“The right person will not…”
“The right person will…”
That’s the advice Catholic social media bombards us with.
But do we ever ask if WE are the right person?
Have we sorted ourselves out before seeking to bring someone else into our lives, who’s going to have to deal with you for the rest of their life?
It’s worth taking a good look at ourselves, and thinking about what we need to sort out.
Here’s what I did when I was single, and had just gone through a terrible breakup.
1. The healing phase
First of all, I had to learn forgive and let go. Prayer helped, but spending time with friends and other people is crucial. The best remedy for pain? Serving others in need. There’s something about serving the less fortunate that reorients your perspective. Needless to say, you need to go no-contact with your ex. Depending on the way things ended, it would be good to agree to a period of healing. We’ll be coming out with a course/sidequest diving more into this.
2. Speaking to real people about it
Sometimes all you need is someone who will listen, that’s essentially what a therapist is anyway. What makes someone a good listener? Someone who listens without judgment or bias, and doesn’t try to project their own personal opinions on the situation. Someone who helps you to discern what God might be trying to do in your life. Yes, sometimes you do need to rant to friends, and that’s okay. But speaking to a real spiritual director is crucial. Find a priest, a nun. Be respectful of their time. If you say you need an hour, stick to it. In this season it’s easy to spiral in your head, so verbalising your thoughts brings a lot more clarity than you think.
3. Work on yourself
At a certain point, you need to stop blaming your circumstances, your ex, or even God for the fact that you’re single. You need to realise that God gave you free will, and that while you can’t control whether someone will show up, you can control if you’re going to be the one who will show up in someone else’s life. This could mean working on becoming more attractive, getting real feedback from strangers who aren’t afraid to hurt your feelings. Moving to somewhere with more prospects, or even just getting your own car so you can drive out 3 hours for Mass or join young adult groups. Being single is the time to focus on your goals. Travel the world so you have interesting stories to tell the next person you meet. Become the kind of person you’d want your spouse to be.
4. Change your mindset
After my experience with my ex, and having been on many dating apps, I started to believe many lies about myself. One of them being that I only attracted broken people into my life. This was a hard one to wrestle with, because the solution to that isn’t just denying the realities and patterns. It was accepting that yes, this has been a pattern. There must be something about me that is attracting all the wrong people, and I need to fix it. Sometimes it isn’t anything that seems tangible, but I truly believe that people do have an “aura”, a combination of factors that lead to a final result. And for that to change, you just need to do the work.
5. What I did
For me, that was getting a whole new life. I started doing all the things that I thought "we" were going to do together, but by myself. It's true that time heals all wounds, but what you do with your time affects how quickly and how well you heal. I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to move to Paris for a year, and I immersed myself in a new passion, Baroque art. I joined a boxing gym, and every day I would go sit in a beautiful Church and just spend time with God. I moved to Paris knowing that the language barrier would be the hardest challenge. Going from someone who was known to be a great orator, to becoming some foreigner who couldn’t speak the language. I had to grow beyond myself, learn a new language. Got a healthy routine in, attending morning Mass at Notre Dame everyday.
I eventually met my now girlfriend when I least expected to, when I had just lost my day job, and in the most unconventional way.
And yes, I know that it all sounds incredibly privileged, and this is like the equivalent of going to a fancy rehab on a private island. But my points still stand.
If you’ve been finding that you haven’t had much luck with dating, perhaps it’s you that needs to do something radical.
What was that quote about the definition of insanity?
I’m rooting for all of you.
