and write down what we want for ourselves and our future relationship. Create a kind of commitment with ourselves that we decide to uphold. Commit to finding someone who shares our values and respects our boundaries. We are essentially defining our own quality charter. 😅
Of course, we will need to make concessions on less important aspects of the relationship (like their passion for the Tour de France or their insistence on tidiness), but from now on, we decide that we will make no exceptions when it comes to what is essential for our own fulfilment and that of our couple.
The myth of the soulmate
In love, we often talk about meeting our soulmate, the person who will complete us and with whom we will finally feel fulfilled. I don’t think it’s healthy to wait for someone to complete us because it means accepting that we have a void that we’re not trying to resolve on our own: a lack of self-confidence, a lack of self-love, etc.
Human beings and relationships are far too complex to imagine an ideal love by considering the other person as the ultimate missing piece of a puzzle. Our existence, life choices, and happiness are in our hands. Let’s not wait for someone else to be happy. Let’s consider ourselves as whole and complete entities, where the presence of another individual will not complete us but will instead take us further and enhance us.
Being with someone should give us a stronger motivation to become a better version of ourselves and to surpass ourselves even more than we would have done alone, but it should not replace the ambition we would have for ourselves.
A numbers game
To find someone, you have to meet several men. When I say “meet,” I mean the experience of engaging in conversations with these men, not simply a superficial assessment as encouraged by various dating apps. Often, those who lament not finding anyone simply don’t have enough encounters, either because their life isn’t structured for it or because the entry selection is too strict or based on overly restrictive criteria. Try to have genuine conversations with a larger number of men in any way possible (one or two per month is not a large number). Why not look for the man of your life… in your own life.
