Shall We?

Yes, let’s.

Recently, I watched a heartwrenching video of a woman on social media who tearfully spoke of her frustrations while looking for love. Wanting to find the right one and that not happening. Being eternally and repeatedly ghosted. I highly identified with her. In a follow-up video, she spoke of some of the comments she received from others who had viewed the original video. Many were of the “love yourself” variety; others told her she should stop looking and it, love, would come to her. I saw some of the comments. I typed my point of view. Here’s a run-down of my point of view.

Wanting love and loving yourself are not mutually exclusive. People, people, people. A person can love themselves and still want to find love at the same time. Both things can happen at the same time. Sure, many look to love and partners to validate them. That happens a lot. But to assume that someone wanting to find a partner means they have no self-worth and don’t love themselves is absolutely shortsighted. Many of the comments in the video spoke to this. To them, her tears were a symbol of someone in I-need-validation pain, not someone in, quite simply, It’s-really-hard-to-be-alone pain.

Speaking of being alone… Commenters were very adamant about her needing to accept her aloneness, to enjoy being by herself. But what if she does enjoy her own company and still wants a partner anyway? See where I’m going with this? This weird separation of things. A person can be fine by themselves and still want to be with someone. The two things can exist together. For me, they do exist together. The realities are that I’ve traveled alone, dined alone, movied alone and have loved every minute of those things and still wanted to share those very things with another person.

“Stop looking!” Oh, lawwwwwddddddd. Many comments were in this vein. Just stop looking. It’ll come to you! I know, I know: it’s a thing. You stop looking/caring/obsessing about something, suddenly what you stopped looking for/caring about/obsessing over comes to you. Sure. But the opposite can be true, too. You can keep looking and caring (not obsessing, but hey, it happens) and it comes to you. I’m sure many of the commenters felt like since she’s been doing things a certain way for so long, maybe not doing things the same way will result in a different conclusion. Could be. But it was still worthy of discussion, in my estimation.

Obviously, I was emotionally tied to this woman because I know what she’s going through. It’s why I commented, both to show my solidarity/encouragement and to also put a kibosh to some of the unhelpful things I was seeing in some of the comments. She replied and thanked me for saying what I did. And that’s all I wanted: for her to feel heard and understood.