In case you haven’t noticed, the winter holidays are coming up fast. For many singles, the holiday season is a sad time. Without a Sweetheart, singles can feel like they are outside in the cold, peering longingly through the window at the happy families around the fire.
Of course we all know that not all families are happy, but many of us sure do wish we could have a chance to try making a family, happy or not.
If you tend to look towards the holidays with dread, you can do something about it. And actually, you can use your sadness to work for you, to spur you on to do something about your situation that you let glide into 2021.
While others are working themselves into a frazzle with holiday preparations, too much food, and excess in general, how about taking a little time each day to build a “Love Trip Planner” that will make it more and more likely you will meet the Sweetheart of your dreams?
This time of year is a great time to start moving towards your goal. Likely you will have some time off, and you could opt out of those miserable parties rather than to go alone.
But then again, what is your goal? That’s your next step: define what you want, as clearly as you can. Write it in big bold letters on bright colored paper and post it all over your house.
Then, get yourself moving by focusing on your discomfort: magnify your sense of aloneness until you feel so uncomfortable that you can’t NOT get moving and change things. Do you really want to go through another holiday season alone and hopeless, and then to see yet another ghastly stretch of gloom next winter? Don’t you just hate that the other side of your bed is empty and cold?
After you have made yourself sufficiently uncomfortable with the present and defined clearly where you want to go, the route to get there becomes more obvious. That doesn’t necessarily mean smooth sailing – it’s all too easy to get thrown off your route. But you do have a sense of where you are headed and you are readier to get started.
Continue to strengthen these two extremes – how uncomfortable, even miserable, you are in the present, and how much you would like to have what you currently do not. The increasing tension will make it harder and harder to resist getting started.
If you aren’t moving towards love, why not? And I don’t want to hear “I haven’t got time!” as an excuse. Because that’s what it is – an excuse. What is any more important to spend time on Right Now than the search for your best life’s partner?
I know how anxiety-provoking starting a mate search can be. For many of us, avoidance is the defense of choice to ward off these kinds of unpleasant feelings. Like starting any kind of change process that has unpleasantness in the beginning, no matter how desirable the goal, it’s easier to think about it tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes.
Let’s do a brain storming about all the reasons you can come up with NOT to start today with your search to find love. I’ll bet you can come up with some pretty good reasons to do nothing in no time flat. But to get you started, here are the kinds of reasons other singles have come up with:
I have to lose weight first.
How will I tell him/her about my three divorces?
No one will want me.
There are no good men/women left.
I always attract losers.
Any of these sound familiar? If you want to take a look at a nice long list of great excuses that others just like you have built, go and look at 50 Ways to BLEEP Your Lover.
Now let’s put your excuses to the Logic Litmus Test:
1. Is what you are saying a true fact?
2. Does it serve your best interest?
3. Does it protect and prolong your health?
4. Does it get you what you want?
I’m going to use “I have to lose weight first”:
1. It would be nice if I were thinner, but I have put off getting thinner for years. If I wait until I lose weight, it might be more years or never, or at least many months of hard work. Maybe not losing weight is something I use to avoid a mate search.
2. Losing weight would serve my best interest for sure, but putting off finding a mate until I have lost weight does not serve my best interest.
3. Losing weight would prolong my health. Keeping the weight on protects my ego from getting hurt by a possible rejection. Putting off a mate search does not prolong my health, but it does protect me from being hurt. I might be happier if I were able to find a mate.
4. No, clearly.
In fact, getting started on a serious search for love might be the best possible way to get both: a mate and a weight loss. There’s nothing like the thought of having to get naked to motivate getting in shape.
Once you have put your reasons/excuses through the Logic Litmus Test, then you have a choice. You can continue to use your favorite stall mechanisms, but they will not be so effective, because now you know that they are bogus. Or you can write up your answers to the Logic Litmus Test questions and review the flaws in your reasoning whenever your resolve to find a sweetheart wavers.
Remember that law of physics “A body in motion stays in motion. A body at rest stays at rest”? If you have successfully kept yourself stuck in singleness, it’s going to take concerted effort to go from stuck to moving. Your thinking and attitude can be both your biggest enemy and your greatest friend.
Train yourself to be aware of how your thinking is getting in the way of what you want. Use the Logic Litmus Test to turn your thinking around so that it is working for you, not against you. You’ll be giving yourself the greatest gift imaginable – the possibility of love.
