“What if I never find the right person?”

I’ve been asked this question several times a week for the last 10+ years. You may feel SO ready to share your life with someone … only to have had dates that fizzled out or incompatible relationships . . . or perhaps you’ve remained single with no such person on the horizon. It can even begin to feel like that’s the way it will always be.

If you’re working through feelings of longing, loneliness, or sadness—or just want to feel more excited about dating—in today’s new video, I share 3 tools that will help you effectively manage those difficult emotions, and give you real hope for the future.

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How can we deal with the fear of never finding our person? I know so many people who are constantly struggling with the fear and the anxiety of it never happening for them in their love lives. 

When we have that fear, it’s not like the acute pain of a heartbreak, where the pain is massive and immediate and can stop us from even getting through our day. It’s a kind of chronic pain that never goes away—a pain of loneliness, a pain of longing and deep desire for companionship (to give our love to somebody), but having no one to give it to.

 That can make people anxious or sad or lonely over a lifetime. And I want to speak to everyone out there right now who is relating to this, whether you’re 35 and you want to have a family and it scares you because you haven’t met your person yet, or whether you’re 65 and you’re thinking, “I just want to find someone to share my life with and I’m so scared I’m never going to find that,” or “I’m never going to find that again.”

So today I want to share with you three tools that you can use to help effectively manage those difficult emotions.

 Before we get started, the three tools I’m going to give you today are actually from one of the later chapters in my new book, Love Life. Have you gotten your copy yet?

 The reason I ask is not just because I deeply want you to get a copy of this since I know it’s going to help you. It’s also because everyone who gets a copy right now is getting a complimentary ticket to an event I am doing on May 4 called Find Your Person.

This is a virtual event, so you can attend it from any country in the world, but it’s designed to take the ideas from the book and bring them to life in a live event that helps you achieve your goal of finding your person. 

Everyone who gets a copy of the book is getting entered into a drawing that I’m doing where we are giving away some really cool things, including tickets to my Live Retreat this year—six days with me in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A one-on-one with me to ask me your love life question or any question you want to ask in life, plus some Love Life sweatshirts. You’ve seen me wear them in some of our videos—many of you have asked where you can get them. The prize draw is the only place where we’re giving them away, and many other cool things. As long as you order your copy of Love Life by midnight on May 3, you will be entered into those exclusive prize draws. That link again is lovelifebook.com.

So what are these three tools that can help you manage these emotions? Well, I went through a very difficult time in my life that I talk about in the book, where I was suffering from severe chronic physical pain. This was one of the darkest times of my life. And one of the reasons it was such a dark time was because I couldn’t figure out how to make it go away. I tried everything. I tried every treatment, I flew around the world, I spent so much money and resources and time and energy trying to figure out how to make this pain go away, and nothing worked.

There was a certain point where I felt utterly hopeless. I had this sense that if this pain never went away, I would never be happy. And since I didn’t know how to make it go away. I concluded that I might never be happy. And that was when I had to start going on a journey of figuring out: “What do I do to manage my relationship with this pain so I can at least get to a place where I’m happy enough to enjoy my life?”

Because—and some of you who have experienced physical chronic pain over a long time will know this—when you’re in that kind of pain, it takes you out of your life. You’re not present. It’s like you’re on the outside of your life all the time. Even in the joyful moments, you’re not really there.

And the truth is, the pain that we can experience in our love life when we’re not finding what we’re looking for . . . we can spend years wanting love but never finding it, never having that love in our lives in a sustainable way where someone really commits, or where we can feel the love we’re yearning for and find someone we can pour our love into . . . it is a similar kind of chronic pain that feels like it never goes away.

I had a woman once say to me, “Matthew, how do I kill the desire to find another person? How do I get rid of the desire to want that love in my life? Because it hasn’t happened for me so far, and if it never happens for me and I keep this desire, I’m going to be sad for the rest of my life.” 

So here was someone saying not, “How do I find someone?” but “How do I stop wanting someone, because wanting someone is making me so incredibly unhappy.”

It’s a source of chronic emotional pain. And one of the big missions I had with this book, aside from the obvious of helping people on their road to finding love, was to help people deal with the very difficult emotions that they encounter when they want love. So like I said, my chronic pain required new tools, and I write about all of these tools in the book, but I wanted to share three with you today. So here goes:

Number one, everything changes, and it’s changing all the time.

We have this tendency in life to think that the past equals the future, that however things have been so far, that’s how they’re going to continue to be. But hopefully by watching this channel, by reading this book, you’re going to start to do some new things, change things up, shift your behavior, even by 1%. 

That’s going to open new doors. It’s gonna bring new people into your life. You don’t know where you’re going to be in a year. You don’t know who’s going to be in your life in a year. What kind of love could walk into your life?

By the way, that can be true in reverse too. We don’t know when something could get worse. People who are in relationships don’t know how long they have their partner for—whether their partner’s going to leave them, or life is going to take their partner through illness. Everything changes. So to think that how our life is today is how it’s always going to be . . . that’s just a story.

It’s a story that keeps us locked in fear and anxiety instead of remaining curious and open to the possibilities of our actual life. And even our relationship to our pain changes.

To anyone out there who’s heartbroken right now, I want you to think about a time in your life where you were devastated, where you were going through something that you never thought you’d get over. And then notice how you feel about it now. Notice how it’s already changed. Everything changes, and this thing that you feel right now will shift and change too.

The idea that nothing’s ever going to change is in itself a story, and it’s a really unhelpful one, because it keeps us locked in our pain.

I once had a coach to whom I was lamenting the fact that because of my physical pain, I could no longer eat certain foods because they inflamed my pain, or I couldn’t have a sip of wine, which I really loved with certain meals. I couldn’t do these things because they all made my physical pain worse. 

I was just devastated, and telling her about how I could never do these things again, and she said, “Whoa, we don’t know if a year from now or five years from now, this pain is going to be in the same place. We don’t know if these foods and alcohol will affect you in the same way in five years as it does today. All we know is that right now, it’s affecting you adversely. So let’s shift things for right now. But let’s lose the ceremony of ‘Oh, I can never have these things again.’”

I never forgot those words: “Lose the ceremony.”

How many of us are doing, in some area of our lives, what I was doing with food, where I was lighting a bonfire and burning the things that I loved? How many of you right now in your love life have lit a bonfire and are burning your hopes and dreams to ever find love, to ever find a relationship—“It’s never going to happen for me. Here’s the dream I had of having a family. Here’s the dream I had of growing old with someone”—and you’re just throwing it all into the fire?

That’s the ceremony. Lose the ceremony. And the ceremony is the story that nothing is going to change. Just like with the foods I was unable to eat, you don’t know where your love life is going to be five years from now. You don’t know who will have come into your life. You don’t know what person, what kind of love, you could never have anticipated, might show up, and in the meantime, you don’t know how much better you could feel about being single a month from now. Everything changes.

Tool number two: surrender.

Eckhart Tolle once said, “Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world.”

When we feel lonely, it feels unacceptable. But if we surrender to that, if we say, “This is how it is in this moment in my life right now,” all of a sudden, we start to see things differently. We start to enjoy things differently. We calm down.

One of the great ironies with my physical pain was this notion that every time there was a treatment or there was some doctor’s visit around the corner, I would secretly get excited again that it was all going to change, that this was going to be the moment where I was going to start feeling better. 

It’s kind of the way that we go on a great date and all of a sudden it’s like: “I feel the hope that I might no longer be single—that I might now have someone who means something to me, who I mean something to.” And it’s hard not to get carried away with that.

But the problem is when that person then doesn’t text us back, when it feels like it doesn’t go anywhere, or when they ghost us altogether. The crash afterward can be severe.

That’s how it was for me when I went to a doctor’s visit and I thought it was going to be the thing that finally got rid of my chronic pain . . . and then it didn’t work. That excitement and that hope would turn to despair, and I would crash so hard and go into a dark hole, not knowing how I would come out of it.

 I got to a certain point where I said, “This hope is one of the most pernicious, devastating things about this pain . . . the hope that one day it’s going to go away.” Because it made me live for the future. I was no longer present in my life; I was just waiting for a time when it would be better.

At a certain point, I had to say, “What if it stayed this way? What if I had to live with this pain as it is today? Could I surrender to that?” And in my mind, I still made space for the fact that everything changes—that it may not be the same in five years—but I said, “If it’s gonna be the same for the next six months or the next year or even the next five, how would I live if I was accepting and surrendering to this?”

And in my mind, I started saying, “You know what? I’m going to live aggressively. I’m not going to wait for a time where this gets better. I’m going to live aggressively today. The pain that I thought I’d never be able to live with . . . what if I could accept it? What would that look like?”

There’s a wonderful story of Prince Ilus, who founded the city of Troy, who on his walk, came upon an object from the gods that was cast down in front of him. He took one look at it, and because it was a sacred object, he went blind immediately. And being learned in the nature and the wisdom of the gods, he cast thanks up to the gods, even with his sight having been lost, and after a week, the gods restored his sight.

Now, I find the least interesting part of that story the moment where Prince Ilus got his sight back. He found a way to experience this grace, this surrender, in having lost his sight. And that’s one of the hardest things to do in life. Every single one of us is going to go through things in life that we can’t just shift or change, and how we cope with those things is going to be what makes us. What if you being single right now, what if you feeling lonely, what if you wishing you could meet someone—but not having met someone and experiencing the pain that comes with that—was something you could actually breathe into and accept and surrender to?

What if you said, “Every day I haven’t met my person, I’m going to live aggressively—I’m going to learn how to be happy enough here right now where I stand knowing that maybe one day I’ll have someone in my life, but I am going to learn to be happy enough in surrendering to the circumstances as they are right now?” How would that change your life? 

Like I said, one of the greatest things we can do is change our relationship with our pain. When we surrender to our circumstances, we are saying, “I am choosing a more peaceful relationship with the circumstances of not having found my person yet.”

Surrendering itself can feel like an overwhelming thing. “I really have to surrender to this? To these circumstances, to this feeling?” Well, in a sense, we surrender to the current circumstances of our life, but we don’t have to worry that surrendering to the feeling is a way of keeping that feeling going in the way that it exists right now.

And the reason for this is in tool number three: Pay attention to the modulations in your pain.

There are some days where the pain of loneliness, of fear about the future, of sadness that we haven’t met someone, is at a 10. And aren’t there other moments where it’s a three? Are there moments where you don’t notice that pain at all because you’re happily swept up in your life with friends? Or that you’re wrapped up in a project that you find meaning and richness and fulfillment in?

There are times where your pain doesn’t feel like this. And this is really important, because in the moments of peak intensity of our pain, focusing on the times that are no doubt coming, where we’re going to feel that pain at a four instead of an eight or a nine, that can be the thing that allows us to surrender.

And pain at a four instead of an eight is life-changing. I don’t know about you, but for example, when you’re in a heartbreak and your pain is at a nine or a 10, you can’t do anything. You can barely eat, sleep, work, or function with friends and family. 

When you’re at a four, it may still be unpleasant, but you start living your life again. And when you live your life again, you begin that upward spiral to a better place where new things happen. All of a sudden, the best parts of your life start to get better. You start to bring new things into your life, you start to create again. You might even bring your pain down to a two or a one.

So pay attention to the modulations in your pain. Don’t judge the reality of your life by 10 p.m. at night when you’re lying in bed in the dark and thinking and craving connection. Look at your life as a series of different feelings in different moments. This loneliness is not the one story of your life, and the height of your pain isn’t the reality of how you feel all of the time. Sometimes, through surrender, through realizing that everything changes, we can just settle into a peak moment of pain knowing that in a few hours, or in a day or two, a moment is coming when we will feel better again.

Now, firstly, if you’re enjoying these tools, and if you’re finding them valuable, leave me a comment. Let me know: What’s your favorite of these tools? Which one do you see as being most helpful to you? Which one made you feel better even as you listened to it?

But also know that these are just three of seven or eight tools that I put in the book that I use for managing pain that you can use for managing the pain in your life.

None of this is to send a message that we should just say, “Where I am today is all I’m ever going to aim for.” In fact, I believe that by managing our pain and our relationship with it, we can get to a place in our life where we are no longer hopelessly anxious or unhappy, but where we are actually happy enough and we feel like “I’m in a centered, peaceful place once again.”

When we’re happy enough, it doesn’t make us complacent. What it does is it gives us the confidence to go out there and start being aggressive about making things happen in life, taking opportunities, being vulnerable, going on dates, showing who we are to people, taking swings . . . because when we’re happy enough, we really don’t have anything to lose. 

If this date doesn’t go well, if you’re not interested in me, if this date doesn’t go anywhere, I know I’ll return to a life I’m happy enough with, where I can exist there and be okay, maybe even a little more than okay. And that, I believe, is one of the most subtle but profound powers we can possibly give ourselves.

 If you enjoyed this video, I cannot stress enough that this book is going to be something that is going to profoundly impact your life. I have spent four years of my life on it, and I’m so excited for you to read it. So grab a copy at lovelifebook.com and you’ll be entered into the giveaway with all of those really great prizes.

Even if you don’t win anything, you’ll still get a ticket to an event I’m doing on May 4 where we are going to take the ideas from the book and bring them to life in practical ways for your year ahead, especially if finding your person is something you want to do, but you also want to be happier or more confident today before that even happens.

Go to lovelifebook.com to grab your copy. Thank you for watching this video. And I can’t wait to see you at our big event, which is virtual by the way, so wherever you are in the world, you can join us on Saturday, May 4.