Love is one of the most beautiful things in the world. The search for it gives our lives purpose and passion. Unfortunately, many people are unlucky in love, going through one failed relationship after the other.
Is this just bad fortune? Is it just a coincidence? Maybe not. Maybe it’s a result of a pattern of behavior that makes it difficult for a person to find love and be in healthy relationships. There are certain signs that you will never find love that you should look out for.
It’s essential to recognize that you’re exhibiting these signs if you ever want a chance at finding and being with your soulmate. Failing to realize they’re happening before it’s too late can highly damage your prospects.
Read on to learn more about five tell-tale signs of behavior that may be standing in the way between you and true love. We’ve also outlined ways to address these signs if they apply to you.
Lack of Self-Love
The first sign that you’ll find it difficult to find love is not having a strong sense of self-love. After all, how can you expect someone to love you if you don’t love yourself?
This sentiment goes both ways. You won’t be able to love someone if you don’t love yourself. Sure, you can have feelings of infatuation and lust towards another person, but you can’t truly love someone if you don’t have a clear enough grasp on the concept to apply it to yourself.
People that lack self-love often fall into the trap of pretending to be someone they’re not to get people attracted to them.
Of course, going through a relationship wearing a mask is unsustainable. The relationship inevitably fizzles out, and the cycle repeats itself.
Behaviors That Indicate a Lack of Self-Love
Here are some signs that show you don’t have a strong sense of self-love:
Constant Use of Self-Deprecating Language
People lacking self-love often use a lot of self-deprecation in their daily lives, even when they’re joking.
Self-deprecation is often part of many people’s sense of humor. However, it shouldn’t be your entire way of joking. Being too self-deprecating is a clear sign that you struggle with self-love. The more you say negative things about yourself, the more you start to believe they’re true.
Always Blaming Yourself
Do you constantly blame yourself for everything unpleasant that happens in your life? Sure, having self-accountability is desirable. However, overdoing it means you probably have a low sense of self-love.
People in this state of mind often focus too much on their shortcomings and don’t give themselves enough credit for their achievements. As a result, they constantly feel like they’re not doing enough and that they’re to blame for all their misfortunes.
Therefore, you should celebrate your wins just as much as you dwell on your failures.
Thinking That Others Are Better Than You
Another indicator of lacking self-love is how you see yourself relative to other people.
Individuals that don’t love themselves struggle with self-worth. As a result, they always think of themselves as inferior to others.
This stems from them assessing other people solely based on their successes while assigning their self-worth exclusively based on their failures.
In turn, this is closely related to the signs mentioned above. If you believe that everyone else is better than you, then you’ll be inclined to try to be just like everyone else.
As a result, your true self won’t have a chance to shine, and the person that would love you just as you are won’t know you exist.
Additionally, you’ll find that you’re attracting people that like the person you’re pretending to be, not the person you truly are.
Unrealistic Expectations
Another tell-tale sign that you’ll struggle to find someone that truly loves you and build a healthy relationship with them is that you have unrealistic expectations in relationships.
When you take this approach to your love life, you fall into the trap of searching for something that simply doesn’t exist.
No relationship is perfect, and the sooner you come to grips with this fact, the better off you’ll be. Relationships are full of ups and downs. They aren’t smooth sailing all the time.
To build a sustainable relationship with someone, you should be committed to taking the journey with them, including the good, and more importantly, the bad that comes with it.
Examples of Unrealistic Expectations
If you expect the following things in your relationships, then you’re being unrealistic and will struggle to find love:
Expecting Your Partner to Be Perfect
No one is perfect. This statement is true no matter how hard Hollywood tries to convince you of the contrary.
Just like you want to be with someone that accepts and loves you for exactly who you are, you should be willing to love your partner through the good times as well as the bad.
Expecting your partner always to be fairytale material and never make any mistakes is a recipe for one failed relationship after the other.
Sure, sometimes the person you’re with has more bad traits than good. If you feel that this person doesn’t genuinely care for you and isn’t good for you mentally, then by all means call it quits.
However, you should think very carefully about a person’s positives before ending the relationship. If they outweigh the negatives, perhaps you should reconsider because you might just be letting a great person walk out of your life.
Expecting Your Partner to Let Go of Their Values
Another unrealistic relationship expectation you should avoid is that your partner will change their core beliefs for you.
Even though they may love you very deeply, there are often things that people wouldn’t change for anyone, no matter how dear.
Therefore, just as you should accept your partner with their mixed bag of positives and negatives, you should also respect their beliefs and not pressure them into altering them to please you.
Additionally, you should carefully examine a person’s belief system before entering into a serious relationship with them. Doing so will help avoid the pitfalls that often plague relationships involving people with conflicting values.
Expecting Your Partner to Give You All Their Time
Staying on the topic of unrealistic expectations, you shouldn’t expect your partner to spend every second of every day with you.
Although there’s nothing like the feeling you get when the relationship is still fresh and you can’t get enough of each other, you should understand that this isn’t sustainable.
Sure, you’re in this relationship together, but each of you is still their person. Giving your partner space in a relationship is paramount. It’s conducive to a healthy relationship and even gives you a chance to miss each other.
As a result, the feelings you have for each other aren’t as likely to fade away with time.
Additionally, you shouldn’t get offended when your partner asks for some “me time.” It doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t want to be with you. It simply means that they need to be by themselves for a while.
Fear of Vulnerability
Finding your true love inevitably means that you’re going to have to expose your deepest secrets, fears, and insecurities to someone. This involves letting out all your emotions without any concealment and showing them to that person.
People are often afraid to do that, and understandably so. This is especially true for people who’ve been vulnerable with someone before and gotten their trust betrayed.
Going through such a traumatic experience can make someone incredibly reluctant to open up to another person due to fear that they’ll have the same heartbreaking experience.
However, you won’t be able to surpass this barrier to finding love until you realize that not all people are the same. Exposing your vulnerability to someone and having them appreciate and love you for it is just as possible as things going south.
Mutual vulnerability is essential to forming a genuine connection with your partner.
Behaviors That Indicate a Fear of Vulnerability
Here are some of the tell-tale signs that you’re afraid of being vulnerable:
Only Showing the Good Side of Yourself
People who have a fear of vulnerability tend to only show one side of themselves. They reveal their good side to the world and keep their fears and insecurities tightly locked inside themselves.
However, you can’t hide these things forever, and they’ll inevitably come to light. When they do, the person that fell in love with you will feel deceived and may ultimately end the relationship.
In turn, your unwillingness to show your whole self will lead to the very outcome that you were trying so hard to avoid.
Getting Uncomfortable When Asked Personal Questions
Another sign that you aren’t comfortable with being vulnerable is how you react when asked about personal matters.
People who fear vulnerability will often act defensively in these situations. They may even get deeply offended.
This confrontational response indicates that you’re not ready to connect with someone on a deep level.
Viewing Vulnerability as a Weakness
The final sign of fearing vulnerability is the way you perceive it.
Individuals that are afraid of being vulnerable view it as a state of weakness. They feel that showing others their deepest emotions gives these people a chance to take advantage of them.
The truth is quite the opposite. The ability to be vulnerable with someone is one of the biggest signs of emotional maturity. It’s a strength that not many people have.
Therefore, you should use this form of emotional intelligence to bond with the person you like and build a deeper connection with them that develops into love.
Negative Attitude Towards Love and Relationships
Another obstacle that could be standing in the way between you and true love is your attitude towards love and relationships.
Naturally, if you have a negative attitude towards them, then you’ll have a hard time finding yourself in a healthy relationship built on mutual love.
People can develop an unfavorable attitude towards relationships and love for various reasons. The most common cause for this is having gone through one or more bad experiences before.
Perhaps you’ve been in a long relationship and ultimately found out that the person you were with was cheating, or betraying your trust in any way. You may also have been in an abusive relationship.
These experiences can taint your perspective on love and cause you to lose your belief that it even exists.
Examples of Negative Attitudes
Going through traumatic experiences involving love and relationships can cause a person to enter new relationships with a bad attitude. You may wonder what negative attitudes look like in a relationship.
Here are some examples of behaviors that can ruin a relationship:
Viewing a Relationship as a Competition
When in competition, the inherent consequence is that there must always be a winner and a loser.
Needless to say, adopting a competitive mindset in a relationship is a recipe for its prompt demise.
People that have been in many failed relationships will often find that the common factor in all of them is their desire to always have the upper hand in the relationship’s power dynamic.
This comes in the form of always having to get their way and believing that they’re in the right.
For example, when a couple inevitably fights, a person viewing the relationship as a competition will try to win the fight at all costs, even if it hurts their partner’s feelings deeply.
They’ll often try to win the fight by bringing up things from the past that have nothing to do with the current conflict and hold them over their partner’s head.
Gaslighting
Another common example of a negative attitude in a relationship is gaslighting. This is when an individual tries to make their partner question their memory and perception of a certain event when they know their partner recalls it perfectly well.
They do so to divert the conversation away from the fact that they’re in the wrong. When engaging in this behavior, a person will deny all responsibility for their actions and pin it on their partner.
This abusive behavior has no place in a healthy, sustainable relationship built on love.
Not Respecting Your Partner
Respect is a key aspect of love. After all, it’s impossible to love someone without having admiration for them and caring about their feelings.
In many relationships, the amount of respect one partner gives is more than what they receive. This imbalance causes the relationship to be unhealthy and doomed to fail.
The level of respect that two people in a relationship have for each other comes to light when they’re having a big fight.
If your partner loves and respects you, there are certain lines that they’ll never cross and certain things they’ll never say. The reason is that they know everything about you and that saying these things would hurt you deeply.
Not respecting such boundaries is a prime example of a negative attitude in a relationship.
Lack of Effort
In addition to the signs mentioned above, another indication that you may never find yourself in love and a happy relationship is that you don’t try hard enough.
Being in a relationship with someone you love is one of the greatest feelings in life. However, you must also realize that it takes a lot of effort to make a relationship work.
If you’re not doing your part to make your partner feel like an appreciated, equal participant in the relationship, then the relationship is unlikely to last.
The work needed to sustain a relationship can come in many forms. It depends on what your partner’s love language is. Some people feel loved through words of affirmation and encouragement.
On the other hand, another person may prefer to receive love through physical touch or acts of service.
If you’re trying to make an effort to make your partner feel loved, yet your relationship still isn’t working as you would like it to, you may not understand your partner well enough to give them the type of love they need.
In other cases, relationships don’t pan out because either party isn’t putting in the effort at all.
Behaviors That Indicate a Lack of Effort
Here are some behavioral trends that indicate a lack of effort being put into a relationship:
Not Making Time For Your Partner
Oftentimes, the most valuable thing you can give your partner is your time.
That being said, note that simply being in the same room as your partner isn’t enough. You need to spend quality time with them.
This involves really being present with your partner and actively listening to them. By doing so, you’ll connect with your partner on a deeper level because you’ll truly understand their perspective and needs.
If your partner feels that you’re always busy and not making an effort to make time for them in your daily life, they’re likely to feel alienated. In turn, you’ll start drifting apart and the relationship will fizzle out.
Always Expecting Your Partner to Fix Things
Speaking of effort, the time when it becomes most important is when you and your partner aren’t seeing eye to eye.
It’s these situations that show just how much each of you cares about the relationship and wants to make it work.
In an ideal relationship, both partners will work together to settle their differences and get back on good terms. However, that often isn’t the case. Some relationships are plagued with an imbalance in that respect.
This imbalance occurs when one partner expects the other to always be the one picking up the pieces and trying to mend the relationship after a big fight. If you’re that person, this may be a big reason why your relationships always seem to meet their end at some point.
Constantly Forgetting Special Occasions
Another aspect that shows how much conscious effort you’re putting into your relationships is how good you are at remembering special occasions. Examples of such occasions are birthdays and anniversaries.
Making a habit of forgetting such dates gives your partner the impression that you’re not invested enough in the relationship to know them like the back of your hand.
Additionally, a mere “happy birthday” text won’t suffice. You need to make your partner feel like their birthday or your anniversary as a couple is a big deal. This involves planning a special day for these occasions where you spend quality time together.
Conclusion
Are your relationships always seem destined for failure? We understand your frustration and pain. After all, we all want to find that special someone and settle down with them. Unfortunately, some of us engage in behavior that stands in the way of that happening.
There are certain signs you will never find love. They may be emotional issues, such as a fear of vulnerability and a lack of self-love. Additionally, you may constantly be failing in your love life due to a lack of effort or a negative attitude toward love and relationships.
Whatever it is that’s fueling your struggle in finding love, you need to realize and address it. Oftentimes, we can be blind to our shortcomings. It takes a lot of self-reflection and honesty with one’s self to admit that you have an issue.
This is the first step towards getting your love life back on track. The journey toward self-improvement and growth isn’t one you have to take alone. If you feel overwhelmed, there’s no shame in seeking the help of a professional therapist or counselor.
