If Everyone’s Looking for Love, Why Does it so Often Escape Us?

If everyone’s looking for love, why is it so hard to find? Let’s rule out all the people just looking for sex. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I want to talk about the singles looking for love — and failing to find it. If all these singles are on apps claiming they want a relationship and actually do, in fact, want one, why is it so hard to connect?

The answer is simple, but the solution is anything but easy. We’re all looking for love, but we often block ourselves from finding it. We’ve all heard the old adage that hurt people hurt people, but they also hurt themselves.

When we’ve experienced trauma and don’t completely heal from it, it rewires our brains and changes our perspectives. All the red flags we’re seeing might simply be caution flags we’re overreacting to. The red flags we don’t see might seem like they could be green when we’re refusing to look at any problems head on. We might be genuinely looking for love and connection but unable to recognize it when it’s out there.

I’ve seen this in myself. When I first got divorced, I knew what a healthy relationship looked like. In theory anyway. I’d never been in one. I hadn’t seen many of them modeled. I went out into the world looking for love, but all I did was attract a ton of red flags because I couldn’t see the places where I still needed healing.

I thought my self-esteem was better, so I ignored the holes in it. I thought my self-worth was stronger, but I compromised myself time and again for the crumbs of other people’s attention. I jumped in with both feet without looking and wondered why I so often found myself getting hurt.

For a long time, I drew the wrong conclusions. Men were the problem. Dating culture was the problem. While both of these can be problematic, the real problem was that I had never unpacked early trauma that influenced the way I saw the world. My perspective was colored by family dysfunction, a neglectful marriage, and a lifetime of feeling like I had to do everything myself because no one else was really going to be there for me.

Over time, I ended up in a healthier relationship. It still had its flaws. After all, I was still learning and still trying to navigate a lifetime of pain and disappointment. By the time that relationship came to a close, I found myself back in therapy. This time, I was determined to do what I had never managed to do before. I was going to deal with my trauma head-on.

While I’d had therapy, I had never experienced trauma-specific therapy before. This particular treatment modality taught me that it was possible to feel, process, and integrate my experiences in a way that stopped me from being reactive to the triggers related to them. I began to feel differently about the world around me. I saw relationships in a new light. I could go back out into the world of dating and relationships without attracting red flags or interpreting them as green because that’s what I wanted to believe. I could finally see things as they are — because I was seeing myself clearly for the very first time.

I stopped blaming other people for not being at my level of healing. I made room for compassion, but I stopped compromising myself. I became open to connection, but my boundaries were stronger than they’d ever been before.

I’d like to say that I found a healthy relationship — healthier even than the last, but that’s not what happened. I’ve learned to love myself better. I’ve learned to live with loneliness and to recommit with each experience to being true to who I am and what I want. I’ve shaped a life that I love, and if sometimes I’d like to share it, know that I haven’t given up on that dream.

If single people truly want love and relationships, it seems like it would be easy to find them when there are so many people in the world looking for the same thing. The problem is that we can see the damage in people once we’re healed. We can see the unhealed wounds, and while they are sometimes more cautionary flags than red ones, we still take note.

Now, when a stranger online lashes out at me because I don’t want the same thing he does, I know that it’s not personal. I don’t even attempt to take it personally. I understand that it’s easy to find other single people, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find someone who is a compatible match for our lives.

For a long time, I self-sabotaged connections. Looking back, I can see why, and I have immense compassion for the version of myself that reacted to triggers I didn’t even know existed. These days, I’m open to love. I welcome the experience of connecting with someone I could share my life with. I don’t know if that’s in the cards for me, but I do know that I won’t be getting in my own way anymore.

These days, I’m a far better communicator than I used to be. I talk about what I want. I set boundaries. I don’t take everything so seriously or look at every single connection as soul mate material. Instead, I’ve slowed down my process for the chance at authentic connection. I’m not rushing into the next relationship status update, but I am open to letting a relationship develop with a good person.

I will always be healing. There will always be wounds uncovered that I need to go back and address. Life hurts, and as resilient as I’ve always been, I’m also human. Pain demands to be felt, and I’m learning to face it as it comes. I’ve learned that to avoid it or deny it will only ever delay the process.

A world of single people with apps available to mingle online — it sounds ideal, doesn’t it? For most of us, it’s a nightmare. Beyond social awkwardness and weeding through the poor matches, we’ve got to be willing to truly be vulnerable, which is hard to do for people who haven’t even begun to approach true healing.

Healing is the simple answer to the earlier question. It’s not easy. It can take a long time. But it’s the only way to appreciably change the quality of our dating interactions. It won’t guarantee that we’ll instantly meet the right person, but it can help us know that we won’t sabotage the connection if the right person comes along.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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From The Good Men Project on Medium

What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean?

My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence

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