Most Popular Dating Advice Sets You Up To Fail.

by Ken Page

Do you ache to have a committed, intimate relationship—one in which the person you want with all your heart wants and loves you, too?

Maybe you’ve been single for decades. Or you’ve been dating for months and haven’t found anyone who is both available and interested in you.

You loathe to admit that you’re lonely, and it hurts.

You dislike doing so many things alone: vacations, raising children, weekends, planning your future. Sometimes the prospect of growing old alone like this really frightens you.

You want a partner, a soul mate, a beloved.

You want to be seen, understood, adored… You deserve it just as much as anyone else.

You see your friends, co-workers, neighbors, family members partnered and happy, starting or growing their families, planning their future, and you think…

How Did THEY Get So Lucky? What Do They Have, That You Don’t?

Is it timing?

Youthfulness?

Are they just more “together” when it comes to dating or relationships? Do they have less emotional baggage than you do? Have they “worked” on themselves more than you have?

Do they have a better career, a cleaner house or better health?

Are they somehow more magnetic than you are?

Do they just not care as much, so love comes easier for them?

You’re bewildered when you see people who aren’t particularly charming or attractive, who have “issues” and annoying personality quirks, whom you wouldn’t date in a million years enjoying solid, loving, happy relationships. Their mates adore them, support them, and stick by them through the ups and downs of life.

What’s even more confounding is that some of these “lucky” people even take their wonderful relationships for granted. They make it seem like no big deal that they found and kept love.

Meanwhile, you’ve contended with your single status, and have gone through so much heartbreak or longing.

You can’t help but wonder, what’s wrong with ME? Why can’t I find someone to love who will love me back? Why can’t I make any relationship stick?

Your worst fear—and your most bitter secret—is that there’s something lacking in you.

But why would you think there’s something lacking in you?

Because most popular dating and relationship advice tells you so.

How Popular Dating Advice Sets You Up to Fail from the Start

Most popular dating recommendations build on a fatally flawed concept: If you want to find your soulmate, make yourself more desirable.

To you, that may mean one of two things:

1. Change the way you look.
2. Change the way you act.

You think you have to work on being as attractive, sexy and alluring as you can be. Maybe you’ve started working out, gotten makeovers, bought new clothes and lost weight, but it still hurts to suspect that no one wants to be with a person like you.

You may have also heard that you have to act more feminine if you’re a woman, or more alpha if you’re a man, in order to draw in your mate. Does that mean that you’re turning your partners off by being too bossy or too passive?

You’re told that you have to play hard to get and behave as if you don’t “need” a relationship. That you must follow “the rules”, and act detached and busy. Otherwise you’ll come across as too needy, or too available, and that’s supposedly a turn-off.

But You Have a Hard Time Playing These Games and Pretending

It doesn’t come naturally, or easily, to you.

You may have even heard that the reason you’re still single is because you don’t really want a relationship. That secretly, you’re self-sabotaging because you have a “fear of intimacy” and that’s why you keep picking the wrong people or pining away for unavailable ones.

Which confuses you, because you want nothing more than to be in love with the right person. How can you both want something so dearly, and be repelling it at the same time? It doesn’t make sense to you.

Or you may have heard that you’ve got an attachment style that explains your failed relationships because of how you were raised. But that makes you feel powerless and hopeless because you can’t change your past, and frankly? No amount of analyzing and categorizing your “style” has gotten you closer to true love, anyway.

You’ve done everything you can think of to be as attractive, magnetic and irresistible to the people you date.

You’ve hidden your faults, you’ve suppressed your greatest desires (to get married and have a family, for example), you’ve left so many things unspoken and unexpressed because you’ve been worried about scaring love away.

You’ve covered up your weaknesses and longings with false bravado.

You’ve contorted yourself to be more extroverted, or detached, or easy-going than you are.

You’ve pretended not to care, when in fact, you care so very much. About everything. To a fault!

You’ve been afraid to speak the truth about your longings and desires, or to relax when you’re around someone you really like, because you worried that they’ll see you as too sensitive, too needy, too intense…too much!

And yet, you’re still hitting the same stumbling blocks with dating and relationships.

Why? Because…

It’s Impossible to Be Authentic While Struggling to Play a Role

Worse, your insecurity will be apparent to everyone but you. And that insecurity is a powerful lure—but not for the kind of person you want. It’s a lure for selfish, unavailable, and abusive potential partners.

Therefore, the more you try to hide or suppress certain parts of yourself, or play attraction games in order to “hook” someone into wanting you, the further away you’ll stray from the kind of relationship you long for.

But there’s good news!

You don’t need to hide the real you any longer.

You don’t have to hold in your passions for fear you’re too much.

That’s because what you may think are your greatest weaknesses, the parts of you that you fear no one will be attracted to or will scare people off…

Those things that you feel the deepest insecurity about hold the keys to finding your greatest love and creating the authentic relationship you long for.

Allow me to explain.

The Qualities That Will Make Us Irresistible to the Right Person

As a psychotherapist, I’ve had many clients come to me for help because they wanted so desperately to find love.

Some complained that they felt they were “too much”—too demanding, too intense, too passionate about something. Some complained they weren’t “enough”—that they were too ineffective, quiet, or passive.

They thought these qualities were getting in the way of finding love, and they wanted me to help them work through these unwanted aspects of themselves.

But what some described as weakness, I saw as humility, selflessness, and tenderness of heart.

What they thought was an inability to let go in the face of rejection, I saw as deep and innate loyalty.

What they felt was too much intensity, I saw as intense passion for the things that mattered most to them.

Over the years, the characteristics of my clients which I found most inspiring, most essentially them, were the ones which frequently caused them the most suffering.

That’s when I realized that the very aspects that they were trying to hide, or ashamed of, were the most beautiful parts of them.

They were their Core Gifts.

And the reason they weren’t connecting with the right person or finding love was because they didn’t love or honor the most beautiful parts of themselves (their Core Gifts), and therefore, they were attracting people who couldn’t love or honor those parts, either.

Core Gifts are not talents or skills. They more often feel like shameful weaknesses, parts of yourself you’d feel most vulnerable to expose. (“I have a deep need to connect and love texting regularly just to share a thought or experience.”)

They are things about you that others may have criticized or ridiculed in the past. (“You’re too sensitive!”)

They may be traits that you don’t want to admit you have, or that you are reticent to expose about yourself on a first date. (“I want more than anything to get married and have a family.”)

Your Core Gifts Are Your Most Beautiful, Precious and Fragile Parts of You — And a Doorway to True Love

It’s likely that at this moment, you’d be unable to name your Core Gifts. Why?

Because you subconsciously guard and hide your Core Gifts—even from your own consciousness.

Core Gifts are places around which you get most defensive. When someone rejects you because of them, you feel devastated and betrayed.

That’s why you create a “safe” version of yourself in front of those who make you feel the most vulnerable: people you’re deeply drawn to, sexually and romantically.

(In other words, you’re more likely to be guarded around people who you’re attracted to, and less so around people you aren’t.)

You unconsciously know that your Core Gifts are at risk when your heart is open and hopeful.

So you hold back, pretend, hide, suppress, withhold your authentic self in a misguided effort to be more “attractive,” or to avoid driving away that one special person you’re really, really into.

And why, up until now, you’ve either:
-- failed to attract the kind of person who appreciates you and wants to love you,
or
-- attracted emotionally unavailable, toxic, unkind, or dishonest partners in the past.

In other words, the degree to which you don’t love these parts of yourself is the degree to which you will be drawn to people also don’t love these parts of you.

In order to attract the right partner and create a healthy, happy relationship, you have to do what probably scares you most:

You have to lead with your gifts.

Not hide them. Not suppress them. Not deny them.

That means you must first uncover what your Core Gifts actually are.

For most, this would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, without guidance. This is why I’ve developed a process to help you uncover your Core Gifts, so you can embrace them and lead with them.

I call this process Deeper Dating.

Deeper Dating is the quickest, easiest, and most direct path to true, lasting, healthy love because you’re no longer wasting time in unhealthy relationships or attracting unavailable partners.

But I can’t possibly work individually with everyone who needs that kind of help. That’s why I’ve partnered with Flourish, so I can extend that help and guidance to as many people as possible, since almost all singles who are longing to find a life partner can benefit from these insights and tips.

When you subscribe to our FREE Relationship Advice Newsletter, you get access to more articles like these, from an accomplished community of carefully selected experts (like me!).

You’ll also learn:

• Which attractions can lead you to love, and which can lead you to pain, and the truth about sexual attraction that no one teaches us.
• The tell-tale signs that you’re living from your Gift Zone; meaning, you’re appreciating yourself and your Core Gifts, and being as magnetic as you can be to the person who will make you happy (and appreciate you, too!)
• How your deepest insecurities hold the key to discovering your greatest gift when it comes to love.
• How to increase your level of discrimination against the people who can never make you happy or love you the way you want to be loved—and do it early on when you meet someone, before you get too involved and attached.
• The most powerful question you can ask yourself when you’re dating someone that will save you countless days or months of pain. Ask yourself this, and it will quickly reveal if the person is right for you.

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It’s free, it’s easy, and you’ll be amazed at what a difference the tips and insights will make in your relationship!

Discovering your Core Gifts and learning to honor and embrace them in order to find love is one of the greatest, most important journeys of your entire life.

And it’s one of the great privileges of my life to share what I’ve learned about this path.

The advice contained in the articles I’ve written for Flourish will help you see why you’ve been attracting certain types of relationship your entire adult life, why you may not have felt a true sense of romantic connection, and what it really takes to set your soul free in love.

I can’t wait to share all this with you!

Warmly,