If You're AFRAID You Won't Find Love. . .

And it's not just a pain that's there when we're inactive, it's a pain that's there when we're with our friends if we are finding it hard to be present or if our friend is getting married and oh my God, I'm so happy for her, but at the same time it just reminds me of what I don't have.

Danny says, I'm afraid that I'll stay single for the rest of my life. I know that might sound so superficial or some people might think that there are worse things. I know they'll say, I need to love myself first, and I do. I do love myself, but I also have a lot of love to give, and I love, love. I have a fulfilling life with a great job, wonderful friends, and every day I live life for me. So my life isn't on pause waiting for the one. But my biggest fear is that I will never find my person. People can say what they want, but romantic love fills spaces in our hearts that other love just doesn't.

So I'm going to throw to you first on this, Stephen. What are your thoughts on this?

I think you'd be surprised how many people fear that But I would say it's not even a fear that's only limited to single people right now. There can be people with the love of their life who could lose the love of their life either through accident or sabotage or things happen, things change. So I think we don't need to demarcate even, oh, I'm single, so that means I'm gonna be like forever alone or relationship people have it. I think we really have to lose that distinction as though those people have found it and I'm not going to. Life is very long and a lot of things change. And, you know, it's easy to say, but I think with these things, you have to believe that it's possible to find love because it's almost like if you, if you go into anything thinking you're gonna lose, you kind of probably are. Like, you have to go in being open and. Accepting, like, love is available for me. It is out there in the world. And you can't get into every love going, is this the one? Is this gonna last for the rest of my life? Is it till I die? You kind of have to go and give your heart.

Have you had moments of doubt, Steve, along the way? Have you had moments where you were like, you kind of doubted, Am I ever gonna find this?

Yeah, I've had those kind of issues where I've wondered to myself, You know, I think everyone does where you if you break up with someone, you wonder like, am I ever going to find that person who I feel that way about? Like, it's very normal to feel that and you think, will it ever be the perfect way I envision it in my head? Will it ever be like that? But again, I do I know I or I have a capacity to love. I already know that. So when I've gone through those periods, I'm like, I am lovable. and I have a capacity to love. So I know that if I'm out there enough, if I'm proactive enough, love is gonna come into my life. It might be in many different forms than you think, or the unicorn form in your head might. It might not be that, but it will be something special and meaningful. And you kind of have to be where your feet are. That phrase you say, you have to be where you are right now, not. in your head imagining maybe this perfect love, it'll be it's like, no, what's in front of you right now, what opportunities are in front of you, and how can you love, like, how can you find that love now? And I think you can't then worry about 50 years from now, you know, all that sort of thing.

And I want to say be with, be where your feet are as Jesse Itzler's phrase, but I just want to make sure I'm not taking credit for that.

What she has written, I have felt viscerally in my life before. And I think although what you're saying, Stephen, is absolutely right, and that attitude is integral to finding love. I think when you're in that place where you, it's not happening and you really, really want it and you know that you have a lot of love to give and there's no home for all of that love, and it becomes, it's actually like you, you want that more than anything. You don't, you want it more than your career, you want it more than your friendships, you want it more than travel. You just want to find the spend the rest of your life with. I have been in that place and you feel it's a scary place to be. So I totally agree with you, Steve. I really do. I do want to say, though, that I think maybe there are just different kinds of people in terms of what they want more than anything. And I definitely relate to what she has said. And I think when you're like us in that way, you Yeah, it's scary because you don't feel like you have control. You have control over most things in your life. You work hard, you'll get a promotion, you save up, you can buy a house, you invest time in your friendships, you can get great friends, you can do all those things, but love is not a guarantee. It's alchemy and it's complicated and that's why it's so scary.

And I'm happy that you said that, Audrey, and I think I'm happy that she wrote this comment and that it got 1500 people agreEing with it because it's just very honest.

Right.

And it's like we're in a culture that just sells us that we kind of oversells us on freedom because freedom's great. Right. So the freedom to get be independent with your, with your job, be by the house, buy whatever. But when you check back in, honestly, with what you really want, that is a big thing, and I I do think it's a pressure valve to just know that like, yeah, 1500 people agreed with her. And everything Steve says, I think is still valid too. You know, it's like, it's really easy to build that up so much in your head that it's gonna be impossible to live up to it. 'Cause if you're going out and you're trying to find the one that's gonna fill in all of that potential that you know is there to be had, that's gonna be a pretty impossible thing. So just my one quick piece of advice before I throw it to Matt is just like, remember that you're just looking for the person to build with. You're not looking for the person that's the one. You're just looking for the one that can build with you.

Yeah.

Which is, I think, is so, so, so important and hard to connect to when we're looking for the feelings we've always been sold on that we're supposed to feel. And those feelings can be very. they can feel almost impossible to live up to. I think they do become actually impossible for anything to really live up to. Even the things that do live up to it don't live up to it forever. The honeymoons that we can feel with someone don't sustain themselves. They change. So there's a danger in looking for a feeling and never evolving the idea of what it is we're actually looking for. But you're right. Jameson. It's, it's, there's this moment in the Crown where Margaret is talking to the Queen and she's so upset with the Queen and she has so much resentment towards her because the Queen earlier in their life forbade him, her from being with someone she deemed to be the love of her life. and she missed out on that love as a result of the queen telling her, no, you can't be with that person.

And.

She calls out Queen Victor, Queen Elizabeth, I should say. She calls out Queen Elizabeth on the fact that she takes for granted how many things in her life have been made easier by having Philip in her life. All of the ways that when she needed someone at the end of the day, Philip was there, when she needed to be lifted, Philip was there, when she needed an opinion, Philip was there. And Margaret didn't get to have that, didn't get to experience that. And it is so wounding for Margaret that she never had that. And she sees how much harder her life was for not having had that companionship in her life. And that is what so many people on an instinctive level feel, is that there is something that is absent in their life that other people have, or at least it looks like a lot of other people have. And the pain from that is chronic. It's a chronic pain. It's a pain that comes about any time you're not actively busy doing something. At the end of the evening, when your friends go home, there it is. And it's not just a pain that's there when we're inactive. It's a pain that's there when we're with our friends. If we are finding it hard to be present or if our friend is getting married and oh my God, I'm so happy for her, but at the same time it just reminds me of what I don't have. That pain is there even in those comparisons that we make, even if we're a good person and we're a loving person and we're supportive of our friends. It's a pain that is there when we can be in our best moments. I can recall a particular trip I was on where I arrived at this hotel on my own, and it was amazing. The hotel was incredible. And we were by the, I was by the beach. It wasn't there with anyone, but it was by the beach. And I remember seeing this gorgeous place and hearing the waves and seeing the lobby, and I had this instant rush of excitement and then this instinct to turn to my left and say, Isn't this amazing? Only there was no one to say, Isn't this amazing too? And so even the peaks, the peak moments can be terribly difficult when we think about how they would be magnified by sharing them with somebody else. I had a breakup years ago that I was in my mid-20s and I remember having to leave this person because I knew this person wasn't right. but also the kind of grieving you do when you leave a relationship and you know that you're walking away from all of the comfort of that relationship and all of the companionship that it brought you, even with the wrong person. And I remember sitting with someone that I worked with at the time, an older guy had been married for some time. And I remember him saying to me, I. I'm sorry, Matthew. I just. I don't. I think it gets you, you, you came to LA, you met someone and you got into a relationship and, and it fine, it lasted 18 months. But he said, I don't think it gets to be that easy for you. And I was mad at him at the time, in a way, because I was like, but why doesn't it get to be that easy for me? You know? And he said, there's just, there's things that I know are going to be important to you that you're just It's not going to be that easy to just find them. And in a way, he was right. It wasn't just that easy for me to find those things. And and I think that the great challenge in life is to to try to figure out what's actually important to us and what's and what's less important than perhaps we once realized what are the things we genuinely can't live without, you know, I know I can't live without someone who's kind. I know I can't, I could never have been with a person who wasn't kind at their core. It would have been a problem. And of course, that's not my only requirement of a relationship, but it was a big one. And I think the more of those things that you can look at and go, what's, what are those things that really, really matter to me? And let me spend my life worrying about whether someone has those and perhaps along the way, what things might I let go of? that aren't as important to me. And then over time practicing leaning into those things and seeing how it feels and practicing, even I think the practice of sometimes letting go of a couple of things that we thought were important to us can be a really valuable practice. Because it's not easy, because there's a child in us, there's a teenager in us, there's a 21-year-old in us that says, no, no, no. I'm supposed to have all of these things. These are the qualities. These are the things I've been sold on. These are the things that are important. These are. And I think that the practice, it is a practice. The practice of letting go of some of those things is like strengthening a muscle, I think. And that muscle gets stronger the more you use it and the more you lean into, well, If someone is the right stuff and I really lean into investing in the right stuff, then I'm going to start caring about the right stuff more because that's where my energy and that's where my focus is going. And as a, I suppose a way to temper all of this, remember so many of the people that you are comparing yourself to actually haven't found that either. They themselves have not found a relationship where they lent into the right qualities and the things that make for a peaceful, happy, long-term relationship. They haven't done that. And they're fighting in ways you don't even know behind the scenes. And there's tension and there's misery and there's. frustration and there's fear that you don't see on the stage when they're out there in life. It's happening behind the curtain. And, and you have to be very careful not to just look at people in a relationship and take up face value that they have done the thing that I am talking about. And I know that I know that what brings me a sense of peace and brought me a sense of peace when I was single is this idea that if you're 40 and you're thinking, is it ever going to happen for me? I want you to know that if someone came to me at 60 and they'd just been through a divorce, I wouldn't be worried about them. I'd, I'd be like, oh, we're gonna, you're gonna find love again. Like, if you're, if you actually want it, I'm not saying that if you're 60 and you come out and you're bitter and you hate the opposite sex and you're like, never again, I'm never gonna ever be in a relationship again, because I hate them. And, and because there, that happens to a lot of people. They come out and they just, they put up a, a road, a barrier to everyone now because they've decided I just, I hate, you know, I hate men. You know, I just never, I never want to open myself up to a man again. I'm done with men. That's okay. And, and that's fine. But as long as you have that mindset, of course, it's going to be terrifically difficult to ever find love. But for the, for the person at 60 who comes to me and they're like, I just went through a divorce, and they're a, they're an open person, and they're open to possibilities in life, and they're willing to put themselves out there in life and to live and to be open to people and warm. I know. I'm like, oh, I'm not worried about you. There is love out there. And you can have it. Can you have your love in exactly the way that you always told yourself you would have it? Probably not. But that's a childish version of love anyway. That's not like a love of a real person. Because to me, real love is someone comes into your life and they're not everything that the 21 year old or 25 year old or maybe even the 30 year old version of you said they wanted. But it's irrelevant because there's something about this person and the way that they are or the way that they love you or the connection you have with them. that. That makes that stuff seem silly, that makes that stuff not feel important anymore. And now what you've done is you've fallen in love with a person, not a blueprint that you had made up at some point in your life. Because people aren't blueprints. They're people. You're going to come along and you're not going to be everything that someone wanted. Like, you're just not. you're going to be some, you're going to be some of what they wanted, some of what they didn't want. But the core of you is going to be, is going to make you their person. And, and so that's, that's what, that's the mandate. That's what we should be going for, is I'm going through life and, and I'm going to find my person and my person is not going to be necessarily someone that I today can dream up because they're much more complex than that. And if I understand that that can happen for me at any age, at any time in my life, and at that point, I'm going to be ready to meet it with presence, with curiosity, with a generous lens for who that person is and what they have to offer. And I'm going to be brave enough to let go of some things that don't matter. Then that's when I loop back, Stephen, to what you're saying. Because at that point, I end up in a place where I go, oh, it's there for you. It's there for you. It's gonna. It's gonna happen. It is there for you if you take that approach to it. If you want to join us in June for the virtual retreat, we would so love to have you. It's real stuff we're doing together over those days. It's three days of immersive coaching. It's live, it's virtual, so you can do it from anywhere in the world. And if you've got to the end of this episode, whether you're brand new to us or you've followed us for a while, you know that what we do is about far more than finding a person. It's about finding a deep, deep love for life. Because the marriage that we're all in is, is a marriage with life itself and, of course, with ourselves. And, and getting those marriages right, getting the marriage with ourself right and getting the marriage with life right, I believe if we do that, the rest actually does fall into place. And that's what we do on the virtual. retreat together.