What Years of Singlehood Taught Me About Love
By: Amber Carlson
Tags: Life, Dating, Life Lessons, Relationships, Love

What Years of Singlehood Taught Me About Love

I spent a good portion of my life being single. It took me years to figure out how I was standing in my own way.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels

By my calculations, I’ve spent approximately six years of my dating life on my own. Before my current relationship, I was one of those perpetually-single gals who endlessly bounced from one relationship to the next, never staying with one person for long. I had the classic “revolving door” dating life.

“I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison

I used to think I just had terrible luck. Sometimes I wondered if there were any good men out there anymore, or if they were all taken. On my loneliest of days, I was convinced I’d be alone forever.

After a long string of relationships and flings that went nowhere, it was tempting — far too tempting — to want to blame all of my ex-partners for all of the ways it didn’t work out. Eventually, though, I started to see that there was a pattern here. Maybe it wasn’t just them, after all.

Maybe I had something to do with it.

I was the common denominator, after all. I started to see that the problem wasn’t that I had dated an endless string of losers and jerks (although some of them undoubtedly were). It was that, for too many years, I held onto unhealthy attitudes and destructive beliefs that sabotaged my prospects and my ability to be in the loving, nurturing, long-term relationship I craved — and, thankfully, am now in.

I stood in my own way for too many years. And if you’re single and longing deeply to find your “one”, I hate to tell you this, but — you might be in the same boat. And while this realization might feel like a slap in the face at first — it did for me, too — it’s the first step towards liberating yourself from the vicious cycle you’ve been caught in for far too long.

Here are some of the core beliefs that held me back in my dating life for many years, and how I’ve made progress towards overcoming them.

We really do need to love ourselves first.

One of the biggest mistakes I made that kept me single for so many years?

I didn’t love myself enough.

I know. We’ve all heard that we have to love ourselves before someone else can love us. We’ve heard it a million bajillion times and it’s practically a cliche. But it took me a long time to fully realize why this is so true.

It isn’t just that loving ourselves makes us more confident and attractive in other people’s eyes, although that’s surely part of the reason. When we don’t love ourselves, it seeps out of us and poisons our lives in a thousand different ways.

One of the most subtle and corrosive effects is that it drives us to habitually and continually choose the wrong partners. We actually seek out and choose to be with partners who are unavailable, noncommittal, and treat us like garbage — because it’s what we’re used to, and what we expect. It reinforces our own bullshit belief that we are unworthy of love.

And on the off chance that we do find someone who is caring and sweet and treats us well? We write them off as “too nice”. We think we’re not attracted to them because we’re not used to the way they treat us. We don’t feel “chemistry” because they don’t dick around with our emotions, string us along, or leave us wondering if they care.

The irony is that these are the men who can actually be good, loving, available partners to us — yet, more often than not, when we don’t love ourselves enough, we leave them.

My lack of self-love kept me pursuing partners who were terrible for me while quickly discarding ones who might have actually made great boyfriends. I rejected being treated with kindness and care in favor of emotional drama, uncertainty, and the mad sparks I felt with those unavailable “bad boys”.

I chased after all the wrong things, and I put up with a lot of really crappy treatment. And while men who treat women poorly certainly bear responsibility for acting like schmucks, the reality is that I chose them, time and time again. Their treatment of me perfectly lined up with and affirmed my belief that I was not loveable. And hence, I enabled, abetted, and reinforced their behavior. That’s on me.

Loving ourselves means, first, that we take responsibility for how we show up in relationships. We fully own the choices we have made in the past and the role we have played in our dating lives thus far. Refusing to love ourselves means that we stay stuck in unhealthy patterns because we remain victims of our own choices. As long as we accept poor treatment from others, we are part of the problem.

We must learn to choose compatibility and authentic connection over surface attraction and chemistry.

Oh, my. So many of us struggle with this, don’t we? And it causes so much needless heartache. But the fact is, we in Western cultures are raised to believe some really unrealistic things about love. We are so conditioned to chase after chemistry, sparks, attraction and lust that, a lot of times, we prioritize those over genuine connection.

Actually, what’s scary is how easy it is to mistake these superficial things for authentic connection. I know I did this — many, many, times.

A lot of us women have a pattern of falling for unavailable men. The “chemistry” can feel like it’s through-the-roof, but in reality, what we feel is just the heightened emotional intensity of never being certain of someone else’s feelings for us. We’re not “so connected” to them; we’re always longing to be closer to them, always craving more than we’re getting.

We become so desperate for them to want us the way that we want them, and we mistake our longing for attraction. We confuse our own desire to be wanted with some kind of mystical connection that isn’t there, and never will be.

Once you’ve been through this rollercoaster ride enough times, you’ll almost be suspicious of the men who don’t fit this pattern. My partner now has never played games, never left me guessing, and never made a secret of his feelings, and in the beginning, it threw me for a loop. But now I realize that this is exactly how love should look. It should feel safe and secure. Most of us just don’t know what this feels like, so we subconsciously run from it.

The Lure of the “Bad Boy”

We women really have the hots for bad boys. They’re elusive, mysterious, sexy — and, most of the time, terrible boyfriends. But too often, we fall for their spell — mainly because of our cultural conditioning and the messages we receive about what romance is supposed to look like.

These guys draw you in at first with their charm, good looks, and swagger. But what’s fascinating — and kind of terrifying — about the charismatic dudes who get a ton of attention from women is that many of them score higher-than-average on the “dark triad” personality traits of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.

So, you have guys with these magnetic, alluring personalities who have confidence in spades — but often also have a manipulative streak, lack empathy, and care very little about anyone other than themselves. Men like this can be ridiculously attractive at first — that is, of course, until the facade falls away and you realize it was all mostly an act.

I think a lot of us women imagine that we can change these guys; we fantasize about getting them to want to commit to us. We think that if we just love them enough — or if we can make them love us enough — they’ll change their ways and magically transform into caring, empathic, emotionally mature men. We believe we can “save” them.

But the fact is, most of the time, we can’t change who they are. Most of the time, bad boys lack the capacity to be good, loving boyfriends and husbands. For the sake of our own happiness and sanity, we’re better off leaving these guys than sticking around and holding our breath for a satisfying relationship that will probably never materialize.

In Defense of “Nice Guys”

When we recognize our inherent worth, we start to choose partners who treat us as worthy. We stop chasing after “sparks” and superficial chemistry and start seeking the kind of genuine connection that creates a foundation for a real, lasting relationship. And there’s no one more ready to give us that genuine connection than the “nice guys” in our midst.

Because the truth is, there are men out there who are emotionally mature and ready to commit. There are men who want to love, respect, and cherish their partners. When we meet these guys, we may or may not feel the same crazy-intense passion or fireworks as we do with the “bad ones”. Their sweetness may feel strange, even foreign. We may even feel turned off by it at times.

But if we can learn to believe that we are worthy of true caring, we’ll slowly begin to recognize what that feels like. Little by little, we’ll grow to accept it. Over time, we’ll unravel the conditioning we received about “how men should treat us” and learn what it feels like be truly loved. And once you’ve felt this, you’ll never want to go back.

We have to accept the inherent uncertainty and vulnerability of love.

One of the hardest things to come to grips with about loving someone — with every fiber of your being — is the realization that you could lose them at any time.

Life is uncertain and tomorrow is guaranteed to no one. You, or I, or anyone else could get in a car crash today while driving back from work and never make it home. We can fall ill; we can succumb. We are mortal.

Each and every day, when we love someone, we take the risk of losing them. But perhaps even scarier than the risk of losing someone is the risk of letting yourself be fully seen by another person, flaws and all. We’re just as afraid of being seen as we are of staying hidden.

I was absolutely terrified of intimacy for the longest time. It literally took me years to even begin to overcome this fear, and I think that also contributed to me continually choosing partners I could never really get close with. Keeping people at arm’s distance let me feel an illusion of safety, but it was only an illusion — and the loneliness and isolation weren’t worth it anymore, at a certain point.

The only way to overcome this fear of closeness is to let yourself be in a relationship with someone. Let them crack you open. Let them into your heart and hand over the reins, and it will change your entire concept of love. This will scare the living daylights out of you, probably — and it will transform your life.

Now I’m in the safest, most loving relationship I could have ever imagined being in, and I’ll tell you: I’m still scared out of my mind at times. Being so close to someone — letting him into my thoughts, feelings, and innermost being — feels so tender, raw, and downright uncomfortable that sometimes I almost can’t take it.

And you know what else? After two and a half years with this person, I still worry that I’ll mess it up somehow. I never quite feel like I know what I’m doing. I’m afraid that I’ll scare him off at some point, or that one day he’ll just wake up and realize I’m not really the one he wants to be with.

Until that day, though, I’m going to love and treasure him with everything I’ve got. I can say, without a doubt, that feeling this love and having this person in my life is 100% worth the fear, risk, and uncertainty that come with it.

TL;DR

I was single and lonely for a long, long time. And actually, I wouldn’t trade those years for anything, nor would I trade the relationships I’ve had. They all taught me a lot about life, love, and being human. But only after I truly learned to love myself, rethought my relationship priorities, and worked towards overcoming my fear of intimacy did I finally find the lasting love I had always dreamed of.