The way the world tells it, dating is hard, there are less decent guys to date, women have a finite amount of time before they pass their ‘sell by date’ while men seem to have all the time in the world, and there’s an element of suck it and see and work with what we have.

Throw in the fact that there are a lot of emotionally unavailable men (Mr Unavailables) and assclowns out there, and that many of us struggle with low self-esteem, and you would be inclined to believe that you have to ‘settle’ and that love is an elusive thing that comes in a package of drama and ambiguity.

All the settling and relationship dumbing down to accommodate men in the hope of getting the relationship we profess to want has me wondering, are we giving up on love?

I don’t believe in settling. It doesn’t mean you opt for creating standards that no-one can meet, but settling is a path to misery.

Settling sets you up to wonder about the should, woulda, coulda’s and its very nature, has you seemingly placing yourself in a position of accepting something that ordinarily you wouldn’t, because you feel like you’ve run out of options or that you don’t want to take a chance on you and believe that a healthy, loving relationship with a healthy, loving mate is out there.

The trouble is, when you don’t like or  love yourself an awful lot and have poor love habits, you have a tendency to have little or no boundaries, and unwittingly find yourself behaving like someone that has no options.

You choose men that reflect the negative things that you believe about yourself, love, and relationships and in turn they appear to remove your options.

Think about it – there you are sticking to that one man like glue wondering if and when things will get better, or wondering what that one man is thinking, saying, doing right now because you’ve become obsessed with thinking about him and the relationship because you wonder what you could have done differently to change things.

There’s that one man you keep letting come back into your life because you think things will be different this time or that one man who you’re wondering why he chose her instead of you. It may even be that every time we meet a guy, we’re wondering if he’s The One even though he has familiar behaviours that we recognise from other poor relationships, or we haven’t even gotten to know him yet and seen whether he is a suitable mate.

The strange thing is that more often than not we know that the man in question is not right for us because he makes us miserable, has so far demonstrated that he is incapable of giving us the relationship we want, and makes the act of staying within boundary lines and treating you with love, trust, care and respect like hard labour.

Why are we banking on one option or treating a guy that has failed to see our value and who has made it clear that he doesn’t want to be in the relationship or behave with decency, as if he is the only man who is capable of ‘loving’ us or us ‘loving’ them?

You have got to stop believing that this is as good as it gets.

You’ve got to stop limiting your options because in doing so, you’re creating limited thinking and then in turn choosing limited partners. They limit what you can expect by managing down your expectations and limit your hope by blowing hot and cold so you never know what to expect or which way your relationship is headed.

As I’ve said before, if we give up on love, we give up on ourselves.

In banking everything on that one guy it’s like saying, I give up on me.

There is life beyond this one guy. In fact, there is love beyond this one guy.

But your own capacity to love will be limited as long as you keep yourself closed to truly liking and loving yourself.

It’s very easy to say you love someone when there’s not a cat’s hope in hell of him actually delivering the relationship you want and it ends up catering to the self-fulfilling prophecy where you get to believe that all men and relationships are like this, or that there must be something wrong with you.

You can’t truly welcome love or truly love someone until you start to treat yourself with love, care, respect, and trust. If you’ve inadvertently given up on love as a result of your beliefs, even though you may be appearing to seek to challenge them, the negative beliefs are sabotaging your success.

At the end of the day, trying to challenge your beliefs by trying to find a man is not the answer. Challenge your beliefs by addressing your own feelings about love so you go out there as a positive woman who feels positive about herself so that she can find positive love.

There will always be chumps and there will always be people with ‘issues’ but you don’t have to be with these guys and in you learning to like and love you, which in turn means that you trust yourself because you have boundaries that allow you to exercise judgement, you teach people how to treat you and what to expect from you, and those that don’t want to play by your basic rules, need to step.

If more assclowns and Mr Unavailables heard the word ‘No’ and had their options closed because women were less accepting of their behaviour, you’d see a lot more of these guys being forced to adapt their behaviour.

We’ve got to start believing in love again. Not fairy tale assclown or Mr Unavailable love, where you choose a poor partner and get him to go from cockroach to frog to prince, after you triumph over a few adversities, but love of the healthy kind. The kind that starts with you.

We’ve got to believe in love by breaking away from the familiarity that a lot of these men and the poor relationships bring and getting uncomfortable with the unfamiliarity of healthier options.

Get uncomfortable and pull yourself out of your comfort zone and start truly embracing the possibility of love and a healthy relationship by letting go of the illusion of that one Mr Unavailable or assclown, and embracing the one you.

Your thoughts?

 

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