The Only Advice Your Should Ever Follow To Get What You Truly Want

For a few months now I have been on a quest to discover how to navigate the contradictory world of love advice, a tropical ocean in which you can find everything and the opposite of everything.

Amongst the 8000 of us connecting here, is there anyone out there who can point us all in the right direction?

Here is all of the very best advice available to us on the World Wide Web (or free and unrequested if you tell any acquaintance that you’re single):

The person should be truly emotionally available, but not too much right away because it could be love bombing and therefore unhealthy.
We should be available but also not too available, to keep the attraction alive (but the other person should be fully available for some reason). Let’s hope the other person is not also reading this blog!
We need to put ourselves out there, a new partner won’t fall from the sky. But also don’t be a desperate human out there searching, it will happen when you’re not looking.
You need to step up and fix all your problems, no one wants to be with a problematic human. At the same time, they should love you for who you are.
If you’re not in a relationship it’s because deep inside you don’t actually want it. You will find your person when you are not looking for it.
Real love is easy, you will look back and realize why nothing else worked. But also, if it’s real love you need to fight for it.
Don’t sleep with them the same night, however, if that feels right to you then do sleep with them on the same night. Take time to get to know them but also if you are past 30 and know what you want, go all in and see if it’s the right person.
Be open vulnerable but also, protect your heart (how you do that is still a mystery to me).
The ideal scenario is dating your best friend, but also don’t get too close as friends or you will get friend-zoned.
It takes years and even then you won’t get to know the person. In your 30’s you know what you want in 6 months you will be engaged once you find the right person.

So what is it that we should be looking for?

We know for sure that in our 30’s and above most people in the dating pool have an avoidant attachment style, and we likely are anxious or viceversa. The ‘secure attachment’ ones are more likely to have chosen a partner in their 20’s. We read plenty of articles on why we should avoid an avoidant or a narcissist and even worse when it’s an avoidant narcissist.

It feels like we are all detectives in disguise, following advice on what to do and where to go to spot the right person, or at least someone who is not completely unstable. All advice seems to point us in different directions and when we finally find someone we feel could be right for us, we try and balance between jumping in and taking a step back to observe if the person we have identified has any kind of major psychological issue before engaging. In the meantime we must hope to God (or whatever we believe in) that we won’t get crushed along the way if we just dare to open our hearts.

My GPS must be broken guys so I decided to stop on a curb. I talked to my closest friends but it’s hard to describe to them where I currently am, many of them have never been in this spot. So I pulled my window down and asked a bunch of strangers for direction. They too, were in the same spot, but they had no idea where they were headed.

Great. Those who have found a destination don’t know the starting point and those who are with me at the starting point have no idea of where they are headed.

To complicate matters, those of us at the starting point all have different sized luggage, vehicles, company, shoes, means…and we may be looking for different destinations, while the friends on the phone keep giving us advice as if we were at the same starting point they were at years ago, not realizing it’s a completely different spot.

Is all of this available advice actually helping us or is it complicating our journey even more?

Years ago I took a writing course where our teacher, Robert McKee (aka God of screenwriting), taught us that the more rules and complexities our characters’ ‘world’ has, the more creative and beautiful our characters’ plots will be, as they have to look for solutions that fit within the boundaries imposed by the world we created for them.

One thing is for sure, we have become endlessly creative. Our stories are bound to be interesting: here we are, in an incredibly complex world trying to find a route to happiness. We want to be the main character of a memorable story. We try to navigate the intricacies of dating between all of the rules and pressures imposed by society, the psychological problems of the other people in the dating pool, our biological clocks ticking louder and louder, our own issues, the baggage and heartbreak each of us has already experienced at this point in life and the basic individual visions and wants from a relationship.

We attempt to create true love and romance like the one we watched in movies and we read about in the best novels. If outside obstacles weren’t enough, we ourselves often add obstacles to these roads we are trying to navigate.

Are we making it even harder for ourselves than it needs to be? What is it that we should be looking for when every fact we know about dating can be simultaneously good and bad?

The danger of too many voices: are you losing track of what you truly want?

As I read this article back to myself I come to one conclusion: maybe we should stop looking for advice and find our own voice within us instead, rediscover our intuition. Maybe the problem is that we feel that our intuition has failed us in the past and we drowned it and covered it with third party advice and opinions, thinking that there must be someone who can tell us how to do this better than our own inner voice.

When we are lost, we tend to look for advice everywhere, for something we may have missed that can solve our problem.

The issue is that we still need to choose which advice to follow, and if we are no longer in touch with ourselves, our intuition will never be able to make the right choice in the middle of all this noise.

There is only one advice you should follow, and that is your own.

I don’t know about you but when I want to start fresh I always start on a Monday. A new diet, workout, good intentions. Monday.

I hate to break it to you (and to myself), but it is Monday every day.

There is no other day of the week, even 1pm tomorrow is Monday. We have a choice every single second of our lives to change what’s not working, to try something new.

Maybe what we need is to forget all of this valuable advise and to focus on ourselves again, to find what truly makes us happy.

If you’re out there looking for advice, here is my two cents: the only advice your should follow, is your own.

Try an advice cleanse, a moment of silence. Do it however you know how to, whether it’s by meditating, taking a walk, writing, painting, exercising or just being. Do it by disconnecting from the Internet and from your phone a bit more than you normally would. Do it by not telling people who always have an opinion what’s happening in your life at the moment. Do it by taking care of You.

Let this be the last advice you follow today and let’s reconvene in a few days and see what happens.

As per everything that could potentially go wrong with his plan, write me, we’ve got each other.

Before I forget, thank you for being on this journey with me, for your messages, encouragement and support. It’s completely unexpected and it means the world to me.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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