Being single is not crappy. Not at all, actually. I have talked in detail about the benefits of staying single for a long period of time. But it’s a totally different ball game if you’re unattached and wish otherwise. Maybe looking for love does more harm than good, maybe there is veracity in the old saying, ‘love comes when you least expect it’.
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If you’ve been single for a while, regularly went out on dates, made an effort to find a compatible partner and exhausted all the dating options out there, maybe you should take a deep breath and listen. It’s probably your fault. Or at least that’s what Mark Manson claims, a well-known blogger and self-help writer, with quite a passion for the ‘love department’.
He gives three possible explanations for why you are still footloose and fancy-free:
1. No respect for yourself
If you don’t respect yourself, neither will others. It’s dead simple. Taking care of you physically, emotionally and mentally will make people be drawn to the prospect of nurturing you emotionally, mentally and physically.
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Manson advises single people to try this out for a month: take care of themselves, exercise, eat well, sleep like babies, make plans, engage in productive activities that bring them satisfaction. Drop the bad habits and be social, make your voice heard, share things just because and pursue people in all honesty, not out of desperation or obligation.
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Once you think about putting yourself first, the experiment will pay off and soon you will attract admiration and respect. Manson says to relinquish the concept of ranking and competition and replace it with perceiving the world in terms of compatibility and incompatibility. Aim for finding the compatibility.
2. Ridiculous expectations
Ridiculous expectations are at fault for you still being single. The fact that we can’t seem to even be open to accepting other people’s imperfections is almost a curse. We find it really tough to abandon our vision about how a relationship should be or how out partner must be. This delusion makes a lot of people miss the ‘matching train’.
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It all comes down to perfection: the ones who seek perfection in others and the ones who expect others to recognize the perfection in themselves. People have all kinds of absurd expectations from a potential partner. They feel entitled to a whole range of things, some of them quite ludicrous. Go to Mark Manson’s blog to read some great stories about false expectations in the dating world today.
“It’s really simple: We all have our own imperfections. Everyone we date also has their own imperfections. Intimacy and romance is determined by people who have comparable and complementary imperfections to one another”.
3. Bad at intimacy
If you’ve checked all the boxes, if you can say, with your fist on your heart, that you’ve acted like an exemplary specimen on dates but still nobody sticks around, then you probably haven’t developed the skills for intimacy.
Nowadays, relationships are objectified, they’re treated like an exchange of information and fluids. Fewer and fewer people go deep into a relationship, they keep it all on a superficial level and don’t get their real emotions out so they end up not connecting at all.
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Emotional investment and vulnerability generate intimacy in a relationship. Fear of intimacy will haunt your love life forever, you can read here all about that. You have to let it all out in the open, expose your true self and be ready for rejection. You’ve got to take risks to go after what you want. First and foremost, you should look within and discover your true emotions. Only then can you create emotional intimacy with someone else.
Work on these three things and you’ll soon change your relationship status. Let’s help others in the dating process, share this post!
