Stop Doing These 6 Things If You Want to Find Love

If you’re struggling to find love for the first time or finding love again, maybe after having your heart broken, you’ve come to the right place. There’s a lot of misconceptions out there about how you will find love but no one ever talks about what it takes to have a lasting relationship.

One thing I need you to understand is that the movies we all watch get it wrong in depicting completely unsustainable and unrealistic ideas of true love instead of shining a light on how our own actions can block us from finding true love. And this leads to the negative mindset of “no one will ever love me, why can’t I find love?”

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Instead of throwing your hands up and accepting that you will never find love, see if you’re doing one (or many!) of these six things that can block you from knowing how to find the love of your life.

Here is what you need to stop doing if you want to find love:

1. Stop Being So Needy

There’s no faster way to repel a man than to need him. Wanting a man is not the same as needing one. Neediness is a state of mind where you feel incomplete, or have an emotional void, and try to fill this empty space with a relationship or male validation.

A lot of women confuse a man’s aversion to neediness as meaning he’s averse to commitment, or a “commitment-phobe.” They see a man’s reluctance to get into a lopsided relationship as a problem and lump him into a group of men who can’t love.

But men aren’t commitment-phobes (at least, the majority are not). A man will happily enter into a relationship with a woman who sees and appreciates him for exactly who he is. On the flip side, a man will run far away from a woman who sees him as the only means to feel good about herself or validate her being.

MORE: A Guy’s Take on Neediness

A guy wants to feel chosen by a woman he had to earn through his actions. He doesn’t want to feel like he’s just filling a spot that could have easily gone to any other man with a pulse. Typically, guys who give up on dating are just giving up on the feeling of neediness they’re getting from women who are supercharged to dive right into a relationship.

Neediness usually stems from a lack of self-esteem or sense of worth. You feel like something is missing within yourself or in your life and begin to believe a relationship will be the cure.

If you were unhappy before the relationship, you will be unhappy in it. Instead of feeling sorry for yourself about being single, work on your relationship with yourself. Work on feeling your best and looking your best.

When you are the best version of you that you can be, you won’t be able to keep men away!

2. Stop Looking For Love And Learn To Love Yourself

You have to love yourself first or you will never be able to accept that anyone else can love you. If you’re struggling with constant negative thoughts like, “Why doesn’t anyone love me?”, ask yourself first if you truly love yourself.

We think there must me something wrong with the guys who really want us and we pine for the ones who don’t care or seem uninterested. When you can’t find love, it’s often a symptom of not having love for yourself.

If you don’t truly like and love yourself, you will never be able to accept that someone else can love you.

MORE: What Do Men Want In A Woman?

The number one way to attract love is to get yourself into a positive mindset and be ready to receive it. If you don’t value yourself, you will go for someone who doesn’t treat you well because deep down you don’t value your own self.

In general, like attracts like. If you want to know what kind of guy will fall for you, just look at how you feel about yourself and treat yourself in your own day to day life.

If you are emotionally unavailable, you will attract a guy who is emotionally unavailable. Now, you can want to be in a relationship and at the same time be unavailable in your own way. If you’re afraid of getting hurt or feel like the guys you want always leave you, then you might subconsciously be putting up walls to protect yourself.

Then, when the guy ends up leaving or not giving you the emotional aspect you crave, it validates your negative belief and the cycle continues repeating.

Ask yourself: Would I want to date me?

What are you bringing to the table? If you want an emotionally healthy, confident, stable guy, then you need to make sure you mirror those qualities at the same level. I mean, why would a guy like that want to be with someone who is an insecure emotional mess? If you want that positive kind of guy, you need to be that kind of girl.

As soon as you’re in that place where you are your best self and you mirror the qualities you want, you’ll notice an instant change in your love life.

3. Stop Playing A Role

So many of us fall into this trap of trying to fit a mold or play a role in order to get the guy. Maybe it’s due to societal conditioning or maybe because deep down we don’t feel good enough. But you can’t form a genuine connection with someone if you’re pretending to be something you’re not or trying to fit a guy’s ideal vision of the kind of woman he wants.

This reminds me of a friend of mine who is just crushing it in life. She’s so polished and poised with all her ducks in a row but her dating life was just fizzle after fizzle. She said to me one day “no one wants to date me,”and after talking with her we figured out the problem.

MORE: 5 Things Men Want in a Woman

There was no genuine connection because she pretended her life was so perfect and impenetrable that no man could breach the iron exterior. They felt like she had a wall up and there was no place for them in her life and you can’t bond that way.

Love is about being seen and known and vulnerable. Now, I’m not saying lay all your dirty laundry out on the table, but you have to peel back some of your layers slowly and match him in learning about each other as unique individuals.

Let this happen slowly. When you don’t instantly bond with a guy like the movies show, this is not the time to throw your hands up and scream, “Will I ever find the one?” Take your time and enjoy the process.

4. Stop Playing The Victim

I’m not trying to be harsh on you with this. I’m guilty of playing the victim and blaming my lack of love life on everything and everyone except me.

You are not single because there is some grand conspiracy to keep love out of your life. Life is not putting happy couples in your path to torment you and make you question does everyone find love but me?

It’s easier to have a story you tell yourself to take the responsibility off your own shoulders. Maybe every guy you meet has a girlfriend. All the guys in online dating are jerks or weirdos or creeps. Your parents divorced and now you don’t believe in love or that a truly healthy relationship can last forever.

MORE: 5 Things Every Girl Needs to Know About Men

Here’s the thing, there are going to be things in our lives that are out of our control and some of them can have a really strong impact on us but we have the choice of how we hold on to or let go of those things.

I always like the saying, “If you run into a jerk in the morning, you ran into a jerk. If you run into jerks all day, you’re the jerk.”

So here’s the best part, you get to decide what role you play in your own life. Are you the triumphant heroine or tragic victim? Who would you want to be more? Which one honestly feels better to you?

5. Stop Idealizing Your Ex

Most of us are unaware of all the ways our past can bleed into our present—and even our future—if left unchecked.

Maybe you’re just not over your ex and you still think about him all the time. Or you actively compare every guy you meet to your ex and end up sabotaging the potential. Perhaps your ex really did some damage that you haven’t fully healed from or are even aware of how deeply it affected you.

I have been hurt a lot over the years in my own love life and been the tragic victim for who things never seemed to work out. In looking back I’m glad to have had those experiences because my career came from it.

The pain has served me well in that it’s given me invaluable insights into relationships but I also came to a point where I realized the extent to which I never fully processed and let go of some of that toxic baggage.

MORE: How to Let Go of Someone

When I first started dating my husband, even though I felt very sure about his intentions, I had a really tough time fully trusting him and the relationship. More importantly, I had a hard time trusting myself and my own judgment. Even though I knew my fears had absolutely nothing to do with him, I couldn’t get past them.

I finally realized that I was equating things my ex had said with my current situation and I was letting that fear take over. It made me believe my now-husband was going to leave me because that’s the “it always happens to me” story I had been playing in my head.

What happened to me is something that happens to many women after a toxic relationship and crushing breakup: I internalized faulty beliefs about myself and never challenged them. I believed I wasn’t worthy, wasn’t lovable, wasn’t enough, and I also just didn’t trust my own judgement anymore.

If you’ve been hurt in the past, try to see if you can identify any old wounds you’re still carrying around with you. Think about how you interpreted the situation at the time and see if you can spot any faulty beliefs about yourself that may have developed.

Then do whatever you need to in order to correct those. It isn’t always easy but is so worth it and it will be a massive shift in your thinking instead of always wondering, “Why can’t I find someone to love me?”

6. Stop Stressing

I know you hear me talk about this a lot but it’s because it’s one of the top things we do as women in relationships. We worry, we stress, we think up all kinds of nightmare scenarios so we can trick ourselves into being “prepared” for them if and when they ever happen.

I talk a lot about how stressing basically ruins everything, because it does and because this is something so many of us do. You have to get your mind under control, you can’t let worried thoughts dominate you because they will ruin your life and block you from forming a genuine connection.

Instead of accepting that you will never find love, work on getting your stress under control and looking forward to when you do find love. When has stressing over something ever gotten you the thing?

MORE: How to Stop Stressing Over Your Relationship

Men are repelled by things that feel bad and stress them out. All men want is to feel good and be happy. You constantly freaking out about the state of your relationship or love life is not an attractive trait that is going to magnetize men to you. It just uses up all your mental energy and gets you nowhere!

Have faith things will work out for you, don’t entertain thoughts otherwise. No more crying, “Will anyone ever love me? Will I ever find someone?”

With all that said, the main thing to do is relax and be happy with yourself. If things work out with this guy, great! If not, that’s ok too! It just creates a space for the next, better guy to walk into your life.

It’s all going to be ok.

Let me know what you think of this list. Do you agree or disagree? Have you realized you might be committing one of these in your own life and blocking love from coming into it?

Also, if you want to know more about what makes a man see a woman as “the one” and what truly inspires him to commit, make sure to read this next: The #1 Things Men Desire in a Woman