You get ghosted. You are told it’s over. You have another one-sided text conversation on your phone, going nowhere. You’re emotionally bruised from a betrayal.
How do you come back to love when it has shut you out, tied your brain in knots, and body slammed your tender heart until it you raised the white flag in surrender, praying for relief?
I’ve heard so many people ask: “What can I do to feel hopeful again? How do I stop feeling burnt out by love?”
The answer lies in a quote I read this week by Seth Godin: “Attitude follows action far more often than action follows attitude.”
In other words, when you feel like relationships, love, or dating are hopeless, it’s not thinking that is going to turn it all around. What really matters is what you DO NEXT.
You know this already.
But after a break up you play out the usual script: You eat junk food. You drink too much with your friends. You sleep with (or try to sleep with) the wrong people. You feel like in a mess at your job, your body, your friendships.
This only makes the spiral worse and worse.
If you want to feel differently about love, and GENUINELY feel alive and sexy and like the idea of falling in love again might actually be something worth pursuing, you need to feel differently about the world. And that begins by taking ANY ACTION that will make you excited about life and YOU again.
Start with your health. Walk out the door and get some sunshine. Move. Take more walks (you can listen to podcasts if you like – maybe this one? :)) Pet more dogs. Talk to more people you meet. Call more old friends. Make more new friends. Find places that you alight your curiosity.
Next, build a life that you love to wake up to. Fall in love with your weird hobbies and passions and share them with others. Find a tribe of like-minded souls. Remember those terrible regrets Bronnie Wares wrote about when she asked dying people to look back on their losses: I wish I hadn’t been afraid to be myself. I wish I had let myself be happier. Decide now to lean into the things that scare you that you know you’ve been putting off. Choose an action that gives you butterflies.
I recently started a new YouTube channel, as a way to challenge myself and share the ideas I love, talk to a new audience on video, and indulge publicly in things that move me intellectually and emotionally. After only a month I’ve already found a tribe of kindred spirits who have reached out to tell me how much they also get joy from the topics I care deeply about: books, philosophy, behavioural psychology, writing.
Every time we lean into sharing, being passionate, moving forward, planting more seeds for future connection – the world becomes such a bigger place.
It’s there for you, if you want to take the plunge. But it starts with decisions and action, not waiting for signs from the universe.
This is what really makes the difference: between the person who suffers a divorce, a breakup, or a rejection, and decides they can never trust again, and the person who puts the pieces back together, reconnects, finds a bigger purpose, goes through the grief and decides that it’s time to open up the world again and let their human side hang out in all its messy glory and dive back into in the tingly, erratic, poetic dance of love again.
If you wait for some outside force to restore your faith, the universe will give you nothing but a hollow dark silence.
But if you go out and share your treasure with others, wrestle with the mighty force of ACTION, do things that prove you care about yourself again, the world will crack open just a bit and eventually reveal the precious revitalising tonic you wanted from the moment your heart fell into the abyss: hope.
Originally Published: www.howtogettheguy.com
