Running Out of Time to Find Love? | Rewind

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This was a question that came in from one of our members. She says, "I'm 29 and starting to feel really uncomfortable with the fact that I'm still single. I can't help but wonder what's wrong with me that I haven't found something lasting yet. How do I shift this mindset and ensure it doesn't sabotage my dating life?" "I don't want to be too eager and end up settling for the next decent thing that comes my way, and I'm afraid I've done this with the last few men I have dated." Today, I'm gonna be talking about 7 different mindsets that can help you out of the anxiety of still being single. The first thing I would say to this person is to avoid the seduction of false Progress. When we feel like we need to make progress and then we see someone in front of us, maybe they're not quite right for us, maybe they fall beneath certain standards we have for the behavior we want, or maybe we just don't really click with them on the level that we want for our future partner. But simply dating them and letting that slip into seeing them and letting seeing them slip into some kind of current or temporary relationship Feels like progress. It feels like forward momentum. But those relationships that we settle for in the short term, just so that we can tell our friends that we're seeing someone again, just so that we can post a relationship status that we're with someone, we can let the world know that we have someone, they're costly in terms of time and energy. It's a bit like relationship musical chairs. Everyone's going around in a circle until the music stops, and then all of a sudden everyone scrambles to find the nearest chair. No one wants to be the person left standing in musical chairs. Well, being single can be the same thing.

You're just—

any chair will do. Just get me sat on a chair so that I'm not left standing at the end of this. But then you realize you haven't been discerning at all about the chair you've sat on. Is it a comfy chair? Is it a chair you want to be sat on for the rest of your life? Some people are sat down on a three-legged chair. Other people— you— that— this person sat on a chair with a whoopee cushion on it because we're terrified that when the music stops. We're not gonna have a place to reside. We're not gonna have a person, so we grab at any person. Number 2: Lose the shame. Own your intentions. I reread this woman's question. I'm starting to feel really uncomfortable with the fact that I'm still single. Notice that language, still single. It carries a kind of shame that there's something wrong with me. There is a desperation about me that I'm still single, and God forbid anyone else see or feel that desperation. And what that does for a lot of people— I've been doing this for 15 years now, and what I watch is people fake a kind of indifference because they're terrified to be seen to be trying in their love lives. Many people would rather be in the wrong relationship than see— be seen to be out there single trying to find the right relationship, because at least by being in the wrong relationship, they can say they're with somebody. That shame is something we have to lose, and the way we lose it is by getting back to just owning the intention. What is the intention? I'm a human being who is capable of giving an extraordinary amount of love, who is still romantic, and excited and optimistic about what— how good love can be. And I want to find that. There is no shame in that. That's just beautiful. And it's such an unkind thing to do to ourselves, to take this beautiful intention that we've had for a very long time and to make it synonymous with desperation and insecurities and all of these— all of our worst fears about our inadequacy. Number 3, break the spell of comparison. Even in the language of, "I'm 29 and I still haven't met someone yet," are the symptoms of comparison. You know, "I thought I'd be here by now." And we measure where we should be in relation to other people. Where are people normally by my age? Where are my friends right now? Are they married? Are they in relationships? Oh my God, they are. Some of them are even starting to think about having a family. I feel left behind. There's all that comparison that makes us unhappy. And by the way, there are some of you in the comments who will say, she's 29, she's a baby, she's so young, and you'll be doing the comparison game because you'll be doing it in relation to your age. Oh God, if she only knew, I'm 50, and when I was 29, I didn't realize how much time I had. But maybe there's a 70-year-old looking at you and saying the same thing. When I was 50, I didn't realize that I could have a whole new life starting at point. It goes on and on. These comparisons happen all the time. One thing is universal: all of us are going to be humbled at some point in our lives by being— to use a Monopoly reference— sent back to go, right? We can think that we're making progress at one point in our lives. You find a partner at 28, you get married by 30, and you feel like you've made massive progress. And then all of a sudden at 32 You're getting a divorce. No one would have wanted that for themselves. They didn't predict it at the point where they were getting married, but it happened, and all of a sudden life went go back to go, and this happens in all areas of our life. Sometimes it happens financially. You thought you were in a certain position, and then some cataclysmic event precipitates you having to go back to go financially, or it might be in your health. You suddenly have a health scare, and that sends you back to go health-wise. We all have these setbacks in life. And, you know, to me, a lot of growing older, and especially the wiser people around me, they start to lose that framing of life of, "I'm trying to do this by this time." Because in the context of a life full of forward motion and then massive setbacks and taking a big leap ahead and then having another massive setback and kind of being sent back to go in different areas regularly, it starts to seem a bit silly. What we realize is the only consistent thing in my life is my trajectory and who I'm becoming. I am every day growing and becoming wiser, more learned, more experienced, more seasoned in life. And, and we can refine that person to become better and better at handling life. The kind of funny thing about life is while we're racing to show material progress— I'm now in a relationship, now I'm graduating to marriage, now I have a family— life is far more complex than that. You could find someone today and not make that relationship last because you're not ready to make a relationship last today. Or you could be single for the next 5 years and the relationship you find in 5 years lasts because of who you became in that time. Life is complex. Lose the comparison. It's just your journey. Number 4, make friends with uncertainty. One of the things that is making this person so afraid is looking at the future and catastrophizing. What if I'm still single at 35? What if I'm still single at 40? What if I never meet somebody, everything changes in life. Everything. Our worst problems today will change. They will shapeshift into something else. They will evolve because everything in life is always evolving, is always changing. And so we have to make space for that in, in that fear of the future. Instead of having this incredible fear of the future, we have to kind of get our feet on the ground today and say, I'm here in this moment right now. My worst fears aren't actually happening right now. They are, by definition, their fears, their, their future projection. That thing isn't actually happening right now. What's happening right now is my feet are on the ground. I'm here in this moment. There's some stuff in my life that I want to fix. There's some stuff I want to work on. There's some stuff that hasn't happened yet, but it's It's all changing, and I cannot predict where I will be a year from now. And that would be true, by the way, if you were in a relationship right now. Don't think that other people have been given the gift of certainty, and you haven't in your single state. They do not own the gift of certainty.

They're—

now they're in a marriage, so they're certain that this person will never leave. They're certain that this person will never cheat on them. They're certain this person will never die. No one gets that certainty. It is not available to us. While uncertainty may create discomfort at times in our life, we can learn to make friends with it. Part of making friends with it, to me, is, yes, I— it may be that some of my fears may be confirmed. It might be that some bad things will happen in my life. But what's certain is that everything changes. This feeling I have will change. My relationship with my problems will change. The circumstances of the problems themselves will change. And, and within that uncertainty, by the way, is also something wildly exciting, which is that anything can happen at any moment. Someone could walk into your life, or you into theirs, and you— what, what is sparked is the great relationship of your life. Speaking of anything is possible, remember And this is point number 5. It only takes one. Baseball, you get a certain number of swings, and then you strike out. This is not true of our love life. No matter how many times you've tried, there is no cap on how many times you can try, on how many people you can approach, on how many relationships you can enter into. You can keep going at this until you find the right person, until you become the right person. Until you find the right relationship, you only need one. How many things in the entire world give you those odds? It doesn't matter how many times you try, you can literally keep trying until you find the relationship. You are only limited by your own fear of rejection. Number 6, learning how to be happy on your own is one of the most worthwhile muscles you can build. So much of the work that allows us to bring our best selves to a relationship, have standards in a relationship, be independent while also being in a relationship where there is a kind of interdependence, is best done while we're on our own. When your friends are all out with their partners on a Friday night,, and you find yourself having to sit in that feeling of being on your own, self-soothing, learning that you actually quite like your own company. The relationships, the friendships that we invest in when we find ourselves single, then the kind of support network that we build, the passions that we find we invest in. These are all things that give us this solid base that when we find someone allows us to ask a crucial question: does this person elevate my life? Does this person add to my joy? Or do they actually compromise this joy that I've created? Number 7: Learn to fall in love with your life the way that your life is happening. And this kind of gets completely out of the comparison mode, and it means a complete presence with our life. Fall in love with your life the way it's happening, instead of the way you thought it should have happened. Instead of being married to the blueprint that you once had for yourself about the way it was supposed to unfold, fall in love with the way that it's unfolding, the good and the bad, because that's your life. And the product of that is going to be your unique product, the product of your pain, the product of things not going your way, the product of, of the muscle you have to build in the difficult times, in the lonely times. That is all creating this treasure that is uniquely yours. And when you get to the end of your story, it will be your story. It won't be a cheap copy of somebody else's journey. And the more you can just go with the flow of that, and every, every step of the way, just decide to make the most of whatever is going on right now. "I'm single at 29. How do I make the most of that? How do I get the most fun out of that? How do I get the most joy out of that? How do I get the most learning out of that? How do I make the biggest impact out of that? That's where I am. What can I do with that?" The more we can fall in love with our own journey and make the most of that particular journey, the better a life we're gonna have.

Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I do not take it for granted. I also wanted to let you know another way that we can connect each week, because there is a private email that I send every Friday to those who have signed up for it. For me, it's a way that I can stay connected to all of you between episodes. The newsletter is called The Three Relationships., and basically each week I share something to help you improve in one of the 3 big relationships in your life: your relationship with other people, your relationship with yourself, or your relationship with life itself. These 3 relationships are the basis of an amazing life.

People tell me that they look forward to this email every single Friday.

It's not the kind of email they skip. So if you want to join us, go to the3relationships.com and you can sign up for free. That's the number 3, by the way, not the word three. So the3relationships.com. Thank you for listening. Take care and keep showing up for yourself in your life. I'll see you in the newsletter.

This monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. Reese, our content agent, wrote the copy based on our best practices, like mentioning monday.com 3 times. That was the second. Johnny, our coordination agent, built the timeline and kept everyone aligned. Olivia, our human creative director, stayed in the loop because agents are great, but they don't always know when a joke lands. She had one note: tell listeners it only takes minutes to build an agent. So, minutes. Create your own AI agent today on monday.com.

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