Dating When You’ve Learnt to Love Yourself

Dating is ostensibly the business of searching for someone to love – but for it to go well, it requires us first to work on a much more fundamental relationship: the one that we have with ourselves. We won’t be successful daters – or indeed, successful lovers – if we haven’t first reached a healthy perspective on our own natures. Dating presents us with the ultimate test of our powers of discernment and of our sense of self-worth.

What exactly does it mean to suggest that we may need to learn to love ourselves before we try to love someone else? It means that we won’t be in any position to work out who is kind and good, who is worth investing in, until we are firmly on our own side. We need to have overcome our self-suspicion, to be sure of what we deserve and to have a healthy sense of our value – in order to correctly judge who could adequately reward our presence and in order not to despair at all the rejection we will inevitably encounter on our journey to love.

Here are some of the many rules, born out of adequate self-love, that stand a chance of keeping us safe and more or less calm during the turbulence of the dating process:

— If they take an age to answer a message, we must walk away.

— If we feel obligated but, deep down, don’t feel comfortable, we must walk away.

— If they make us feel ashamed or scared, we must walk away.

— If we need to keep reminding ourselves that they are right on paper, but something in our depths stubbornly says ‘no’, we must walk away.

— We must forever banish the idea that choice is limited. It is, in its way, infinite. There will always be other people. The pool is constantly being refilled. The situation can change in an instant. We must wait as long as we need to.

— We should spell out what we want clearly, early on. If they run away immediately, they would have done so eventually in any case; we’re merely saving ourselves time.

— We should try hard not to go off people who threaten to be nice to us.

— We should strive not to fall in love at once with those who ignore us.

— We should accept with grace that most people won’t want us. We’re really not for everyone. And we don’t want most people either. This is going to be an exercise in the million perplexing ways in which one human can fall short of another’s hopes. We aren’t being wilfully fussy. We are interviewing for the most important job in our lives. We are trying to stay true to a legitimately distinctive vision of happiness. We have no option but to be very difficult.

— We only have to be lucky once. We’re trying to fill a single, very important chair – not a bus.

— If there is an ex in our background haunting us with a sense that it could have been better with them, it evidently couldn’t – or we wouldn’t be here. Let’s not compound our difficulties with nostalgia. Exes became exes for solid reasons.

— We probably fought very hard to untangle ourselves from a past partner. Honour the effort that went into giving ourselves a chance for something ‘better’.

— Don’t be too jealous of the married and the settled. Life has a habit of eventually forcing everyone to take equal sips from the cup of sorrow.

— Details are where large incompatibilities first manifest themselves. It shouldn’t feel strange to call it a day because of an unfortunate sentence or word on their part.

— Watch out, in dating as in relationships, for the so-called polite, people-pleasing, cowardly, shape-shifting ones: those whose disinterest wears a smile, and who waste so much time of our time with their dread of being rude or unkind.

— Some people are going to be plain unwell. Mental illness is a reality for a fair percentage of the population; we should be ready.

— However auspicious a situation might appear, we must assume nothing too readily. We won’t know for sure for a very long time. We must quash premature enthusiasm – so as never to pay an undue price for it down the line. We must keep repeating, like a mantra, every time promise dawns: ‘… but we just can’t tell yet’.

— Attraction matters. This isn’t an unholy or cheap demand; this is more than merely friendship. We should candidly register when the feeling is missing – and move on without shame.

— We mustn’t go to bed too soon; it creates obligations that will be exhausting to work our way out of. Let physical intimacy be the result of confidence in their emotional rightness – not an attempt to catalyse a bond. There will be plenty of time for all of that later.

— Take regular breaks. These auditions are terrifying. We are right to feel tearful and fed up. It is appalling to have to write and then delete so many scripts for our possible futures. It is sad to keep realising how far we are from home.

— Try to identify a kind, concerned friend on whom to rely for counsel when perspective starts to slip and madness threatens; they will help.

— We should notice – more than we’re usually encouraged to – whether or not they interest us. Are their minds richly filled? Do they make us feel cleverer than we feel on our own? Do we want to know what they think? We might have to spend another 7,000 dinners with them.

— We should refuse all non-reciprocal situations. They are either keen on us – viscerally keen – or we must walk away. We aren’t here to coax, beg or drag the semi-willing.

— We should be ready for numberless rejections and drain them of too much meaning. We mustn’t turn them into referenda on our right to exist. They are about poor alignment, not about every loss we’ve ever had.

— We must know that we can be alone, possibly forever, if we have to. It is conclusively better to remain single until eternity than to give room to a compromise candidate. Solitude at least allows us – always – to maintain hope.

— Let it take as long as it has to. If we are still here this time next year, and the year after that, so be it.

Dating is an extremely demanding process. We will often feel close to surrender and folly. But the more we are on our side, the more we will be able to hold in mind a critical truth as we return home from yet another disappointing encounter: we aren’t in any way unloveable; we just haven’t found the right love yet.