Build a life you truly love

After you have made sure you’re the first person you’re thinking about and focusing on right now, you can start cultivating a life that consists of only the things that give you good energy. The easiest way is to look right where you are.

What do you enjoy doing? What makes you feel good about yourself? Who brings a genuine smile to your face? Now that you’re not dating, you can do things in your own ways — or whichever way lights up your world — without the pressure to change yourself to please anyone. You are free to be fully yourself.

Go follow your heart. Sometimes, the destination might surprise you but accept it anyway. Embrace the uncertainty ahead. Step into your potential. I know it’s scary and it might be uneasy at first, but it will make you stronger and better, trust me. Try being loudly, unapologetically you for a day, a week, a month, a few months, a year, or even longer until it becomes effortless. Do the things that make you feel like yourself the most. Find the people who share the same interests and outlooks on life as you. Surround yourself with these people. Learn to receive their love. Be present for their love. Tell yourself that you deserve their love. Enjoy their love like it’s always been yours.

It might take a while for the positive effects of this process to kick in. So be patient. Take it one day at a time. You will get it wrong, you will make mistakes, you might even fall back into old destructive behaviours, and it’s all okay. The key part is to keep marching forward and never give up on yourself. You must believe that better days are ahead of you and you’re exactly right where you need to be in order to get there.

Choose who to date and decide who to invest in based on your core values

Before therapy, I used to choose partners primarily based on superficial factors, such as job title, appearance, and good conversational flow. Date nights usually involved excessive alcohol and attraction would escalate at lightning speed. Now, I realise that I wasn’t looking for a relationship; I was looking to be validated and distracted. I needed to escape my daily life as I hated it. I also didn’t think very highly of my own values and interests, and that’s why I was intensely drawn to people who were opposite of everything I stood for. Needless to say, these connections never led to healthy relationships.

This is why the steps one and two outlined above are so important. To be good at dating, especially when you have a history of being anxiously attached, you must learn to love yourself first. You must learn to meet your own needs. You must learn to validate your own feelings and experiences. When you have built a life you truly love and feel comfortable in your own skin, when you seriously value yourself as a human being, you will feel drawn towards people who are similar to you. You will find it easy to cut off the people who disrespect you or don’t treat you the way you’d like to be treated by a partner.

People often say that you have to find someone who shares the same values as you. At first, I thought how hard could this be?! I believed you could simply ask people straightforward questions about their values and decide accordingly. So I asked and listened to people’s perfectly worded answers and, without fail, I ended up with someone who was completely wrong for me. As I matured, I realised that, while everyone seems to know just exactly the right things to say, most people don’t know what their core values are. Even if they’re being completely honest, who they think they are can be different from who they really are.

The best way to discover someone’s core values is by observing their words and actions over a long period of time. This is exactly what dating is for. Dating isn’t a proving-your-self-worth contest. Dating isn’t about trying to qualify as someone’s “the one”. No. Dating is a two-way process to assess compatibility. You don’t have to be liked or chosen by everyone you meet. And not being chosen by someone you meet isn’t a reflection of your self-worth; it’s a reflection of their preferences and perspectives which might or might not have anything to do with you. You must remember that you get to choose too. You gather information about your date’s values and interests and decide whether this person is a good match for you.

To do this effectively, you need to know what your core values are and you need to be able to identify the behaviours that demonstrate these values as they happen. One way you could practice this is to look at your non-romantic relationships. You could try to describe these relationships and find what they all have in common. From my personal experiences, your partner should make you feel at least as at ease and comfortable as your best friend would. They should inspire you to be more of you, not any less.

Especially, they should not constantly challenge your boundaries. Sometimes you do have to show people how to treat you, but an incompatible partner will require you to do this a lot and, frankly, it’s not worth the time and effort. I like a quote by Brianna Wiest that says, “Every time you break your boundaries in order to ensure someone likes you, you end up liking yourself that much less.” And that’s true. If you keep breaking your boundaries for someone, you will end up losing yourself. Also, it shouldn’t be entirely your responsibility to uphold the healthy boundaries for both partners. If your date keeps pushing boundaries, it isn’t a test for your character, it’s an insight into theirs.