People Who Can’t Find The Love They Crave Almost Always Overlook These Two Simple Things
The more complex reasons preventing you from finding true love.
Brooke Cagle | Unsplash Learning how to love yourself is one of the most important things you can do to find the relationship you've been hoping for. Is your love life taking a downward spiral, and you don't know what to do? Are you wondering to yourself, "Why can't I find love?"
Then, you may be falling into habits that stop you from getting the love you want. How do you break the patterns that prevent you from having the love you want? What keeps you from finding love that lasts?
You might be struggling to fix your love life or pushing away your chances of finding real love. I recall when I was in love and in a relationship, it changed the way I deal with love and taught me powerful lessons. I gave up everything to feel loved. My entire life revolved around this person, in the hope that I would get the love I wanted.
Instead, I lost almost everything, and I had to rebuild my entire life when I let this person take advantage of me. So, I learned to choose myself over love. Choosing to love myself allowed me to meet my current partner and have a family.
This was a tough lesson indeed, but I rediscovered my actual self and learned how to not give up my actual self for love. Maybe you’ve invested everything into someone else, hoping to feel good about yourself and get the love you’ve always wanted.
If you make yourself needed, then you can protect yourself from a partner leaving you. Or, perhaps you’ve chosen love over yourself, and given up everything for a relationship, only to discover that the other person was not there for you. Maybe you've given up on yourself and become unseen or resentful.
If you do not feel good about yourself, have abandonment wounds, or unmet love, then you can put all your hopes and desires onto a partner in the hope that they can make up for it and give you the love you always wanted.
Sadly, this hope can become a blinding fantasy that disappoints you, especially when your abandonment wounds become triggered by your partner, which reinstates all of the hurt you originally felt.
People who can’t find the love they crave almost always overlook these two simple things:
1. They look for love outside themselves
If you look for love outside of yourself, you will never get the love you want. Putting your hopes into someone else to feel good about yourself often only ends in heartbreak and leaves you feeling empty when you’ve sacrificed your needs to feel loved.
If you do not prioritize yourself, no one else will. If you sacrifice yourself to meet the needs of others, your needs will not get met. These are signs you’ve been holding onto fantasy love.
When you missed out on the love you needed in childhood, you can create a fantasy that someone else will meet these unmet needs, so that you can recapture the love that was needed.
In this way, you can protect yourself from feeling unloved, worthless, or rejected. This becomes fantasy love; it’s not real love. It will only blind you and stop you from getting the love you deserve.
While self-love offers benefits like resilience and emotional regulation, only focusing inward can lead to isolation. Research shows that a healthy balance between intrapersonal and interpersonal sources of love is the most beneficial for your mental health.
2. They project what they want and need on their partner
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When you project all of your hopes and unmet needs onto a partner, you can end up seeing your relationship as your entire source of need fulfillment, causing you to give up aspects of yourself to protect this fantasy of obtaining unmet love. By negating your actual self, or compromising yourself for love, you end up making the relationship all about them — not you.
You can focus on your relationship by pleasing your partner to escape the dreaded feeling of not being good enough, while subsequently pushing real love away. Being true to yourself is the antidote to stop sabotaging your relationships, so you can get the love you deserve, without pleasing your partner or revolving your whole life around them.
Being your real self is the solution to finding true love and stops you from sabotaging your love life. In her research, storyteller and academic Brené Brown depicts that allowing yourself to feel vulnerable opens you up to receiving love when you can be seen for who you really are.
When you hide your real self by making others happy, you cannot come alive, nor be seen or heard for how you feel. So you let your feelings of not being good enough control your relationships.
Rather than acknowledge how you feel and allow yourself to connect, you protect yourself by avoiding of shameful effects that end up pushing real love away. Instead of expressing your vulnerable feelings, you turn to others to make you feel good about yourself.
In fact, the way you feel about yourself causes you to attract the very things that make you feel bad about yourself, especially when you put yourself last in the hope of finding the love you want. If you feel undeserving of love or feel unlovable, then you will most likely accept a partner who doesn’t love you in the right way.
You’ll feel worse about yourself when you lose everything that represents the real you to make someone else happy. You’ll feel worse about yourself when your partner does not prioritize you when you’ve catered to them.
In fact, you’ve let them come first because you put yourself last and did not make yourself a priority in your relationship. You’ll become dependent on your relationship to pick you up when you’ve got nothing left in the tank to pick yourself up.
When you’ve sacrificed yourself for love, you end up with nothing left but a broken heart and an empty self when your needs are not met. When you lose yourself for love, you will most likely feel unloved. Turning to your partner to feel good enough will mean you make them responsible for how you feel, rather than letting them know the real you.
If you fight so hard to get love from others, then you sacrifice your actual ‘self’ and feel unloved when your own needs are not met. Break free from the habits that get in the way of having the love you want. When you put love above yourself, you will most likely feel unloved and feel rejected when your own needs do not get met.
You can build a stronger foundation for your relationship if you express your real self and do not lose sight of who you are and the things that matter to you. You teach others how to treat you by the way you treat yourself.
You can break the patterns that stop you from getting the love you want. Real love comes from expressing your real self in your relationship, not hiding how you feel in the hope of feeling good enough.
In this way, you can have a relationship that enhances the real you. Learning to love yourself and being your real self will prevent you from pushing away the relationship you want.
Nancy Carbone is an author, relationship therapist, and psychodynamic therapist. She specializes in the treatment of personality disorders and relational trauma and is accredited as a mental health social worker.
