Do you feel the urge to start a relationship with a man/woman you know is not as compatible with you as you wish, but who will at least distract you from the loneliness/emptiness/sadness/life dissatisfaction you feel…at least at the beginning of the relationship?
Do you feel that this urge is becoming stronger every time you go out with some of your friends who are in happy relationships or have just starting dating someone and are head over heels in love?
Or do you sense the increase of that urge when the holidays (like Christmas and St Valentine’s Day) come and you feel more lonely that ever before?
Or maybe you are already in a relationship but something vital is missing in it and you are deeply unhappy but scared of taking the decision to end it since being in that relationship is at least familiar to you and being single seems so frighteningly unknown?
The core need to connect
We are all born with the core need to connect. And the unique blend of intimacy, friendship, passion and attachment we experience when we are in a relationship is something that our souls derive one of its greatest joys from. However, the question we need to honestly answer is: Do we really get these things from the particular relationship we are in? Or do we hope that we will get them one day when he/she changes? Or even worse – do we illusion ourselves that we have these things when our body shows us with its language (illnesses, strange physical conditions, panic attacks, restlessness, depression, etc) that something in our notions of the relationship we are in isn’t aligned with reality.
Is the relationship healthy, inspiring, helping us become a healthier, happier and better version of ourselves?
If your honest answer is “No”, then face the truth that your body and soul cannot maintain the illusion your mind has been sticking to. Your soul longs for a connection with a compatible soul, with someone you are going to feel healthily connected on all levels – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.
The roots of the fear of being single and the way out of the downward negative spiral of unhappy relationships
Yes, being single is scary when you yourself haven’t connected to your own soul, when you haven’t grown up emotionally and still have wounds from your childhood that are bleeding and hurting. But a relationship cannot heal them and cannot fix the internal emptiness you might feel from the lacking connection to your soul.
If you decide to put up with an abusive or unfulfilling relationship just to avoid being single, your soul’s wounds will get bigger and your self-esteem will suffer even more than before. It’s a downward negative spiral. The more your self-respect diminishes from the abusive relationship, the weaker you will feel and the harder it will be to trust yourself and believe that you can cope with life on your own.
In these dark times of your life, gather the courage to reach for help – from trustworthy friends, from colleagues, and best of all – from people whose job is to help other people find their true path in life and regain their self-respect. With this pivotal help, make a leap in the unknown – the territory of being single. Continue working on yourself:
- Expand your consciousness
- Heal the old wounds
- Learn self-love
- Change these character traits, models of thinking and behaving that have been an obstacle to real love, life fulfillment and internal stability and strength
- Find out what activities nurture your soul and make your life feel meaningful and rich
- Discover which of your past goals and notions have been inherited from your parents and society’s expectations and which goals come from your authentic Self
- Enjoy being single while preparing the soil of your inner garden for a real, healthy connection
This happy, healthy connection will grow when the right person comes and when you yourself have developed the qualities you admire and are looking for in a beloved. Because for the garden of love two “right” people are needed – people who have invested time, effort and attention into becoming the best version of themselves on all levels – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. People’s energy vibrations that are on the same level attract each other.
Overcome the fear of relationships or of real intimacy
And of course, there are people who are not afraid of being single but they stay single most of the time because of their fear of being in a relationship. While it is important to stay single rather than marry the wrong person, make sure that you are not “married to being single” either. Just remember that some people’s unhealed childhood wounds make them become dependent on relationships, whereas other people’s unhealed wounds make them unconsciously avoid long-term relationships and deter all possibilities for really and deeply connecting to another person. In all cases, a process of healing should take place. Otherwise, your soul would suffer.
Two are the main paths that stand in front of us every time we are faced with the need to make a choice – Fear and Self-love
The bottom line is, Dear soul, make sure that your decisions are based on your self-love and genuine internal strength and NOT on fear, lack of self-confidence, old habits and unhealthy models you have seen in your childhood. Being in a healthy, inspiring relationship is blissful but until you learn how to create it and until you meet the right person, it’s much better to stay single. Be open to the opportunity to get to know the people you meet, but do not rush into a relationship or marriage just because you want that relationship status.
Learning from experience depends much more on the quality of learning rather than on the quantity of experiences
Some people say that rushing into a relationship is not a mistake because this is how we gather experience. And that is true to some extent. Our first few relationships help us clarify who we are, what we want and what we need to work on in ourselves. But then we need to really learn from these relationships, become more conscious, and apply the knowledge we have gained. If we do not learn from our experiences, we may move from one relationship to another and repeat the same mistakes again and again. This exhausts the soul. This may make some people cynical and drain their faith in love. This may actually lessen their chances to build a really good relationship.
Choosing to be single for some time after the end of a relationship is necessary since it is the time for reconnecting to the soul, becoming fully aware of the lessons and doing the one thing that surely depends on us – working on ourselves, increasing our emotional intelligence, transforming our models of thinking into healthier ones.
Finally, this is what Irvin Yalom, a psychotherapist and author of books, says:
”To fully relate to another, one must first relate to oneself. If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation. Only when one can live like an eagle – with no audience whatsoever…only then is one able to care about the enlargement of the other’s being.”
Author: Mariya Dimitrova