i've heard that the best way to find love is to stop searching for it, and spend your time and efforts focused on self improvement and doing things you like. this gibes with my recent experience.

i dated my first girlfriend from age 14 to age 20. when we started dating my freshman year of high school, i fell for her right away. i learned so many things from her, things most people my age and younger already knew, but had escaped me because of the difficulty i have relating to people and understanding social norms, and because i have bipolar disorder, which makes any form of introspection terrifying. i grew to see her as a second mother. the relationship was probably really good for me the whole time i was in high school, but when i wanted to leave the state for college, she said she knew i'd leave her and begged me not to. growing up immersed in disney bullshit, i told myself that love meant never choosing your happiness over that of your partner, so i stayed in our hometown of cincinnati, and went to a small liberal arts college.

i was miserable at first, and it only got worse from there. by the time i was halfway through my junior year, i'd attempted suicide twice. i felt trapped; i wanted to live on campus and have friends and drink and do things kids my age did, but i felt that choosing any of those things (which she had forbidden) over being with her was choosing pleasure over love. i was afraid that if i broke up with her, all of the girls i met in the future would ask why i broke up with a girl after dating her for years, and see that as a reason not to date me. at the same time, i thought that even if they wanted to date me, by leaving my first love, i was implicitly leaving every girl i'd ever meet in the future.

i wanted to be able to say that i had only loved one woman, ever, with all of my heart. it seemed ridiculous to imagine myself saying 'well, i used to really love this one woman, but now i love a different one.'

now, you can only bang your head into a wall so many times before the thought of going around it or even climbing over it starts to sound more appealing, and eventually i had the right combination of despair and hope, courage and fear, to break up with her. within a week, i went from researching pawn shops in cincinnati to see if i could buy a gun and shoot myself, to feeling like i was the luckiest guy in the world, for having been through enough shit to shed subtle tears of joy while drinking and playing poker with a few friends, because i had wanted it so badly for so long.

i spent the next 5 years trying to find a girl to whom i could be that dedicated and loving and loyal, a girl who felt the same way about me, a girl i could marry and raise children and grow old with. every time i met a girl i liked, i'd fall for her in like a week. i see now that because i was approaching all of these relationships from a place of intense desire for them to work, they never did.

for example, i had one awesome relationship with a girl i met at a bar, on a night when i felt miserable and rejected because a girl i'd see maybe twice told me she was seeing someone else, most likely becuase i was way too into her. i went to the bar hoping to meet a hookup for casual sex. instead, i met a girl whom i immediately felt was too special for that. we dated for a year or so, and our relationship ended less than a month after we moved in together, while i was crazy addicted to pot and experiencing a lot of religious psychosis as a result of my bipolar disorder coupled with the excessive drug use.

at first i was just happy to be out of the relationship, because we were fighting a lot -mostly over my drug use and increasingly strong belief that i was hacker-buddah-jesus. this happiness lasted about six months, and then vanished over the course of a week, when a girl i'd been fooling around with told me she didn't want to see me any more because i was smoking pot all the time, out of shape, and more than a little nuts. i felt miserable. i knew my life was in the shitter, and that the girl i'd broken up with months ago was really great for me. i remember looking through photos i'd taken while we were together, and finding a picture of a massive blueberry pancake we made one sunday morning. when she suggested that instead of making several pancakes, we should just make one big one with all the batter and all the blueberries, i told her i loved her for the first time right then and there. i saw this picture and burst into tears, feeling like the intuition i had years earlier - that i was implicitly leaving all relationships by leaving the first one - was right.

i decided to make an ok cupid account, in hopes that maybe a new relationship would solve all of my problems. i started talking to a girl i met on there, and before we met in person i told her my theory that it would possible to trigger a standing electromagnetic wave in the earth's atmosphere if you got a bunch of people thinking in such a way that their brainwaves caused a massive schumann resonance. for some reason i was convinced that this could be caused by some sort of giant public orgy. in my theory, this standing wave would act as a carrier frequency for the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of all people on earth, enlightening all minds and triggering the singularity.

for some reason this didn't scare her. the day we met in person for the first time was also the day i'd decided to leave north carolina (where i was at the time) for san francisco, to make the change from electronic trading to the startup world. as normally happens, i fell for her very quickly and we agreed to try the long distance thing. it was hard as hell, but we worked at it. in december 2010, she came to spend christmas with my family. i have 8 siblings, and we are very close with each other. when they met her and liked her, when she yelled just as loud as the rest of us during heated games of mafia, i knew i could be with her. i told her that i wanted to get engaged, becuase i was afraid the long distance thing would be too tough otherwise. she said she wasn't ready, and i left ohio to go back to california hopeful but almost resigned to it ending, and a week later i was single again.

the day we broke up, the last thing she said to me was that i needed to get psychotherapy, in particular a form called analysis, so that i could learn to deal with my emotions.

this was 10 months ago. since then, after a couple of thousands of dollars worth of therapy, a lot of journaling and meditation and introspection, i'm in a completely different place. i'm not lookiging for love any more; i figure if it's meant to happen, it will, and if it's not, i've loved enough to last me a lifetime.

i've been in kiev, ukraine the last two months, working with an outsourcing team here to launch my startup. the only person i knew on arrival was my buisness partner, so i've spent a lot of time alone. i don't think i can possibly overstate how much i've grown and learned in the past two months. instead of running from or being completely overwhelmed by my negative emotions, i sit with them, talk to them, ask them what's wrong and how i can help them and thank them for letting me know how i'm hurting. when i do that, they don't go away, but they no longer feel like something i'm suffering from, so much as something i'm observing. instead of feeling like the part of me that tells me i'm meant to cause the singularity and save the world from destroying itself is some sort of asshole who's trying to fuck with me, i realize now that it's a part of me that is lonely, scared, and afraid of feeling as hurt as i've felt in the past. i no longer try to push it away or ignore it or get mad at it; now i thank it for trying to help me, patiently tell it that what it's doing doesn't make things better, and ask it to remind me of pleasant memories like playing board games with my family over christmas vacation when it gets upset.

i'm typing this in a restaurant at the airport, about to get on a flight back home. i left california few months ago a tangled emotional mess, afraid of and hating parts of myself, desparately searching for the love of another to heal me. i'm returning feeling more calm and peaceful than i've ever felt in my entire life. i feel immense gratitude for every fleeting feeling of pain or pleasure, for every audible click of the keys on this keyboard, and for every pixel in the laptop screen.

i have no idea if i'll ever find a girl to marry, and for the first time in my life, i'm ok with that. i have all the love i need, from my parents, my siblings, my friends, my cats, the people on reddit and facebook and google plus who like the shit i write, and most importantly, from myself. somethings tells me that entering a relationship in this state of mind is much more likely to lead to something that lasts.