A friend of mine shared the following article: “3 Lies That You Tell Yourself to Keep Yourself Single.” These are the following:
- I will never find a man who’ll love me.
- I’m not worthy of a great love.
- I will die alone.
What the author, Virginia Clark, is recommending that instead of looking at things in a negative way, you can opt to and by the way, this is directly taken from the article itself:
- There is someone out there for everyone. I see proof of this as I look at the many different kinds of couples all around me. I choose to believe that if I exist, so does he.
- If I am longing to find my partner he must be longing to find me right now as well.
- No one is perfect and that includes me and the man who’ll love me.
- They’re many imperfect people in wonderful relationships, and I’m no different.
- I know I’m worthy of a great love because if I wasn’t I wouldn’t have the strong desire to be in one.
- This is my fear talking and has nothing to do with my life now.
- I’m just being overly dramatic and scaring myself.
- No one knows the future or how their life will end.
- I refuse to hurt myself with this hurtful thought any longer.
- I choose to live in the present and enjoy my life.
For some reason, her message has not dwelled on me very well. Reason being, the message still remains the call of a woman who is still aging and is worried about her bodyclock and wants a woman in her life to feel complete. It assumes in a way that since other imperfect people have found relationships, then you could too.
But what if you actually don’t find a man? What if you don’t find the love that multitude of self-help/romance books promise you?
In general, the world has more males than there are females, or at least it seems like it. This chart shows the sex ratio by country for total population. The ones that are Blue, represents more women, red more men than the world average of 1.01 males/female. Obviously, China is pretty blue, but the rest of the world are reddish to deep red.
But aside from the demographics, we’re talking about the quality of males vs. females as well.
Women are now getting higher degrees, and are starting to earn from a nominal value, at par to or more than males as ever before. Whereas it used to be a rarity for females to lead companies, more and more women like Marisa Meyer, Meg Whitman, and Ursula Burns show that women can also hold their own in the boardroom.
Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, gives us a lot of statistics that highlight the challenges of being female in a male-dominated society/workplace. However, whereas the book does encourage women to lean in and to lean out and be more involved, and not take being female as a liability, it also does cite various statistics that reasons why women do not grab more opportunities as they should have, given their competencies.
Regardless of the statistics and demographics, one thing is clear, despite the freedom, independence, competence, over-education, and higher earning power, there are a lot of single women out there all crying that their lives are incomplete without a significant other!
“I will be happiER if I get a boyfriend,” my friend tells me.
“I want to get married and have children before my biological clock runs out,” says another.
“Where’s my Prince Charming?” wonders one. “Am I not worth it?”
Well, let’s face reality here fellow ladies.
Maybe there is really no prince charming out there. They’re not called fairy tales for a reason, right?
Chances are, the prince charming you are looking for comes in a form of a guy whom you out earn, is not that cute and probably a bit on a plump side, has a stable job, and does drives you crazy once in a while.
Definitely, not the tall, dark, handsome, ridiculously rich and worships-the-ground-you-walked-on guy that you wished for.
Most likely, despite many efforts, you may actually end up alone.
Not because of lack of attention to guy hunting, there are of course, still tons of women in their 40s and 50s, who are out on a prowl in clubs. But rather because we think too much of ourselves.
“I’m worth it.”
“If a guy loves me, he should change for me.”
“If I see the guy who’s for me, I would know.”
Well, to be honest, if you really think about it, you — or we — are not all that. Evan Marc Katz writes about it perfectly in his article, “Should I date a 7 or hold out for a 10?“, if the guy was a 10, who is he going to most likely going to want to date? That’s right, another 10.
There’s a reason why men do not like to date strong, successful women.
They do by the way.
They just don’t like to date strong, successful women who stubbornly insist to have their way all the time, and who refuses to compromise even though their demands are becoming increasingly unreasonable!
Think about it. 🙂
Remember, the challenge is different: it’s one challenge to actually get a boyfriend, the other is to keep it.
A relationship takes sacrifice and hard work, and if both of you refuse to compromise, the relationship won’t work out. Even if you’re lovey dovey today, how you handle conflicts and life challenges matter to ensure a long-term relationship.
I’ve met a lot of pretty amazing ladies who just can’t keep a man.
Why?
They’re amazing as colleagues. They’re terrific as girlfriends. But heck, they sure suck as girlfriends.
On the flipside, they may be terrific as girlfriends, but if you simply let guys walk all over you, they’ll sooner than later lose respect for you, and that pretty much spells a death wish for your relationship.
So where does that leave us?
What do us women have to do to finally find love in our lives?
Well, will answer it in a succeeding blog post. Have a great weekend everyone!
