Stop Looking For 'The One,' Start Looking For Someone Who Understands You

I don’t remember the last time I went on a real date. I meet tons of women, but few ever catch my interest in the way my interest needs to be caught.

I used to devote a lot of time into searching for someone I can be with, someone I can love and share my life with. But after years of searching, you get to a point where you say: What’s the point?

Sure, you want to find somebody to love -- somebody who loves you -- but searching for that someone doesn’t seem to work. Finding that right person is basically entirely up to chance. It’s out of your control.

Yes, you can increase your likelihood of finding that special someone, but not by “dating” as many people as possible.

Instead, you ought to focus on yourself and hope that when you meet a potential lifetime lover that you’re exactly the person he or she has been looking for. What type of person would that be? Someone who is capable of understanding another better than he or she can understand him or herself.

What it comes down to is this: We’re all looking for someone who can help us better understand ourselves. That’s what you should be looking for. But you won't find it spending your life searching for that someone.

Searching is active and it takes a lot of time -- you have more important things to focus on.

I understand that finding someone you love is difficult, and because it’s difficult, you feel the need to dedicate time to finding that special someone. However, actively searching -- dedicating significant time to meeting new people for the hopes of finding the love of your life -- is pretty much futile.

This is not to say you should avoid meeting new people and giving yourselves a chance to get to know each other, but you shouldn’t make that the focus of your life.

There are surely other things you could be doing and working on. We all love the idea of dedicating our lives to one incredible individual, but you can’t dedicate your life to the search itself. You’re betting your happiness on an uncertainty and wasting valuable time.

If you do find the right one, you likely won’t be ready for it -- and that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to you.

I remember being younger and dreaming about meeting the perfect girl -- I was always a romantic. I knew I’d find the love of my life. What I didn’t realize is that I wouldn’t be ready to love her the way she deserved to be loved.

It’s almost like a bad joke; we spend so much time trying to find someone to love and when we do, half the time we aren’t yet capable of dedicating ourselves in the way necessary.

Finding the right one too soon will break your heart. It will change the way you understand love and the way you look at the world.

Finding the love of your life before you’re mature enough to handle such a relationship will likely be the best and worst thing that ever happens to you.

You’ll lose the love of your life, but you’ll come out much stronger and wiser for it.

We live in a world in which nobody seems to truly understand anybody.

Why not explore how well you can actually get to know someone? People seem to think that getting to know someone is easy -- you just spend time with that person and you automatically learn all you need to know. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy; you need to understand what it is you’re looking for.

Most of the relationships we have in our lives -- not just romantic relationships, but relationships of all kinds -- are shallow. We rarely get to know someone on the deepest of levels.

A lot of the time I believe it’s because some people just don’t click -- they don’t trust each other enough to open up to the other. But most of the time, I feel it’s because most people don’t care enough to ask the right questions.

Most of us just aren’t curious enough about other people. Hell, most conversations consist of one person talking and the other simply waiting to respond. Rarely do people bother to listen.

Whenever you actively look for something, how often do you actually end up finding it?

It’s when we don’t bother searching that things seem to fall into our laps. We’ve all experienced this phenomenon before. We spend hours searching for our passports, our keys, a specific document we managed to misplace.

We search and search and search until we run out of time. Then, the next day, we happen to stumble on whatever it is that we were searching for with no effort at all.

When you’re searching for something, or someone, you are going about with a set of already established pretenses or beliefs. You think you know the type of person you are looking for.

You think you know where you are most likely to find him or her. You think you have it all figured out, but then life surprises you. You meet someone more incredible than you could have ever imagined and you end up meeting him or her in the most unlikely fashion. Welcome to life.

Have you ever stopped to think about whether or not you’re the right person for the person you believe is the right person for you?

You may one day be, but are you that right person right now? It’s one thing not to be mature enough to nurture a loving relationship, and it’s another not to be the person the love of your life needs or deserves.

We spend so much time thinking about the type of man or woman we want to spend our lives with that we never really bother to consider the type of person that special someone wants to spend his or her life with. It's interesting, really, because that’s the most important part of it all.

You may be thinking to yourself that there is no possible way to know what someone you haven’t yet met is searching for, but let’s be honest… you know exactly what he or she is looking for. We’re all looking for the same thing: someone who is incredible.

What happens when you find the person you love and you aren’t yet the person you need to be? Instead of spending so much time searching, work instead on bettering yourself as an individual.

The one doesn’t actually exist.

There are plenty of potential "ones" out there -- rather, you should look for someone who understands you. Someone who sees the real you. This is the hardest thing to find in life and arguably the most beautiful.

When you can look into someone’s eyes and see a glimpse into your own soul… it changes you.

There isn’t just one person out there for us, one window to our very own life forces. There are plenty of people who could be the love of your life. However, keep in mind that there are a lot of other factors at play.

Sometimes you’ll meet someone you just can’t stop thinking about and it’ll make it impossible to find someone else. Sometimes life events make falling for someone new improbable.

Sometimes we just don’t bother to get to know people before we brush them off as "not for us." Just because there are several people you could love out there in the world somewhere doesn’t mean that you’ll end up loving any of them.

That’s why love is so beautiful -- it’s not a promise, but a hope.

You should be capable of living your own life the way it’s meant to be lived before you try and share it with someone else.

Otherwise, you’re treating the person you love to a half-lived life. Most people look to love as a solution to their problems. Most think that finding someone to love will make their problems disappear. But they don’t.

They don’t disappear -- they just don’t seem as important as they did before you fell in love. Falling in love is all-consuming. However, as the love matures, our vision begins to clear and the problems we thought disappeared resurface.

We will always have problems, so avoiding love until we fix all that we need to fix will leave us alone for our whole lives. Yet, we should keep in mind that being in a relationship when we are living lives we hate will basically guarantee a failed relationship.

Eventually you will need to take care of what needs to be taken care of -- making huge life changes can be very difficult when you are entirely independent.

And because you’re an egocentric being, you may feel the need to get back that independence in order to create a life you’re happier with. Once you give up on someone, getting him or her back becomes nearly impossible.

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