Why Seeking Love Only Leads To Finding Desperation

We live in a world where everyone is constantly on to the next best thing.

Finish school, find the job, get the promotion, and own the business. Find the guy, put a ring on it, and have a bun in the oven by the time the weekend hits.

Sound familiar?

It can become extremely overwhelming to find a balance between the pressure from the world around us to follow the pack, and the pressure from the pull within us to follow the beat of our own heart’s drum. Because of this constant battle of head, heart, and humanity, it’s easy to make the decision that we are going to seek and find whatever it is we are looking for. This may work (to a certain extent) with education, dreams, and potential career paths; however, I am learning very quickly that this will never work with love.

Being a go-getter is both a blessing and a curse. It’s something I’ve always attributed to being where I’m at in life, but it’s also the reason I can’t sit still for more than 5 minutes without feeling the need to better myself. I’ve had to learn the hard way that some of the best things are worth the wait and that the amount of time we are willing to be patient and wait for something is directly proportionate to the value in which we place that particular thing. Love has always been one of my top priorities.

Lately, I’ve found myself at a point in life where pretty much everything has fallen into place aside from the fact that I have no one to share the ride with. My education, career, passions, pursuits, and dreams are all beginning to align, but something still feels like it’s missing when I lay my head down at night and wake up alone each morning. I’ve found this gaping hole to be consuming my thoughts, purpose, and reasoning behind nearly everything I do.
Maybe I’ll meet him while perusing apples at the grocery store—I’ll bet Pink Ladies are his favorite, too. I should probably get back into that running group I used to run with, just in case any hotties have joined. Volunteer at the animal shelter? How cute would it be to bond over a love for saving the strays?

I’ve found that the more I allow these thoughts to consume my mind, the less encounters I seem to have with anyone I could see making his way into my future. In fact, the harder I try to “seek” the person I am looking for, the more I seem to attract the exact opposite of what I am trying to find.

I am a believer in the law of attraction. By this, I simply mean that we attract what we are putting out into the world. Negativity attracts negativity, optimism attracts optimism and—you’ve got it, desperation only attracts even more desperation.

Have you ever thought about how many attractive people you seem to come in contact with when you’re in a happy relationship? It’s absurd! I don’t mean attractive only physically; I mean it seems as though when I am dating someone, my life is suddenly set on a track in which all sorts of other like-minded people with similar interests, passions, beliefs or character come into my life. I’ve joked many times with my friends about how easy it would be to meet someone when you’re already dating someone else, yet the minute you’re single it’s as though all of those eligible bachelors disappear into thin air. It’s taken me a while to learn and understand that the reason I seem to connect with so many amazing people when I am in a happy relationship is because that is the vibe I am putting out into the universe—happy, content, fulfilled. On the other hand, it’s the nights we go out searching to find something or someone that we only end up attracting the people who are also exuding desperate, unfulfilled, seeking, clawing, reaching feelings.

This doesn’t mean that we need to go out and find a “fill-in” to attract the right kind of people, in fact, it means the very opposite. The biggest lesson I have learned from this realization is that we have to seek fulfillment within ourselves before we can find it within another. How many times have you heard “it’ll happen when you least expect it” or “you won’t find what you’re looking for until you stop searching?” The underlying reason you least expect it or stop searching is because you’re too busy filling your life with all of the other things that make you happy. It’s in these moments, already filled to the brim with passion and dreams and purpose that we meet and connect with individuals who are also filled with passion, dreams, and purpose—the kind of people we had to stop searching for in order to find.

This also goes along with feeling discontent in our current situations and thinking we need to move or change or search in order to find what we are looking for. I’ve learned that we can travel the world in search of the right person, but it isn’t until we are happy right where we’re at that they will come into our lives.

Take a deep breath.
Find what it is that makes you happy, filled with passion, and full of purpose.
Find what it is that makes you feel fulfilled.

And the moment you think your life couldn’t be any more full, you will meet the person who fills spaces you didn’t realize were missing.