Personal Growth Makes It Difficult For Me to Find a Partner
The path I am on feels lonely.
I want to improve myself — but I also want to live well. I want to grow from embracing life’s adversities — but I also want to be happy.
That’s why it is important for me to talk about not just the upsides, but also downsides of personal growth. As much as I don’t see any other way to live than consciously getting to know myself, I sometimes bump into problems that I didn’t foresee when I was starting on this path of self-discovery.
One of them is that “finding myself” makes it increasingly difficult for me to find a romantic partner.
I have been single for three full years now. This is only a little shorter than the period of pursuing conscious, personal growth.
I mark the autumn of 2015 as the beginning of my “conscious personal growth.” This was when I discovered this thing called meditation and I understood that many answers that I was looking for could be found within. It was the moment when I set out on a (probably never-ending) quest to get to know myself.
This was also the last time I engaged in a romantic relationship that I perceived as potentially long-term. From today’s perspective, it seems like I entered it unconsciously — and came out of it a lot more conscious.
“While ‘living in time,’ a lover comes to show us what love isn’t. Only when living from present moment awareness is a lover a reflection of love’s possibilities.” — Michael Brown
I was certainly “living in time,” rather than in the present moment back then. And I, for the most part, still live “in time” now. However, the knowledge about myself I collected on the way makes it more difficult than ever to engage in a romantic relationship right now.
The truth is that, in my case, personal growth has made me lonely. For a long time, I struggled to voiced that fact, but I can no longer escape it.
It is very apparent to me that — as of today — being more conscious of my own feelings, thoughts, needs and desires makes me less eager to interact with people than before.
Up until 2015, I used to “fall in love” rather unconsciously. Like most humans on this planet, I felt the urge to receive love from somebody out there. Combined with my rather low self-esteem (with which I still struggle today), this resulted in me falling into the arms of any man who opened them for me.
In other words, if someone showed the slightest bit of interest in me, I was automatically interested back. It was as if I couldn’t afford to “waste” any chance for a relationship. And so, right from the beginning of no matter a fleeting romance or prospective relationship, I gave agency over what was happening to the man in question.
I unconsciously assumed I was the one who should comply — and he was the one to have his needs met. Sad, but not so uncommon in a culture that has been for centuries raising women to behave this way.
This, I stress, was all, happening unconsciously — that is, without me realizing what was really going on. All I wanted was to be loved and the merit of those relationships was of secondary importance. However, as I started exploring my own inner world with meditation, things started turning around.
Today, I can no longer say that I am completely unaware of my needs. I may still not know all of them — but I can definitely see patterns in all my previous relationships. This makes me acutely aware of what wasn’t working then — but also, aware of what I want for myself in the future.
And the standards that I am coming up with now are, honestly, hard to meet.
One of the major results of pursuing personal growth is that I know I can be okay on my own. This comes as a revelation for me, after many years of not being able to imagine myself as complete without a man by my side.
This notion is of course liberating, as I am not as desperate for attention as I used to be. But it also comes with higher expectations towards my future partner, should I ever find him. These expectations are connected to my wish that if I ever am to enter a romantic relationship again — I want it to add upon the quality of my life, rather than withdraw from it.
Due to the increased consciousness, I am also aware that a good relationship means work, rather than just wine and roses. Such partnership may come with compromising my personal decisions, being vulnerable, patient enough to meet the other person where they are — and so on. And quite bluntly, I am willing to invest these things — provided that I get enough value in return.
But, because the values I am chasing are frighteningly concrete, it is not so easy to find a man who would comply with them.
The more I am working on myself, the more of a defined personality I am. For the first time in my life, I recognize it as important to have it my way when comes to making the important decisions. I now have defined dreams and lifestyle that I want to pursue. At the same time, I want to pursue them along with the values that become less and less negotiable every day.
As I am going through life as a single, I am just reconfirming those values to myself. And the more they are reinforced, the harder it becomes to question them later, should a partner who challenges them came my way.
At this point in my life, personal growth feels like a lonely path to me. And that’s all I have to say today. There will be no fake positive sentence to finish this post on a different note than that.