Recently, I was in session with a client who had just gone through a bad break up. He felt dejected, hurt and was grieving the loss of a future he imagined with his ex-girlfriend. He told me that he had felt that it was not a good relationship for him, but that he had stayed because he was “afraid”.

“What are you most afraid of?” I asked.

He looked down, his voice got shaky and he said, “That I will never find my person.” He went on to tell me how weak, scared and insecure that fear makes him feel.

Is this a fear that lives inside of your heart and mind and fills you with anxiety and distress about the future? People feel so alone when they express this fear and, yet I hear so many people articulate the same fear, every week, in my practice. The fear is so relatable and understandable. Humans are wired for loving connection and the idea that you may never find it is not just scary, it is painful.

Here is what I wish every person who carries this fear would know:

Your fear is not the ‘truth’, rather it is pointing you in the direction of what matters to you.

If a healthy, bonded relationship is what you want, you are not weak, you are expressing what matters to you. You are aware that there is genuine goodness in that type of bond, and you are right. We are wired, biologically, for love and emotional connection.

Your fear dangles a catastrophic story of never finding your person and it is so tempting to believe that the catastrophic story is the TRUTH. Beware how much you have accepted this story as your story. If it helps, you can tell yourself, “That is a story my fear is telling me. There are many other possibilities here. In fact, my fear is pointing me towards what matters to me.”

Are you telling yourself that no one out there wants that same bond with a romantic partner?

Another thing I hear a lot is, “It’s awful on the dating apps! Everyone just wants to hook up! I feel like the only person who wants something real.” I hear this so often that I sometimes want to share, “In the session before yours, someone else said the very same thing!”

More of us understand the value of a healthy, loving relationship than we may realize. The apps are one way to go about dating and, if they fill you with dread, find something aligned with your values that you can engage with as a way of connecting with people who love what you love. Hook-up culture is one culture in our world, but so is the culture of love, building a life together, great sex and friendship.

What if no one chooses to be with me?

Are you choosing who you would like to be with, or are you waiting to be chosen? This may sound like a strange question, I get it, we cannot force someone we are interested in to choose us. But, if we are not clear about what we need and how we want our relationship to feel, it is very hard to feel like you are choosing. This hope that someone will choose you, can leave people feeling weak, powerless and insecure.

Often, I will ask my clients to make a list with me: How I want my future relationship to feel? People will answer that question in a million different ways, but what I have never heard is, anxious, unsafe, undervalued, not a priority, not trustworthy, distant, cold, coercive etc…

Getting clear, within yourself about how you would like your future relationship to feel, rather than how you would like it to look, is a great way to begin to shorten the time you spend with people who are not able to create that with you.

Recently, after doing that exercise in a session, a client reported after a date, “He was a nice guy, but he told me all about himself and about all of the partying he’s been up to and he talked and talked, he didn’t ask me about myself. And, I knew as the night went on, this is not the way I want to feel with my person. He was a perfectly nice person, he’s just not my person. So, no thanks!” When you are clear about what you need, you can shorten the time, waiting and hoping that the person you are with will be different, and you can move on to someone who fits with you and your values.

In all of the old stories about romantic love, there is a trope about finding the “perfect person” and how it all just falls into place and we live happily ever after. Instead, if you know how you want your relationship to feel, and you meet (and are attracted to) someone who has those same set of needs/wants for a relationship, that is the good stuff because, together you can create that relationship.