Do you treat love as something to cross off your to-do list? Do you feel that you’ll only be worthy when you have the ring? If so, here’s why you should stop viewing love as an achievement and start living your best life, single or otherwise.
- You’ll stop pinning your self-worth onto love. When you stop seeing love as something you have to achieve, you’re less likely to define yourself according to it. You’re more than someone’s potential girlfriend or wife.
- You’ll stop viewing its failure as your failure. Relationships can fall apart and fail, sometimes despite your best efforts. When you stop viewing the failure of a relationship as your failure, it means you don’t see love as something under your control in the way that achieving a goal can sometimes be seen. Hey, you know that sometimes it feels like life and love can do what they bloody like, and it has nothing to do with what you want or who you are.
- You won’t see it as a must to have “or else.” You want to find your person at some stage, but why see it as something you have to have and kill yourself over? You actually don’t have to find love, after all, and the type of love that requires you to work super-hard just to have it isn’t really worth your energy. Nothing worth having is supposed to be that torturous.
- You’ll avoid putting stress on yourself. There’s tons of stress out there when it comes to finding your One. If you see meeting your perfect partner as being a goal you need to achieve, this will just exacerbate the stress you’re already feeling. And for what? The whole process is supposed to be fun and surprising, not something that lands you in the hospital because you’re so worked up about it.
- You’ll give yourself validation. If you see love as something you have to achieve, you’ll always look to it for validation. It’s basically like saying, “If I have love in my life, I’ve done well for myself and I’m a worthy person.” Of course, that also means that if you don’t have love in your life, you’ll think you aren’t worthy, which is total BS.
- You’ll feel good when single. When you work so hard to have love in your life, you see losing it as a devastation. Now, obviously losing love is always traumatic, but if you can be happy as a single person you’ll be more likely to move on from a breakup with your head held high.
- You’ll remember love can happen to anyone. If you see love as an achievement only a select few can have, then you’ll see it as being something really rare. But the truth is that love is all over the place. Anyone can fall in love and get married. Seriously. It’s not something reserved for people who are special or work super-hard.
- You’ll stop not being yourself. If you feel that you have to change in order to achieve a happy, successful relationship, this will cause you to lose yourself. Why should you change, anyway? If you think you have to otherwise you won’t get what you want, then you’ll never be happy. Be yourself and have a “come what may” attitude. It’ll make you be so much happier.
- You’ll complete yourself. If you define yourself according to the goal of love and marriage, you’re expecting it to make you happy and complete you. But that’s something only you can do for yourself. Besides, the most successful relationships are those in which both parties are whole, complete beings on their own.
- You won’t risk settling for less. It’s a weird thing that sometimes happen when you strive so hard to reach a goal. You end up thinking, “Well, if I can’t achieve my goal of having The One, I might as well be with someone who’s not that great.” Why do people do this, you ask? Because they think that having something is better than nothing, just so that they feel they’re still worthy in society’s eyes. Don’t do it. If you do, you’ll actually make yourself miss out on finding someone who’s perfect for you and doesn’t require you to jump through hoops for their love.
