Relationships
How to Find the Love of Your Life in 5 Steps
Five steps to help you find love and a lasting relationship
Love is a tricky thing. It’s a surge of emotions that precipitate a cascade of drives that push us toward a relationship with someone else. Love is a volatile state for us to be in, one that offers tremendous rewards and the potential for total unhappiness and pain. For all the time and effort we expend finding love, something that most of us fail at a number of times in life. It’s not easy. And it’s especially not easy if you don’t have a strategy for finding it.
Have you thought about what your strategy is? Do you have an outline of ideas that will help you in your quest to find love? If not, relax, I’ve got you covered.
Here are five steps you can take to find the love of your life (and hopefully keep them).
5. Make a Commitment
Before setting out to find love, make a commitment to yourself that you’re going to find a relationship that’s healthy, happy, and satisfying before you do anything else. And it’s important that we hold ourselves to our commitments. Ask yourself, “Is this what I really want?” Follow that question up with, “Is this something I’m willing to do almost anything to get?”
Believe it or not, a lot of people will quit at this point, before they’ve even started. They might think they want love but they’re not willing to put in the work required to do so. Making a commitment to put in the effort is step number one and once you’re determined to find someone to compliment your life, the rest of the process will be just going through the steps.
4. Find out What You Want
A lot of people don’t actually know what they want. They haven’t given much thought about the kind of person they’d like to attract in life, they just want love. Hey, that’s okay, we’ve all been there. Everybody needs love.
But when it comes to building a successful relationship, it pays big to try and pinpoint what we want before setting out. Do you want a goth girlfriend or a hunk of a lumberjack? Whatever kind of person you want, imagine them! Ask yourself about more than just superficial traits, too.
How do you want them to treat you?
Do you want them to have a great sense of humor who’s totally extroverted, or would you rather they be the quiet introverted type?
Not only is it important to know what you want if you’re going to try and get it, but knowing the kind of person we want will also clue us in on what that person might be attracted to. Which will teach us what they might want. Then, the next step is easy, just try to become that kind of person.
3. Work on Yourself.
This might be the least popular part of this list, so we’ll get the bad news out of the way. Love is an investment.
A lot of people go through life thinking that having a lifelong relationship is something they’re entitled to. As if you can just go to the market and pick up a new lover, someone to keep who will love you with bright eyes and big smiles no matter who you are or what you do.
But the first part of finding love is becoming someone who’s loveable. That means we have to do the internal work to become the kind of person people want to be around and stay around. Fortunately, most of the things you’ll need to do are skills you can learn. And in the digital age, teachers are everywhere.
Learn how to be funny, patient, thoughtful, and kind. Seek out the material that teaches you how to get ahold of your temper.
People say, “If you want to find love, just be yourself!” all the time. But what separates those who succeed from those who don’t is oftentimes a matter of who’s willing to be the best version of themselves. Find out what that is and try to be it.
Self-growth is how we prepare ourselves for a relationship that will be a give-and-take, an exchange with another person that we can build to last.
2. Learn How to Talk to Strangers
For a lot of people, this is the hard part. They’re willing to invest in themselves, they’re willing to work on themselves, they’re willing to make the commitment, but they bawl up and get shy the moment it comes time to get out and talk to people.
Learning how to talk to people takes practice. You’ll want to start by making small talk with people, strangers in passing, people online, without any expectation of an outcome. Don’t go find the most overwhelmingly gorgeous person you can think of and try to spark up a conversation in hopes of romance. You’ve got to crawl before can sprint a five-minute mile.
Talking to other people is the art form that you’ll need to master before you can build a healthy social life that will help you find the person that’s the best fit for you.
1. Date & Wait
The last and final step is difficult for a lot of people. I know it used to be for me. It took me years to learn that finding something serious takes a long time. I used to date around for a couple of weeks and then get disheartened that I hadn’t found someone yet, and then I’d quit my search altogether for a few months until I got lonely enough to try again. How silly I was!
“What’s wrong with me?” I’d wonder. “Am I just that unloveable?” Don’t worry, if you’ve had these thoughts, they’re perfectly natural. But these are the expectations we need to unlearn. I realized I was putting unrealistic expectations on finding love.
Our culture teaches us that dating and relationships should be easy. People act like you’re weird if you struggle with dating and relationships, but nothing could be further from the truth. We all struggle from time to time.
I remember being under this bogus impression that finding a relationship was just as easy as going out and meeting someone, like in the movies. But I’ve since learned that finding someone we’re compatible with is no easy task. It takes a long time.
I dated a lot of people, talked to many more on social media, and made a ton of friends in the year leading up to my newest relationship. But, you know what? Only one of the dozens (hundreds?) of people I talked to ended up panning out and being a good fit for me.
You see, once you’ve got your act together, you know how to get out and interact with people, and you’re ready to start searching for someone seriously, you’re going to start dating people. Hopefully, you’ll start dating a lot of people. And you can’t expect to find a happy, healthy, loving relationship right out the gate.
So date and be ready to wait. Love doesn’t happen overnight for any of us, no matter what dating gurus and our media culture (*ehem*…Romantic Comedies) try to teach you. We all struggle. We all have to wait for it. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you because you don’t find love in a matter of weeks. It took me a year to find the right person for me and I’m glad I waited. As I look back from a secure, happy, healthy relationship, I now see that all of the other people I was hanging out with and maybe went on a date or two with weren’t right for me. So take your time. You’re worth it.
