“Where Am I Going To Find Another Guy Like That Again?!”

The main fear when breaking up is that you’re not going to find anyone matching your standards and you confuse attention with the intention you get from him when evaluating your compatibility.

I hear this line so much these days. The more I shared my breakup stories from the last years, the more I hear other women (and men — but just reversing genders in the question) asking themselves this question and then crying for their ex-es.

Let me tell you this: you’re not the only one, and he was not the last one!

So here’s the first mistake you make when you fall for someone who doesn’t turn out to level up your expectations:

Attention is not the intention

“He knows me and my stories and that means if we break up I would have to go through that whole process of revealing myself again with another man”

I’ve heard this line in so many variations that I can’t express how much sadness I gathered every time I heard it. There’s something about the attention we get from someone that feels magical in the context of our life story. Somehow, the illusion of being understood is mixed with the one on being listened to and then we mix the attention with the intention.

You see, attention is when someone has “time to kill” and decides to spend that time with us. The more we get this attention, the more we confuse it with an intention to spend time with us. Don’t get me wrong, that might be true, but, in the meantime, my job is to give you a warning that this is not always the case!

“Intention” is different from “attention” because it comes to a place of awareness

At the beginning of a new relationship, you tend to give attention to a lot of things about the other person. You notice things from an external position, and you analyze them objectively. The more you fall in love, the less you pay attention to these things that in the beginning might have sparked a reaction or a red flag. We tend to switch from attention to intention when we stop focusing on the little flaws and we think of the holistic system of choices this person makes. But the dynamics change once again after a while when we notice that the place from paying attention to those details, in the beginning, was from a place of fear about our past traumas not to be triggered by our new partner. We then see how the attention was not attention until we focused on wanting to see the positive in our partner and we paid again attention to things from a new perspective.

It’s confusing, right? Let’s see a story of how that worked for me in the part.

I was dating this guy who was showing a very spiritual nature. He made me believe he was fully committed to this spiritual journey of self-discovery, but there were signs that he wasn’t doing the “walk” and more just the “talk”. As I was focusing my attention on him in the beginning from the perspective of my fears that he might not be a guy who wants something serious because he’s deeply wounded from his past ( hence the spiritual nature to heal that past), I didn’t fully see who he was until I started deepening my connection to him and allowing myself to be changed by the nature of our relationship. The intention then was to focus on both of us growing. The moment I started shifting my attention from protecting myself from someone who could potentially break my heart to allowing that person to be in my life and change my energy, I realized that he was both draining and unhealed and not committed to the path as he claimed to be. In the end, he was the one leaving the relationship with a clear rejection of my energy wanting to assist him in his healing process. It was at this point that I realized my attention should have been from the very beginning of seeing what he does for himself to heal, instead of focusing on how he was showering me with attention which made me believe he is not going to crush me.

In the opposite direction, in the beginning, he was love-bombing me with many gifts, surprises, making plans for the longer term and paying a lot of attention to my needs. But the more he got comfortable into the relationship and got the validation that I am there to stay, the more his intention started showing off. He was looking to be validated as the perfect boyfriend more than to be there for me and who I was. This was evident to me the first moment I brought feedback to the table about something he did and I did not like. That feedback crushed his ego and he felt betrayed. He became defensive, started to project more things on me and made me doubt my instincts. I even thought I had a dissociation moment there when accusing him that he might have cheated on me. Of course, I felt so bad for thinking like this when he might be innocent that for the coming weeks I only focused on bringing back the zen into the relationship and made sure his “hero effect” was not gone. I felt guilty of undermining him with this assumption I had ( based on little evidence that I could find but not confirm because he was good at hiding things and not transparent at all), so I made sure I adjust that tension between us with a lot of love and attention. The intention behind it though was not genuine because I did not feel he deserved my attention this way. As the feelings were not genuine, it quickly escalated and I started projecting my resentments on the words between the lines in his stories.

One Sunday morning, we woke up and had breakfast like we usually did and when he talked about wanting to move to another country, I interpreted that as an escape from his side. I turned that simple conversation over breakfast into a breakup because I noticed he intended to get as far away as possible from me despite giving me the regular attention he was giving me every day.

In hindsight, maybe he was scared to truly allow me in his life so fast and his initial intention of being the perfect boyfriend which was an ego-driven intention was also shifting to a more healthy one of checking if there’s real compatibility between us. We never spoke again after this episode so I guess I will never find out if he freaked out about us going more serious and I misinterpreted from a place of fear again that I will be abandoned if he goes to another country, or if he really wanted to break things off and this was his way to do it.

Relationships are very fragile and delicate and sometimes the things we bottle up by not communicating our true intentions become our biggest enemy specifically for their subtle nature that allows them to decay and rotten our trust in one another. I wrote another article here about cheating and the 7 stages of cheating. The first 3 stages specifically address these miscommunication issues.

In the end, getting the attention of someone as if everything is perfect can be quite an illusion over things being truly what they look like.

Checking in with your true intention about why you do things in a relationship is the only way to not get tricked into an attention game. Also, not getting attention does not change an intention if that exists already. The best way to see how a person truly feels is to check first why you need their attention the way that you do and then ask them the same question from an awareness perspective over your true intentions.

Why do we end up here?

We fall in love with an idea about the other person and with list traits, we want in our partners but most of the time this is highly unrealistic compared to who they really are.

Let’s see why.

We want specific things and we go for a high level of details about what we look for in an ideal partner when we are afraid to be surprised and choose from our fears. Our past experiences determine how we envision the future but thinking of the future from the past limits our ability to grow.

Again from the relationship above, I met this guy in spring, after 8 months of sorrow crying for my ex before him. The new guy was nothing I anticipated. We rapidly went from dating to a serious relationship and he surprised me every day with cute gestures and things he would do for me. I had no expectations over how this relationship would go and how he should be to continue growing on me emotionally.

While he did meet some of the criteria I expected in a man I would fall in love with, on other things he was nothing like I imagined. He had a child from a short-lived relationship 14 years ago. I was not sure that at that point in my life I wanted a partner with such a “burden”. It was hard for him too to accept his child even though he was an adorable 13-year-old boy by now. But I tried to sit with my feelings about this new information that was not on my “list” and see if it still fits me. And it did. I actually thought at that moment “well, I want kids someday with my partner whether it will be with him or a future one, but I am quite scared of having 2 pregnancies because my mom experienced a lot of trauma with me so that’s why she didn’t want to have the second baby, but if I choose a partner who already has a child, I can have one child of my own with him and mine will still get an amazing brother with the genes of my partner but not mine as well, and that’s fine with me”. So it was a “logistical” matter and I learned I am flexible to these things and I can adapt if my list is not too rigid.

And, to be fair, keeping a rigid list is not really keeping an open mind and doesn’t align with my life values so I will not pursue such a thing.

Surprised by specifications rather than constrained by them

As I said, you have to check with your intention of loving someone why you give up on certain things you want in an ideal partner and where you can make compromises and allow surprises to come in place. Checking your intention comes from a position of knowing your ego. You get to know your ego by understanding why you wanted certain things in the other person anyway.

For example, if you want a list of specifications you might look for in a man, here’s one I made:

• a tall, blonde, blue eyes ( or brunette dark eyes) to be the one that sweeps me off my feet
• someone interested in specific sports like me, or goes to the gym regularly ( and has a six-pack maybe)
• someone wears clothes from a specific brand or has a particular kind of taste in clothing
• someone with a college degree and is successful in their career
• someone who likes a specific kind of music or movies or games
• someone who wants to travel in specific destinations where I also want to go
• someone who already has a plan for how to make a family and buy a house or plan a first child
• someone who gives me presents and is a good listener and takes me on romantic dates even long after we started a committed long term relationship

And the list can continue. But the point is that all the features above are about what you are lacking.

To give you examples of things I wanted in my partners before:

• I wanted a guy with the discipline of life and strong morals
• I wanted a smart yet playful guy
• I wanted a spiritual guy who is also strong enough to lead ( a household, a business, etc)
• I wanted a guy who would support me through my journey of healing and be there for me even when I am not able to sit with myself
• I wanted a guy who could look for who I was behind the walls I was exhibiting which usually required the guy to do the extra mile

While all the above are open-ended things and not the rule, it does quite constrain my area of search for a new guy. So what shall we do is we think our list is too rigid, yet we don’t want to lack principles and standards?

Look for more than just specifications, look for life values

I know this is not easy to spot, especially in the first few dates with someone when you barely get to know them. But there’s a simple way to regain hope after you lost someone you thought meant everything you ever wanted in someone but you lost them: you go on as many first dates as possible!

I am 30 years old at the moment and I started dating on Tinder for the first time at 25. I was very inexperienced and lacked the skills to make my profile rank well with the guys I wanted despite having a cute face. I was also very insecure about my looks and my life overall so dating became my way to telling my story to different people in different ways in many iterations. The more I iterated my stories, the more I learned. It soon became evident that the same goes for guys. The more men I dated, the more I saw the subtle ways in which they show their values and not just their “specifications” when we go on a first date.

I can’t say I became a dating expert, but I can say I was able to rapidly channel my attention to a guy’s values from a first date just like you’d been struck by lightning. And to be fair, the more I cultivated my instinct about spotting these guys from the very beginning, the more confident I was to not see it as the end of the world when one is flakier and turns out to not be “the one” after all.

You see, the ability to see potential in someone gives you the ability to transform almost any random guy into someone you can build something with.

That doesn’t mean that you should literally go and find the first guy who is ok and invest your whole self there. But it does mean that there are options for you and that there are more fish in the sea even if you think you had the greatest connection with the previous guy. In the end, you never know who a person is until you let them go and see how they act in your absence. And for me, the past 3 months from my breakup have taught me that I am better off without him and that he probably got more than enough from this relationship with me and me wanting to stick around thinking nobody else will be like him, would be a really stupid thing to believe.

Looking at the values of someone as an indicator of how they would match with yours is a better way to search for a new partner than to look for “the same” as your ex. In all honesty, I was not expecting I would date someone again that soon and the difference between them would be so big, but I did and I am happy I didn’t stick to specifications and I looked for values. My revelation was that age was the wrong indicator for someone’s maturity and that emotional intelligence can top any life experience.

Carry on dating and stick with “plenty of fish in the sea” rather than the scarce mindset of “I will never find someone like that again”! Thank God you won’t find someone like that again because that would mean another broken heart and we don’t want that all over again!