On the average, I get about ten messages per week from my female
readers around the world along the lines of “Where have all of the good men
gone? Where are the guys who will open the door for you? Why do men only want
to hook up and not have a real relationship?” Let me take this time to get
something absolutely straight right off the bat…Whatever you
continually attract into your life, reflects back at you and the way that you
live your life, and how you expect the world to behave. This concept doesn’t
just apply to romantic partners (the quality of food you consume, the money you
make, the exercise habits you maintain, the depth of friendships that you have,
etc.) but for simplicities sake I will focus on romantic partners.
Blaming your cities socially cold ways, or hook-up culture, or the
high divorce rate, are just walls that you are erecting in order to hide
behind. In my experience, the higher your standards are, the more you attract
people with high standards. So even if there is a large amount of truth to the
concept of our modern dating climate being geared towards a ‘hookup culture’
mentality, who cares about what 90% of people are doing? You’re not trying to
date 90% of people.
Have you ever heard of confirmation bias? Basically it says that
when you expect the world to act a certain way, you will select information
from your environment that will further reinforce that way of thinking. So if
you expect men to be a certain way, you’ll more readily attract men who will
agree with your existing viewpoint.
I have one client who went on a month long man-loving journey where
she wrote down a list of five things she loved about men every day, and she
verbally praised a different man in her life every day. Now, her history
(childhood experiences and dating history) had given her a ton of evidence to
the contrary, and the month long exercise was not an easy one for her… but she did
it. She decided that she had enough of her old way of thinking and she wanted
to expect more from men. When she expected more from the men in her life, she
started to attract higher quality men with standards as high as hers.
In my first year of blogging and trying to monetize it, I was
incredibly hard on myself (I'm still a work in progress) about my blog's rate
of success. I have always intentionally surrounded myself with a crowd that few
people would call an “easy” crowd, as in they have incredibly high standards
and so I often feel like the small fish in a big pond. I went to my mentor to
ask his advice on how I could stop being so hard on myself. “How can I be happy
with my business that is doing $1,000 per month when I have close friends my
age who are doing over $10,000 per month? It feels like I’ll never be able to
catch up.” And his advice to me was as elegant as it was profound. He told me
“If you want to find someone who is doing better than you, you can find it. And
if you want to find someone who is doing worse than you, you can find that too.
You’re deciding what you want to pay
attention to.” And it’s the exact same thing when it comes to partner
finding.
If you tell yourself that there is validity to the concept of
“hookup culture” that mainstream media loves to talk about, and you assume that
all men just want sex with no attachment, the world will happily provide you
with lots of feedback of that being the truth. But if you decide to assume that
the majority of men are kind, compassionate, generous and loving individuals
who want a committed intimacy just as much as you do, then the world will
provide you with lots of evidence to support that version of your reality. As
hippy-dippy as it may sound, I'm a true believer in thoughts becoming things.
Know what you want, have the courage to ask for it, and honor
yourself enough to only stop searching once you’ve found it. Stop settling with
partners that you’re not proud of. If you’re with someone that isn’t right for
you, then you’re only taking them away from the other person who is
right for them. If you are on a path of growth, self-awareness, intentionality,
and becoming the best version of yourself possible, then you will inevitably
meet and attract people that are living their lives the exact same way.
To put it another way, if you’re crawling your way through a full
marathon then you’ll notice the other people that are doing the same and the
sprinters will be a blur from your vantage point. But when you get up on your
own two feet and start taking responsibility for the fact that you want to run
with the fast crowd, you’ll be able to keep pace with the runners and the
people on their hands and knees will be the blurs.
The choice as always, is yours…
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