Failure in Love

Ivylily wrote: I'm constantly reminded that I will never find someone and no one will ever love me.

Where are these reminders coming from? It's just what you tell yourself.

I recommend you tell yourself better things. You have plenty of time to find someone who's right for you.

It sounds like you don't love yourself.

If you don't love yourself, you can't fill that gap by expecting others to love you. This is a big turn off for most people. Few guys want to be with a person that doesn't love themselves.

Candid wrote:

Ivylily wrote: I'm constantly reminded that I will never find someone and no one will ever love me.

Where are these reminders coming from? It's just what you tell yourself.

I recommend you tell yourself better things. You have plenty of time to find someone who's right for you.

From constant failed relationships or attempted relationship. I met a guy last month and we had a few dates and it just ended abruptly few hours ago. Its looks like a pattern. I'm almost 30, yes in someway I am still young but than again it is difficult to find a partner

Richard@DecisionSkills wrote:It sounds like you don't love yourself.

If you don't love yourself, you can't fill that gap by expecting others to love you. This is a big turn off for most people. Few guys want to be with a person that doesn't love themselves.

I do love myself and I have accepted everything about my flaws, either superficial or deep down. Unfortunately, I just can't catch a break

Ivylily wrote: I feel that I don't deserve love ...

There's not a peck of self-love in this. What makes you think you can catch a break while feeling this way?

My advice is don't go looking for love. Don't focus on getting into a relationship. This will never work. You need to go do the things that you enjoy and join some community work. Get yourself into situations where you will meet a lot of different people. Paradoxical as it is, you will find someone if you don't go looking.

Ivylily wrote: I'm constantly reminded that I will never find someone and no one will ever love me.

This sounds to me like you have some nasties in your interpersonal environment because this doesn't sound like something you are conjuring up in Mind. It sounds like your perceptions of ideas that are mentally presented to you in Mind. For that to happen the other person has to be strongly related to you.

Once you realize that these ideas are mere perceptions of some jealous person's malicious suggestions, then you can easily reject them. And the best is to replace them with ideas of success, ideas that you have someone in your life that you have a long and happy relationship that last throughout your life.

Replace the nasty suggestions with positive affirmations that you are lovable and that you love yourself and see yourself as a wonderful humane person. Then you will attract another humane person in yours life and have a good relationship as you desire.

Ivylily wrote:

Richard@DecisionSkills wrote:It sounds like you don't love yourself.

If you don't love yourself, you can't fill that gap by expecting others to love you. This is a big turn off for most people. Few guys want to be with a person that doesn't love themselves.

I do love myself and I have accepted everything about my flaws, either superficial or deep down. Unfortunately, I just can't catch a break

Your statement right here is very telling. When you love who you are, that means you come first. In these statements, you make yourself last. You are saying they made the decisions and you were left empty handed, which reflects poorly on you. You're letting people define you, which means you do not have a clear picture of who it is you are. I noted where you said you love being in relationships. Have you ever considered you like them because you feel more defined? It sounds like you go into relationships looking for the other person to feed you positive input about yourself which makes you feel like you function better because you suddenly generate confidence. Would that be a fairly accurate statement?

The break you seek to catch is already in your hands. You just need to exercise it and give it to yourself. Dating is not like the NFL draft where you go into each round hoping someone will pick you. And as each round passes and they choose not to take you, your sense of accomplishment and value diminish. That has nothing to do with how you should be seeing this process. You are carrying the blame for the results instead of looking at the fundamentals of what you should be examining for yourself.

Meeting a new person will always be a unique and unpredictable situation. Some people shine on the outside with high marks for presentation, but only later start exhibiting other areas that don't carry quite the gleam. In short we all have flaws. If you want to sort through this situation and get at the truth, I have to tell you the truth starts with yourself.

I've been married nearly 25 years and have kids and even one grandchild now. When I met my wife you know the first thing she said to me? She said, " Hey! Got a name?" What an intro. What did I say back? I said, " What's in a name?" LOL! That's how we started. And if you had told me that would later produce three kids and a grandson, I would have hand walked you to the nearest asylum and told them to throw away the keys. You can't forecast this stuff. The only thing you control is YOURSELF.

So what can I tell you about long term relationships? Let me destroy some myths for you. It didn't work because we said all the right things. It didn't work because we always wore the right clothes and knew how to make ourselves unbelievably charming. It didn't work because we were just two horny monsters who always knew how to be the ultimate stars in bed. And it didn't work because we liked all the same movies or music. Have I covered all the superficial stuff? Here's why it worked and continues to work to this day.

We stay together because of WHO WE ARE and that feeds what we mean to each other. You see, all of those things I just mentioned are not who you are. That's superficial nonsense that society often places WAAAAAAAAAY too much weight on to "snag a date!" Well I get the impression you're not trying to "snag a date".I don't get the impression you're looking for a one night stand. So that means we drop the car lot tactics and we BECOME the people we actually ARE. This means you need to be YOU and nothing but YOU. However that plays is how you should be. Why? Because pretending to be what you're not or catering to what someone else is does not produce an authentic version of yourself.

If you're out with a good friend and they bring a friend with them, do you go out of your way to dress up for them and be extra friendly and ask deep penetrating questions about their life? Probably not. Are you thinking about what kind of impression you are making on them when you're sitting down and chatting? Probably not. Are you worried about whether they see you as you actually are so you might see them again? Probably not. Will it bother you that if they never see you again, it might have been because you did something wrong? Probably not. So why is that? It's because you're just seeing them as themselves and you're just being you. You're not acting like you're up for the Academy Award and you haven't gotten your speech rehearsed. Meeting someone new should always play to the tune of meeting that nondescript friend of a friend. You don't know them and you should not walk away with expectations that you should have controlled how they saw you. Again... YOU ONLY CONTROL YOURSELF.

So does this mean you act slovenly and disinterested? Of course not. Common sense still applies. If you're meeting someone at a nice restaurant, dress accordingly. You can dress nice, but it should still be you they're meeting, not some idealized version of yourself. And if you love yourself, then you already know who you are... RIGHT? So be who you are. There's nothing for you to be self aware of while you're out. You should be enjoying your time out with them and reflect later on who they were and if this is a person YOU would actually want to spend anymore time with. YOU do the grading for yourself. So what happens if you liked what you saw but they didn't? Good! They saved you the time to figure that out yourself. Move on. That doesn't mean something was wrong with you. It means it was not anything you needed to invest any more time in.

And it doesn't matter what they're reasons are. When you are happy with you and love who it is you are, other people do NOT define you. You MUST be happy with you FIRST. Whatever a person has for not wanting another date is always going to be pointless to me. Why? Because long term relationships are not about a perfect race. Quite the contrary. It's about being IMPERFECT... but accepted anyway. THAT'S the key. And we're ALL imperfect. I'm not talking about two needy people feeding off each other's insecurities. I'm talking about two INDIVIDUALS, who know who they are separately, that chose to be with the other person because they care for one another on a deeper, more fundamental level that does not feed off of being perfect. We both try really hard and we make sacrifices for each other. It's not about showing out. It's about showing up.

So quit worrying about "why" a date didn't work. Someone recently asked me what I felt when I saw my old "ex's". I told them I understood why they were my ex's. If they didn't qualify long enough to even be a steady partner, I typically forget them entirely. And that's how you need to see those moments. The only thing that "failed" is how you're defining those moments. Be glad they didn't work out. Be glad they said it early instead of dragging you around only to express it later. Take control of your life and start looking at these events with less weight and place more importance on not whether they could have worked out, but the fact they weren't going to work out. Their reasons are their own to worry about. Forget about them and move on.