How to Deal With the Fear of Never Finding Your Person | Matt Monday

The idea that nothing's ever going to change is in itself a story, and it's a really unhelpful one because it keeps us locked in our pain. How can we deal with the fear of never finding our person? I know so many people who are constantly struggling with the fear and the anxiety of it never happening for them in their love lives. And when we have that fear, it's not like the acute pain of a heartbreak where the pain is massive and immediate and can stop us from even getting through our day. It's a kind of chronic pain that never goes away. A pain of loneliness, a pain of longing, a deep desire for companionship and to give our love to somebody, but to have no one to give it to. And that can make people anxious or sad or lonely over a lifetime. And I want to speak to everyone out there right now who is relating to this. Whether you're 35 and you want to have a family and it scares you because you haven't met your person yet, or whether you're 65 and you're thinking, I just want to find someone to share my life with. And I'm so scared that I'm never going to find that or I'm never going to find that again. So today I want to share with you three tools that you can use to help you effectively manage those difficult emotions. Before we get started, the three tools that I'm going to give you today are actually from one of the later chapters in my new book, Love Life. Have you got your copy yet? And the reason I ask is not just because I deeply want you to get a copy of this because I know it's going to help you. It's also because everyone who gets a copy right now is getting a complimentary ticket to an event I am doing on May 4th called find you'd Person. This is a virtual event so you can attend it from any country in the world, but it's designed to take the ideas from the book and bring them to life in a live event that helps you achieve your goal of finding finding your person. I also wanted to let you know that everyone who gets a copy of the book is getting entered into a prize draw that I am doing where we are giving away some really cool things, including tickets to my live retreat this year. Six days with me in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, one on one with me to ask me your love life question or any question you want to ask in life, and some Love Life sweatshirts. You've seen me wear them in some of our videos. Many of you have asked where you can get them. The prize drawer is the only place that we're giving them away and many, many other cool things. As long as you order your copy of Love Life by midnight on May 3rd, you will be entered into those exclusive prize drawers. That link again is lovelifebook.com so what are these three tools that can help you manage these emotions? Well, I went through a very, very difficult time in my life that I talk about in the book, where I was suffering from severe chronic physical pain. And this was one of the darkest times of my life. And one of the reasons it was such a dark time is because I couldn't figure out how to make it go away. I tried everything. I tried every treatment. I flew around the world. I spent so much money and resources and time and energy trying to figure out how to make this pain go away. And nothing worked. And there was a certain point where I felt utterly hopeless. I had this sense that if this pain never went away, I would never be happy. And since I didn't know how to make it go away, I concluded that I might never be happy. And that was when I had to start going on a journey of figuring out what do I do to manage my relationship with this pain so that I can at least get to a place where I am happy enough to enjoy my life. Because, and some of you who have experienced physical chronic pain over a long time will know this. When you're in that kind of pain, it takes you out of your life. You're not present. You're like on the outside of your life all the time. Even in the joyful moments, you're not really there. And the truth is, the pain that we can experience in our love life when we're not finding what we're looking for. And we spend years wanting love but never finding it, never having that love in our lives in a sustainable way where someone really commits, or where we feel that love that we're yearning for and feel someone we can pour our love into. It is a similar kind of chronic pain that feels like it never goes away. I had a woman once say to me, matthew, how do I kill the desire to find another person? How do I get rid of the desire to want that love in my life? Because it hasn't happened for me so far. And if it never happens for me and I keep this desire, I'm going to be sad for the rest of my life. So here was someone saying, not how do I find someone? But how do I stop wanting someone? Because the wanting Someone is making me so incredibly unhappy. It's a source of chronic emotional pain. And one of the big missions that I had with this book, aside from the obvious of helping people on their road to finding love, was to help people deal with the very difficult emotions that they encounter when they want love. So, like I said, my chronic pain required new tools. And I write about all of these tools in the book. But I wanted to share three with you today. So here goes. Number one, everything changes, and it's changing all the time. We have this tendency in life as human beings to think that the past equals the future. That however things have been so far, that's how they're going to continue to be. But hopefully, by watching this channel, by reading this book, you're going to start to do some new things, change things up, shift your behavior, even by 1%. And that's going to open new doors. It's going to bring new people into your life. You don't know where you're going to be in a year. You don't know who's going to be in your life in a year. What kind of love could walk into your life. And by the way, that can be true in reverse, too. We don't know when something could get worse. People who are in relationships don't know how long they have their partner for, whether their partner is going to leave them. They don't know if life is going to take their partner through illness. Everything changes. So to think that how our life is today is how it's always going to be, that's just a story. And it's a story that keeps us locked in fear and anxiety instead of remaining curious and open to the possibilities of our actual life. And by the way, even our relationship to our pain changes. To anyone out there who's heartbroken right now, I want you to think about a time in your life where you were devastated, where you were going through something that you never thought you'd get over. And then notice how you feel about it now. Notice how it's already changed. Everything changes. And this thing that you feel right now, that will shift and change, too. The idea that nothing's ever going to change is in itself a story. And it's a really unhelpful one because it keeps us locked in our pain. I once had a coach who I was lamenting the fact that because of my physical pain, I could no longer eat certain foods because they inflamed my pain or I couldn't have a stimulus sip of wine, which I really loved. With certain meals or, you know, when I traveled, I would enjoy trying different things. I couldn't do these things because they all made my physical pain worse. And I was just devastated and telling her about how I could never do these things again. And she said, whoa, we don't know if a year from now or five years from now, this pain is going to be in the same place. We don't know if these foods and these, you know, alcohol will affect you in the same way in five years as it does today. All we know is that right now it's affecting you adversely. So let's shift things for right now, but let's lose the ceremony of, oh, I could never have these things again. I never forgot those words. Lose the ceremony. How many of us are doing in some area of our lives what I was doing with food, where I was, like, lighting a bonfire and burning the things that I loved? How many of you right now in your love life have lit a bonfire and are burning your hopes and dreams to ever find love, to ever find a relationship? It's never going to happen for me. Here's the dream I had of having a family. Here's the dream I had of growing old with someone, and you're just throwing it all into the fire. That's the ceremony. Lose the ceremony. And the ceremony is the story that nothing is going to change. And just like with the foods that I was able to eat, you don't know where your love life is going to be five years from now. You don't know who will have come into your life. You don't know what person, what kind of love you never could have anticipated could show up. And in the meantime, you don't know how much better you could feel about being single. A month from now, everything changes. Number two, surrender. Eckhart Tolle once said, acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world. When we feel lonely, it feels unacceptable. But if we surrender to that, if we say this is how it is in this moment in my life right now, all of a sudden we start to see things differently. We start to enjoy things differently. We calm down. One of the great ironies with my physical pain was this notion that every time there was a treatment or there was some doctor's visit around the corner, I would secretly get excited that it was all going to change, that this was going to be the moment where I was going to start feeling better. Kind of the way that we go on a great date, and all of a sudden it's like, I Feel the hope, the hope that I might no longer be single, that I might now have someone that means something to me, who I mean something to. And it's hard not to get carried away with that. But the problem is when that person then doesn't text us back when it feels like it doesn't go anywhere, or when they ghost us all together. The crash afterwards can be severe. And that's how it was for me when I went to a doctor's visit. And I thought this was going to be the thing that finally got rid of my chronic pain. And then it didn't work. That excitement, that hope would turn to despair, and I would crash so hard, and I would go into a dark hole, not knowing how I would come out of it. And I got to a certain point where I said, this hope is one of the most pernicious, devastating things about this pain, is this hope that one day it's going to go away. Because it made me live for the future. I was no longer present in my life now. I was just waiting for a time when it would be better. At a certain point, I had to say, what if it stayed this way? What if I had to live with this pain as it is today? Could I surrender to that? And that I was still in my mind, I still made space for the fact that everything changes, that it may not be the same in five years. But I said, if it's going to be the same for the next six months or the next year or even the next five, how would I live if I was accepting and surrendering to this? And in my mind, I started saying, you know what? I'm going to live aggressively. I'm not going to wait for a time where this gets better. I'm going to live aggressively today. The pain that I thought I'd never be able to live with. What if I could accept it? What would that look like? There's a wonderful story of Prince Ilus, who founded the city of Troy, who, on his walk, there was an object from the gods that was cast down in front of him. And he took one look at it, and because it was a sacred object, he went blind immediately. And being learned in the nature and the wisdom of the gods, he cast thanks up to the gods, even with his sight having been lost. And after a week, the gods restored his sight. Now, I find the least interesting part of that story, the moment where Prince Ilus got his sight back, he found a way to experience this grace, this surrender in having lost his sight. And that's one of the hardest things to do in life. But every single one of us is going to go through things in life that we can't just shift or change. And how we cope with those things, that's going to be what makes us. What if you being single right now, what if you feeling lonely? What if you wishing that you could meet someone but not having met someone and the pain that comes with that was something you could actually breathe into and accept and surrender to? What if you said, every day I haven't met my person, I'm going to live aggressively, I'm going to learn how to be happy enough here right now where I sit, knowing that maybe one day I'll have someone in my life, but I am going to learn to be happy enough in surrendering to the circumstances as they are right now. How would that change your life? And like I said, one of the greatest things we can do is change our relationship with our pain. And when we surrender to our circumstances, we are saying, I am choosing a more peaceful relationship with these circumstances of not having found my person yet. Now surrendering itself can feel like an overwhelming thing. I really have to surrender to this, to these circumstances, to this feeling. Well, in a sense, we surrender to the current circumstances of our life, but we don't have to worry that surrendering to the feeling is a way of keeping that feeling going in the way that it exists right now. And the reason for this is in tool number three. Pay attention to the modulations in your pain. There are some days where the pain of loneliness, of fear, about the future, of sadness that we haven't met someone is a 10. And aren't there other moments where it's a 3? Aren't there moments where you don't notice that pain at all because you're happily swept up in your life with friends? Or that you're wrapped up in a project that you find meaning and richness and fulfillment in. There are times where your pain doesn't feel like this. And this is really important because in the moments of peak intensity of our pain, focusing on the times that are no doubt coming, where we're going to feel that pain at a 4 instead of an 8 or a 9, that can be the thing that allows us to stop surrender. And by the way, pain at a 4 instead of an 8 is life changing. I don't know about you, but for example, when you're in a heartbreak and your pain is a 9 or a 10, you can't do anything. You could barely eat, sleep, work, function with friends and family. When you're at 4. It may still be unpleasant, but you start living your life again. And when you live your life again, you begin that upward spiral to a better place where new things happen. And all of a sudden, now the best parts of your life start to get better. You start to bring new things into your life. You start to create again. You might even bring your pain down to a 2 or a 1. So pay attention to the modulations in your pain. Don't judge the reality of your life by 10pm at night, when you're laying in bed in the dark and thinking and craving connection. Look at your life as a series of different feelings in different moments. This loneliness is not the one story of your life. And the height of your pain isn't the reality of how you feel all of the time. Sometimes through surrender, through realizing that everything changes, we can just settle into a peak moment of pain, knowing that in a few hours or in a day or two, a moment is coming when we will feel better again. Now, firstly, if you're enjoying these tools and if you're finding them valuable, leave me a comment, let me know. What's your favorite of these tools? Which one do you see as being most helpful to you? Which one made you feel better even as you listen to it? But also know that these are just three of seven or eight tools that I put in the book that I use for managing pain that you can use for managing the pain in your life. And by the way, none of this is to send a message that we should just say, where I am today is all I'm ever going to aim for. In fact, I believe that by managing our pain and our relationship with it, we can get to a place in our life where we are no longer hopelessly anxious or unhappy, but where we are actually happy enough. Where we feel like I am in a centered, peaceful place once again. And when we're happy enough, it doesn't make us complacent. What it does is give us the confidence to go out there and start being aggressive about making things happen in life. Taking opportunities, being vulnerable, going on dates, showing who we are to people, taking swings. Because when we're happy enough, we really don't have anything to lose. If this date doesn't go well, if you're not interested in me, if this doesn't go anywhere, I know I return to a life that I am happy enough with, that I can exist there and be okay. Maybe even a little more than okay. And that, I believe, is one of the most subtle but profound powers we can possibly give ourselves. I cannot stress enough the book, this book right here is going to be something that is going to profoundly impact your life. I have spent four years of my life on it and I'm so excited for you to read it. So grab a copy@lovelifebook.com and remember, you'll be entered into that prize giveaway with all of those really cool prizes. And even if you don't win anything, you'll still get a ticket to an event I'm doing on May 4th where we are going to take take the ideas from the book and bring them to life in practical ways for your year ahead. If finding your person is something you want to do, but you also want to be happier or more confident today, before that even happens, go to lovelifebook.com to grab your copy. And I can't wait to see you at our big event, which is virtual by the way, so wherever you are in the world, you can come on the 4th of May. It.