This may be more of a rant but I’m just feeling really frustrated and hurt.
I was recently dumped and I didn’t see it coming. I haven’t been in many relationships and I’m a virgin in my late 20s. I was so sure that I had found love this time and it turns out I was very wrong. Now I’m getting even more frustrated/upset because to me, the clock just keeps ticking and I’m running out of time. People say finding love is never too late! And that’s great they feel that way but personally, I always thought I’d be married by 23. It took me YEARS to accept that it might not happen until 35. I’d be devastated if I hit that age and still wasn’t married.
I would very much consider myself a hopless romantic and while I am desperate to find love, I’m not desperate to the point that I’d date anyone who gave me any kind of attention. I have standards that I refuse to settle on because I know what I want in a partner and what life I want to live.
When I express this frustration to family, they always default to “Oh the reason you can’t find love is because you don’t love yourself and/or you need to learn to be happy with just yourself.” I feel like the philosophy is bullshit. I can’t even put into words how pissed off I get when I hear anything like that. I don’t want to learn how to love myself or work on internal gratification. I’ve known very early on that I’m externally motivated. I believe you can still love others without loving yourself. The two have no correlation. I’m just doomed to be forever alone because I don’t love myself???
I’m also tired of hearing “work on you” or “when you stop looking that’s when love finds you” or “just enjoy being single”. My number one priority right now is finding my forever partner. I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life. Learning a new hobby or “living my best life” is not going to make me happy. I do find happiness in staying busy and being useful but right now my goal is to be in a loving relationship happily married.
5 comments
>I’m externally motivated. I believe you can still love others without loving yourself. The two have no correlation.
How’s this been working out for you so far?
It might not help you find love quicker and you can definitely love others without loving yourself, but it would probably make you happier and more satisfied with your life, which will be more attractive, especially to higher quality men who would want to settle down. It might also contribute to having a stable, long term partnerships. If you’re putting a lot of validation on your relationships, it adds a lot of stress to them, hard to grow and develop under that kind of additional stress.
I’ve never related to anything more. you are not alone in these feelings
You do need to learn to be happy in your own skin, but that is a separate issue from finding a relationship. I don’t think you should give up trying to find someone while you are working on that.
Keep in mind though, that once the honeymoon phase of the relationship wears off, it’s not really going to be enough to keep you happy all on it’s own. It is a nice positive though.
I’ll make this very short, my last relationship ended because of insecurities I had with myself. I couldn’t communicate and was scared that I wasn’t good enough for the person I was with. I didn’t realize how much good I had done for her and how much we loved each other. I was always negative towards myself and only saw my bad traits. It wasn’t until after we broke up I realized 1 the mistake I made by breaking up in the first place, and 2 how much my own hatred for myself leaked into my relationship. Go ahead, try to love someone without loving yourself but it always catches up in the end, and when it does you just feel desolate, sad, and empty. Now I get to watch her as she walks out of my life, knowing that no matter how much I fight for her, it is too late, as she does not love me the same way anymore.
Work on u is not bad advice.
We as people should ALL always work on ourself to be the best version of ourself as best we can.
Be fit be healthy both physically and mentally have a decent job and life sorted out etc etc
Also in general u have to try and understand the “dream man/woman” you want, what would they want in you to some degree.