Steps for Women Over 50 to Find Love
You’re successful in many areas of your life and yet you can’t find Mr. Right. Perhaps you keep dating the same man with a different name over and over again. Perhaps you’re afraid that you’ll make the same mistake again. Perhaps you feel like you’re overweight and not attractive enough. Or maybe you believe that all the good men are taken. Or perhaps you feel too vulnerable to put yourself up for rejection again. Or perhaps you hope Mr. Right will just appear and ring your front doorbell
There are so many reasons not to go after what you want, but unfortunately we don’t often get what we want if we don’t go after it. In the next series of articles I will be explaining just how to go about it. But first a little about me. When I was 80 years old, I left a relationship that I had been in for over 20 years because it was no longer satisfying. I moved to a retirement complex where I expected to stay single the rest of my life.
When I was 82 years old, I decided that I had had enough of the single life and would like a companion. So I put an ad in a couple of online dating services. I put in a specific type of ad which I will be sharing with you. Then I started my adventure. In a few months I met a wonderful man, 85 years old, in good health, intelligent and we’ve been together for a year now.
Step one in this endeavor is to understand exactly who you are. Look at your core character. Do you feel that you are honest, generous, creative, full of integrity, good listener, loving, adventurous, introvert, extrovert? These words should give you an idea of where to start.
Step two is to closely examine yourself and your desires. Look at what you really want and must have in a relationship. There is no right or wrong—just what will work for you. One way to start is to consider, “What makes you feel really loved?” You can get some ideas by looking at past relationships that were really good. What about them was so good? Did he compliment you a lot? Was he generous? If you had fun together, what did you do?
Perhaps you then could consider the things that went wrong in past relationships? Did he talk a lot and never listen to you? Was he addicted to alcohol or some other drugs? Was he verbally or physically abusive ? Was he unfaithful? Did he spend too much money on his own desires and you had a difficult time budgeting? Did he ignore the children or scream at them? Commitment phobic? Emotionally unavailable? I hear these stories very often in my counseling/coaching private practice.
Step three is to examine the good and the bad from the past and then make two lists. List one is what you MUST have in a relationship or it is no deal. List two is what you WANT to have in a relationship. These lists are extremely important, As we look at future articles in this series, the things that you put down in the MUST list are deal breakers. That means you will not continue seeing a man who does not satisfy all of your criteria. Later we’ll talk about how to test for these qualities. We’ll also learn to handle the barriers that I discussed in the first paragraph. I call these false beliefs that need to be challenged and changed.