I use to think EXACTLY like you. Now that I'm parking it close to 60, it feels like a lifetime ago. But the irony of that is when I met my wife -to-be, I had abandoned any hope of ever maintaining any meaningful relationship , least of all getting married. So what changed?

In retrospect, I was exhausted with experience, so I was not in the mood to work that hard to invest in any expectation so much as just keep everything real in the moment. This meant I was 100% honest with everything I saw and said. I was not a better or ideal version of me, I was just REGULAR me and that made all the difference. How she would react would not be the measure.

Now was it all just me creating this result? Of course not. The reason why it worked out was because she was in the same place in her life and came into this essentially the same way. For once, we were both looking at one another but feeling the grass was greener on our OWN side. That made us make honest choices, say things in an honest expression, and look at everything with a grounded perspective, rather than wishful thinking.

So the short answer is I quit feeling like I had to do all the work in dating which in turn meant I was not going to carry the blame anymore. I valued who I was and if they didn't like it, that was finally okay. I always blamed myself for relationships that went sour because I was wired to think I said or did something wrong. Turns out what was wrong was the way I thought about it and myself in those encounters.

I can look at each one of those now and shake my head. I didn't know what I was doing. There were some people I had absolutely no business hooking up with because they were just not good for me. Others were in a different place in dating than me, so I was not a good fit for them. And then there were some where the person I chased was not serious like I was, so I either burned them out or ran them off by putting too much weight on everything we did.

But I never could see it like that at the time because I had ZERO objectivity. Even though they were all different people, I saw them all as equal "missed opportunities " simply because I believed I needed to be with someone that would make me feel complete and accomplished as a person. Of course listening to music and dreaming about what the future could be with each of them blew it all up into pure fantasies that guaranteed a bad result. Completely wrong headed way to see it.

So when I quit placing all the merits in these individuals , which I helped create through unrealistic expectations, and started liking my own life without them, then (and only then) did my vision become clear because I thought about myself FIRST.

Instead of what I could do for them, it became were these people a good fit FOR me. My expectations became measured. How I saw them now was based on whether they were good in my world where my happiness existed. The decision about how they would be in my world became mine to make, not theirs to cast aside or dictate terms.

So instead of you seeing your life as that of someone "alone", you need to see it as a valued world that belongs to YOU. Yes, another person can bring valued experiences into that world, but they also bring everything else that is less inviting. And if you do not know where you stand for yourself, what do you do when they need your help when they fall down? You have to be able stand alone before you stand beside another person. That means happiness needs to start with you first.