Why You Only Find Love When You Stop Looking For It

I think that anyone who says that they don’t aspire to be in love one day is a liar. Maybe you don’t want it right now or maybe you desperately want to pour out all the love you’ve been saving up on someone. Either way, as humans, we all crave to love and be loved. I don’t know much about love, but what I do know is that the only way to find love is to not look for it.

In high school, I never dated anyone. People liked me, and I never liked them. I was a snob and a half who took cues from Cher Horowitz and wanted nothing to do with high school boys. I thought my window would be college. I imagined college to be an endless array of guys where I would get to choose my best suitor.

I quickly found out that was not the case.

No one was knocking down my dorm room door to get the chance to date me. I was 19 and thought that something had to be seriously wrong with me since I never had a boyfriend. I spent most of my time sitting in my dorm watching Netflix while crying and wondering why no one liked me. It made me hate myself because I thought that I was the problem. I wanted to desperately for someone to come along and make me forget about all this nonsense I had convinced myself of.

After overcoming a lot of the depression and learning to cope with my anxiety, I realized that no one liked me because no one knew me. I was literally hiding away from the world for months. I decided to take charge of my own love life and set out on a quest to date people. I thought that if I put myself out there and actively looked for love, I was bound to find it. It made so much sense at the time. On my quest to find love, I went on a lot of dates that only left me with sloppy kisses and funny stories to tell my friends. I didn’t click with anyone and I started to revert back to thinking that I was the problem.

I decided to take a break and stop caring so much about finding someone and just start living my life and doing what I enjoyed. I started going to the gym regularly, focused on school, got a job, started writing online, and made goals for my future. I wasn’t worried about who was going to be beside me because I realized that having myself was enough. I was content with my life and open to whatever came my way.

One day I decided to message some dude on Facebook whom I worked with and somehow we ended up talking for 4 hours that night and haven’t stopped talking since. I didn’t go into it with an agenda to fall in love. I wasn’t expecting to fall in love and wasn’t actively looking for it; it just happened.

What I’ve found is that you just have to live your life; do what you want and be yourself. The rest will come when it’s supposed to. As cliché as it sounds, life tends to work itself out exactly the way it’s supposed to. There is no use in stressing about being in a relationship for any reason. There is no timeline on when you have to have a boyfriend. Stop seeking out love and just allow it to come to you whenever it’s ready.

Featured image via Asad Photo Maldives on Pexels

1 COMMENT

  1. PLEASE don’t post things like this. This advice cannot be any further from the truth!
    I’m now 3+ years of “not looking”. During the first year I focused immensely on myself. I cared a little more about finding love in the 2nd year. However, the 3rd year, and now well within the 4th, I’ve gone insane because of this awful advice.
    I’m STILL lonely. How can you tell a person to not look for the one thing they truly want? No amount of mountain biking, country two-stepping, punk rock shows, or the gym can replace an actual relationship. Not to mention that MOST people in relationships are in them because they were looking for them.

    PLEASE DELETE THIS ARTICLE!

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