In my experience, stop looking and it'll find you. I met my wife on the beach, basically randomly. Neither of us wanted a relationship at the time, we just enjoyed talking to each other so much. Our "first date" was to a hiking meetup, where we ditched everyone and broke into a park after-hours, explored shit, and at some point, kissed, while hiding from the park rangers.
This is not a good advice. You got lucky despite not looking - recognise that. A slightly better version is "make sure you're open to opportunities outside of explicit dating context".
All my best/favorite relationships came when explicitly not looking for anything. If it sounds counter-intuitive, it really is. Kinda like turning right on a motorcycle to go left. There’s no harm in trying it for a couple of months, in the worst case, you don’t meet anyone.
Not bad because it's untrue, but because it's just incidental to something more specific. For example concentrating on your hobbies and getting to know people that way, or finding some new group activity, or spending more time with friends and converting one, or just being in places you enjoy rather than spending time on internet dating is a specific thing to do that works for finding someone compatible. But if you only stop looking, that's not going to work - that's the cause/effect swapped.
It's not incidental. If you think about the attributes of the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, and the attributes you want them to see in you, either implied or explicitly, one of those attributes will most likely be "happy." Most people don't want to seriously date angry/sad/etc people, but who knows. Either way, if dating and "looking" is making you not-happy (which is the sense I got from OP's post), then you need to stop. Because even if you found someone, the odds of them wanting to continue with someone who doesn't come across as happy is nil.
It might be worth clarifying the definition of "happy." I'm not talking about all smiles and shit, you can get angry, even as a "happy person". I mean more like the source of happiness comes from within. Your spouse's job is not to make you happy, no one is on this planet to make you happy. The only person who can make you happy is yourself, so find what brings you joy and do that thing, but try to make it a thing that is around other people doing something similar (not sitting in a house all alone).
If you are happy, content, etc, people will subconsciously seek you out just as we all subconsciously seek out those people to be in our lives. Oh, and get outside your friend group ... like, way outside it. There's a lot more to it than that and I've hand-waved a lot of it, but I'd have to write a book and I really don't want to.
I think you agree with me, we just have a different way of describing this - because I agree with everything you said apart from "It's not incidental" which I'd replace with "that's why it's incidental" :-)
This is terrible advice if "doing nothing" results in OP staying at home or otherwise not being in situations likely to intersect with new potential mates.
Different things work for different people. Glad not looking worked out nicely for you!
I get the point, but maybe that looking desperate puts people off, so being more relaxed could help. I recall being dismay that when single no one showed interest, while in a relationship women seems to ask me out (still rarely, but not 0)... Long story short I think the message is don't be too intense, but be honest you're looking for a relationship and not a hookup.
Haha, that’s another bit of advice: put a wedding ring on. I would hardly ever get hit on until I put my wedding ring on. Then it was like they came out of the woodwork every weekend I went out. No idea if any of those would ever manifest an actual relationship, but could be worth trying.
If putting on a wedding ring attracts guys who want to get married, I'd be pretty surprised. Or kind of curious about why a guy who wants to get married would be going after a married woman! On the other hand, if it leads to friendship without the pressure, why not?
I think being honest with yourself - and others by extension is the key. Someone else won't MAKE you happy. And no one really knows they want to marry and have kids with someone they just met on a first date. It's so hypothetical. So be honest with yourself and that will flow into your relations with others.
When I met my wife, the very first night, we had a really open and honest conversation about where we were/what we wanted, including talking about marriage (not to each other specifically, just we were looking to settle down). It was nice to not dance around those topics as if they were taboo, or wonder if we were wasting time by not having similar objectives.
So this is interesting..."stop looking and it'll find you." is advice I've heard from so many people, dear friends, spiritual teachers I know and respect.
And yet, I find it virtually impossible to willfully cause myself to "stop looking."
And especially when I'm stop looking in order to find something.
I can't pretend that I'm not.
And I can't stop trying to find something.
I will add - and this is a little more personal info than I wanted to share - but I've bared so much personal information already, so what the heck, is I say this as someone who has spent over six months living in a zen monastery practicing non-attachment, among other spiritual and psychological exercises.
So how do you stop looking?
Is that even possible?
Or does it just happen?
> So how do you stop looking? Is that even possible? Or does it just happen?
So, just to put it in perspective, I did this at ~30 years old. My wife is a few years older than me. Instead of trying to find a partner, boyfriend, or whatever, go looking for a single friend. IOW, change what you're looking for.
1. It's a lot easier to find friends than potential life partners.
2. Expanding your network increases the odds of finding potential life partners.
3. IME, turning a budding friendship into a relationship is relatively easy if both people are willing. Also, if either one isn't willing, it won't really harm the friendship because it is so new.
As an adult, making new friends is a bit harder than when we're younger. Hit up meetup.com and just start going to random things that might be interesting to you. Or ask your existing friends to invite you on random outings they have with their friends (you've probably got a "gateway friend"[1] that has lots of friends that don't overlap with your friends) and just start meeting people with the sole goal of making new friends.
Your secondary goal is to find a life partner, but don't make it your primary one. Eventually, you just start making friends everywhere you go (it took me almost a year), stop caring about the life partner part, and during that time I had zero relationships. At the end of that, 90% of my friends were women that I never had a physical relationship with. When I met my wife, we just sat and talked for hours, and then I knew it was different than any other friendship I'd had in the last year. We exchanged numbers and then talked for hours yet again and again. At no point was there talk of a relationship or anything more, in fact, we weren't officially dating until about ~2 months after we met, but we were inseparable after ~3 weeks.
There were a ton of failures along the way though, especially near the beginning. Some truly cringe-worthy moments that I'll take to the grave. But it was worth it, in the end.
But seriously, just stop looking.