Meeting Someone: Why Is It So Hard?
109. Meeting Someone: Why Is It So Hard?
You feel like you never meet anyone you like.
Or for you, meeting someone seems like a mountain
Or finally, despite all your efforts, no one shows you real interest
In this episode I’m going to list the behaviors I’ve been able to observe, among the 600 people I’ve accompanied, that can block you in meeting someone romantically.
The Illusion of Scarcity
You’re convinced that meeting the right person is rare because you have to find someone who suits you, who attracts you physically, and on top of that you both have to be free at the same time and have the same life plans.
And you even have “proof” to back it up:
- The number of good encounters you’ve had in your past
- Your circle of girlfriends who are struggling too
- You read on @martineveutpecho catchy lines that are nice, sure, but that make you think it’s rather hard to meet someone.
Scarcity is only the reflection of your brain’s negativity bias.
Here is a simple statistical calculation to show you:
Let’s say you’re a 40-year-old woman living in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the canton of Vaud, and you’re looking for a man aged 40-49 at most.
If you look at the statistics for the canton of Vaud, there are 17,239 men with single status and 5,669 men with divorced status in this canton, a total of 22,908 men.
Let’s say you’re compatible with only 5-10% of them, you potentially have between 1,145 and 2,290 men who could appeal to you. That’s about the number of seats at the Opéra Garnier in Paris. That’s huge!
What sabotages you the most is not scarcity but the thought that it’s rare to meet someone who suits you.
Because if you think meeting someone is rare, your actions will line up with that thought and you will tell yourself, what’s the point of making the effort, being regular on the apps, going out to widen my circle of friends if I think I’ll meet nobody anyway?
What if Your Selection Criteria Are Sabotaging You?
If your criteria or expectations in a relationship are unrealistic (you can listen to episode 51 on the criteria that can make your expectations unrealistic), a person who meets all these criteria may seem impossible to you and give you this impression of scarcity. I call this phenomenon looking for a unicorn.
In Opening up to love I challenge each participant’s selection criteria to help them identify their contradictions, what isn’t clear in their choices, and also to prioritize what matters most by coaching them.
For this episode I invite you to ask yourself the following questions:
- Which criterion, in your opinion, reduces your choice the most (height, income, looks, age..)?
- Ask yourself why this criterion is important to you and what your room for maneuver would be?
- Challenge your criteria with curiosity by looking for examples outside your room for maneuver and see whether some people outside this room for maneuver still appeal to you, and if so why? For example, physical criteria often seem unchangeable, especially height (PS: I always invite participants not to set precise physical criteria because after several years of relationship these criteria fade away and what matters more is the person’s charisma and how they make you feel): if you tell yourself this man absolutely has to be taller than me in heels and over 1.75 m, see whether you notice men who appeal to you who are shorter than that, and if so, what else do they have?
- By going through this reflection you will see which criteria matter more to you, and it will help you make the right decision for your partner because in the end you always choose a package.
Are You Really Giving Yourself the Means?
If your motto is “it will happen when it happens” it’s normal that meeting someone is difficult. Once you’ve entered working life, widening your social circle takes a conscious effort on your part:
- Do you go out? If you go out, are you always with the same circle of friends and are you in a dynamic of talking/exchanging with other people? Are you in a dynamic of going toward others or do you wait for it to fall on you?
- Are you signed up on dating sites and do you regularly invest time with the right mindset?
- Do you address the fears you have about love or do you wait for them to pass on their own?
❤️ Watch my webinar on how to finally be happy in love!
Change Your Attitude and Your Experience of Meeting People Will Change
The more you stop believing the scenario your brain tells you about meeting someone, the more you’ll be okay with challenging your criteria to better know which ones are important, and the more you motivate yourself to create opportunities, the easier meeting someone will be.
To that end I invite you to widen meeting someone into an exchange between human beings.
This will take pressure off you to make an encounter that works; the more different people you meet, the more concrete examples this gives you to challenge your criteria, and the more people you meet, the more you increase your chances of meeting the right one. As simple as that. What matters for this test is that your intention remains the exchange between human beings and not meeting the right one.
If Despite All This You Don't Meet Anyone Interesting
It may be a love pattern that keeps love at a distance. I talk about it more in this free webinar “How to free yourself from the patterns that keep us from being happy in love?”.
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FREE Webinar "HOW TO FREE OURSELVES FROM THE PATTERNS THAT PREVENT US FROM BEING HAPPY IN LOVE?"
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Going further
If you’d like to dive deeper into the subject and identify your own love patterns, there’s my book S’ouvrir à l’amour available in all bookstores.
And if you’d like to work on your love patterns through the body and transform your love life, there’s the program Opening up to love. You can take the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: psycho-corporeal work to deprogram nervous system automatisms and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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