Why Am I Still Single? There is nothing wrong with you!

Let me put your mind at rest: 

You are not single because there is something wrong with you.

 BEING SINGLE IS NOT YOUR ‘FAULT’, so there is nothing for you to ‘fix’, nor is there anything you need to change about yourself.

There is no magic skill, talent or quality of character you can develop that would open the secret door to being in a relationship. You do not have to dress differently, talk differently, flirt/act/come across differently, you do not have to be perfect to attract a partner.

 People in couples are not any better than you. The fact that they are in a relationship and you are not does not mean they are higher than you in social status.

Even though self-confidence does play a role in having a wide network of friends and potential suitors, I know loads of people with little to no self-confidence who are in relationships and lots of super confident people who are single. So please don’t beat yourself up if you don’t fit that stereotype of what men/women allegedly find attractive. 

There are a lot of articles online on the sort of person one should be to attract love, the best attachment styles, how we should have less  inhibitions if we’re aiming to attract a partner (allegedly) - all of them missing the main point that there isn’t just one type of person who attracts love from everyone they meet - otherwise all of us would be in love with the same group of people.

Are you Single Shaming yourself?

If you are asking yourself “why am I single”, it’s because on a subconscious level you believe that there’s something wrong with being single. After all, people don’t normally type into Google: “why am I so rich” or “why am I so happy”, because those are desired states of being, at least in most of the West.

Maybe you even idolise relationships and being in love as the ultimate goal to life (there is an immense amount of conditioning we go through even by the age of five, that sets us up for a lifetime of looking for that special someone outside of ourselves).

You might even be subconsciously judging yourself for being single or not being able to get yourself out of singlehood - I know I did! Sometimes people feel like they’re being punished, with seeing couples or pictures of happy couples as an additional reminder of something they want which, they believe, is not available to them… 

One of the greatest breakthroughs I’ve had, that turned the issue on its axis for me, was when I stopped trying to run away from and instead turned to face the fear of being alone indefinitely. 

It turned out that the real reason I was so petrified of staying single for the rest of my life was because I felt unfulfilled, unhappy and incomplete by myself. 

I was bored, and I believed my experiences needed to be shared with someone else who would validate them and me.

I felt a deep sense of something missing, and my life being lacklustre and less meaningful than when I was in a couple.

And - perhaps even more importantly:

I felt that there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t able to secure a relationship. With every new half-hearted date, it was like the dream of love, belonging and acceptance kept moving further and further away from me, until it became an impossible dream.

These realisations were the direct result of Rapid Transformational therapy sessions, soul-searching and admitting to the things I didn’t want to admit to, because I felt they made me “wrong” or incompetent. 

This was mainly due to the opposite end of unhelpful advice - people tell you you should be ok on your own, that you shouldn’t need a relationship to be happy, which in itself makes a lot of sense. However, what a lot of these people don’t tell you - is how to let go of that unwanted craving for a partner - often, because they’ve never had to do it themselves.

What this ‘advice’ did for me was make me feel judged for not being ok with being single. So now I felt judged for not being in a relationship AND judged for not being ok with my seemingly miserable fate of singlehood.

This became a block to accepting my feelings exactly as they were; because not only did I start hiding not being ok from others, I also started pretending to be ok to myself. 

There was a huge void in my life where something significant should have been,

and, I assumed, that something was a romantic relationship. After all, whenever I felt bad about myself when I was younger, I would find a boyfriend and - hey presto - the problem was resolved. Or at least so it appeared.

The reality was that none of my ex-partners could fill that void permanently, even if I had stayed with them for the rest of my life, because the void wasn’t theirs to fill. 

The bottomless black hole in me of feeling worse off than others, unlovable, unwanted, incomplete, insignificant, excluded, isolated, lonely, hurt and rejected could only be temporarily covered up by someone else loving me.

The relationships could never resolve the issue fully, because none of them was permanently changing the way I saw myself, and some of them were actually contributing to my insecurities.

When I was in a relationship - no amount of compliments and acts of kindness was enough for me to feel whole, because my lack of wholeness and completeness wasn’t coming from the external world in the first place - it was coming from inside me.

If anything, the connection to another person was distracting me from

the real issue - my lack of connection to myself,

which had been severed in childhood, and never really built back up until after all these epiphanies.

It wasn’t necessary for me to blame myself for having put relationships on a pedestal for so long, after all - I had no role models in childhood or early adulthood for what it meant to be one with myself at my core. The women I looked up to at the time were dependent on their partners for their emotional safety, even when it was exactly their partners who were causing this emotional safety to rupture in the first place. 

So being a good girl, I tried to emulate this dependency prerequisite for being a woman, limiting my time spent in singlehood as much as possible. I feared it would show me up as being somehow defective. 

I dutifully bent to others’ unreasonable expectations of me, as long as it meant I wasn’t alone. 

It was that self-abandonment and self-neglect that made me feel so much worse when the relationship eventually split up, because by that point I literally had nothing left, not even myself. 

The source of these painful feelings was extremely hard to identify on my own, because it felt like they were coming from the external world, which was apparently against me. It felt like I was the only one being ghosted by one date after another; it felt like I was trapped in the repetitive cycle of getting my hopes up when meeting someone new, only to have them smashed again two or three dates later. I was completely lost in the opinions of strangers on who I was to them, to the point that I was no longer sure what I though about myself. This made me feel confused and disempowered, as I was giving my power away to people who did not have my best interests at heart.

The road to gaining my wholeness, completeness and emotional safety irrespective of whether I was single or in a relationship was a long and painstaking one, because the direction of where I was going was unclear. It was only when I figured out what I was looking for, that suddenly all the tutorials and YouTube videos started appearing in my feeds, supporting my understanding of self-love as the real solution to my troubles. 

The reason why none of the relationships could EVER fill that void in me, was because it wasn’t my partners’ love that I craved so badly, it wasn’t the connection with another that I so desperately searched -

it’s always been me. I was the one I was looking for, in terms of nurturing, support, care, attention, kindness, belonging, safety, compassion and all those other ways in which I felt so hard done by in life.

None of my partners - past, future or present - could ever heal my mother wound. The nurturing and protection I craved was not for my husband to provide. And if I kept looking for this incredible man who would magically know me better than I knew myself, I would have exhausted myself and wasted my life in pursuit, whilst feeling terrible about myself, because I couldn’t live up to this impossible standard of the Hollywood fairy tale Happily Ever After…

It took me decades. You, on the other hand, do not have to spend this long figuring it out like I did. 

If this article resonates with you, and/or if you’re tired of bending over backwards for some person you’re not even sure exists  - there’s a high chance we could do some amazing work together.

To find out how I can help you step out of those old disempowering beliefs about needing a partner - click the link below and let’s talk -