How To Find Love (Or How to Find a Boyfriend or Girlfriend)

In my research for my new website I have been looking at the most searched romantic words on Google. One of the biggest is the word Dating, with over twenty million searches per month. One million people are searching specifically using the word love. This suggests that there are a lot of people out there who are looking for a partner. That is why, in this article, I would like to focus on how to bring a partner into your life and start a successful relationship. If you are in a relationship already, some of these ideas will still be useful, but if they are not directly relevant, I would be grateful if you would pass this article on to your single friends.

Having spent quite a few years of my earlier life as a single person, I know what it feels like to desperately want a partner, but to be unable to meet anybody or to take a relationship beyond the friendship stage. At the time I would be attracted to women, and they would like me, but they never wanted to be my girlfriend. Unfortunately I concluded that I was unattractive and unloveable, and this made me even more self-conscious and lacking in confidence - it became a vicious circle. At times I thought that I would never meet anybody and yet I knew I had so much love to give and receive. I guess this kept my spirits up until I discovered the real reason I was single.

I wasn't on my own because I was unattractive, badly dressed or unloveable - I was on my own because deep down in my subconscious mind, that washow I wanted to be. I came to this astonishing conclusion after several years of self-development work, which involved looking at my self-beliefs. Central to this was the belief that I would be happier on my own, or more accurately, being single would protect me from the emotional pain that I knew subconsciously would rise to the surface in an intimate relationship. This pain was coming from a belief that love is a source of pain, and the fear that if I allowed myself to love somebody fully, I could not stand the pain of any subsequent rejection, or of losing them. But in getting down to this fundamental fear around love I discovered another highly destructive layer of negative emotion that was making it impossible to find a partner and form a relationship.

As I looked within at my self-beliefs I began to realise that I was full of guilt. This had started in my childhood around not being able to help my parents with their own life challenges but had grown into a general sense of unworthiness. Although I was outwardly successful at school, college and work, inside I was carrying around a feeling of being bad. When it came to romance and dating this was a disaster because the guilt made me feel terribly self-conscious and shy and meant that I was afraid of getting into a relationship in case my partner saw my faults. Ironically, I did eventually find a partner who became my wife, but my lack of self-worth meant that I was not emotionally available to her and she eventually left me. I then had to face the rejection that I so feared and the agony of losing love.

Of course, the love was never lost, because love isn't like that. Love is always present because it connects us all, and it was coming to this understanding that allowed me to move my life forward and start healing my negative self-beliefs and sense of unworthiness. If you are single and long to find a partner, ask yourself the questions I asked myself. "Why would you not want to be in a long-term, committed relationship?" - "What benefits do you receive by remaining single and independent?" Go beneath the obvious conscious desire for a boyfriend or girlfriend and find out what it is in your past that has made you believe that you do not deserve a relationship, or it you did get into one, that it would result in emotional suffering. Somewhere in your past you will find an incident or period where you turned away from self-love and acceptance and decided that it was too risky to get yourself into an intimate, healing relationship.

As you become aware of any negative self-beliefs like guilt and inadequacy that you are holding, you will be able to make new choices about yourself and the way that you understand love. This will help you to grow your self-esteem, which is the key to attracting a partner and having a successful relationship. This was exactly the process I went through in my own healing (which is still ongoing of course!). As part of the awareness I gained, I also discovered another amazing thing. Although I was holding myself back from a relationship because I felt guilty and unworthy of love, this was not the most fundamental issue. As I stripped away the guilt and healed it, I found that I was afraid of my capacity for love - afraid of just how big my heart was. This deeper fear seems crazy, but I know that it created all my other negative self-beliefs.

So, ask yourself one final question, if your are single (or if love is lacking in any way in your relationship) - " Am I afraid of my loving heart - am I defending it? If you sense that you are, you can heal any guilt, inadequacy and unworthiness very easily. Simply embrace your gift of wholeheartedness and open it as fully as you can, and as often as you can. This will reveal the real, loving you, and there is nothing more attractive than somebody with an open, undefended heart. If you can do this, it will bring a true partner into your life. Your open heart will then keep it on a healing path. Thankfully this was my own experience of healing guilt and re-opening my heart, having defended and closed it down for some many years.