Looking for love - it can sound a bit idealistic, but seeking out relationships or holding onto anger and frustration about your current romance (or lack thereof) can have a big impact on your wellbeing and mental health. It can be easy to lash out and blame situations or other people for your state in life.
This can become a slippery and sometimes highly destructive mindset.

Sometimes we make a choice to commit to changing things, making resolutions to try harder, focus on relationships, date more, for example. However, if we enter into these esoteric big goals without any concrete plans of how to actually get there, frustration and chaos will reign.

Making plans often gets overlooked because we either don’t know where to start, or we feel that having a plan is somehow unromantic or manipulative. It might be a bit of a shock to some people, but relationships take work! So it makes sense that the personal work doesn’t start when the relationship does, but beforehand too. If we feel that we are destined for failure anyway, or that love should be easy, this is flawed thinking.

If you are “single and ready to mingle”, it starts with you. Take some time to reflect on your previous dating history, and think about what you’d like to change. If you’d like to meet a more diverse group of people, try new experiences, be around non-flaky people who don’t shy from commitment, stop attracting the ‘wrong type’, or do the work on changing your own preconceptions or negative thinking - this can’t be done by other people, it requires you to do the work on yourself and for yourself.

Perhaps you are already in a relationship, but issues have arisen and you want things to change. How can it be improved? Do healthy and gentle boundaries need to be established (or re-established), does your internal dialog and thinking need to be challenged? Are there unrealistic expectations at play? Perhaps an upheaval in how you view your partnership or each other needs do happen. Do you view each other from an attitude of respect, or perhaps you need to deal with the realization that perhaps the relationship has run it’s course or become too unhealthy.

Once you have an idea of what you want to change, what do you need to do to action it? Make lists, formulate a plan, open your mind to creativity and getting out of your box (physically and mentally). Do what needs to happen to plot a course towards meeting your goal.

If you want to meet more people, you have to put yourself into a position where you’ll meet more people. Even though your focus is meeting others, don’t go into situations anticipating that you’ll meet ‘the one’ or even get a date. This probably sounds counterintuitive, but unless you enter into a new environment with curious little, openness and positive energy, you’ll tend to push people away. People can read desperation. If you feel that you maybe enter into opportunities with the single-minded attitude to find a partner, then perhaps this mindset needs to be examined.

We can all have certain aspirations of the dream life - the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with, the house, the kids, the career… without raining too much on your parade, a little reality needs to also be at play.

Once you have a plan, you need to commit to making the changes inwardly and outwardly. If you have a big end goal it can be very easy to drift off track and give up. Goals need to be manageable and achievable, so start with daily and weekly ones that you can do, and will contribute towards your overall long-term aspirations. Be accountable to others. Keep a journal, and track your progress. Recognise your accomplishments in the every day, and permit yourself some healthy and beneficial rewards.

In committing to your own growth and personal development, you have something to be proud of - with or without a relationship. You might even surprise yourself.