This week I received a question from a reader describing a challenge I know others are struggling with. So, I asked her permission to answer publicly on the blog. Here is the question:

I have a question and it’s totally fine if you don’t want to answer it. When I read your Renewal chapter in your book, I very much related to the first part of the chapter where you talk about feeling left behind in the marriage game. I am currently 34 years old and have been searching for a good man for a long time now. I stay in shape, have good character, and have done a lot to improve myself. Was there anything that shifted for you that helped you find your husband? I am experiencing some curative effects from applying many of your joy techniques. I just wonder if there’s something you learned in the process that could be useful to someone like me.

name withheld

I know there are many people out there who love single life and enjoy living completely on their own terms, without all of the complexities that come with a partner. And I’m beyond happy to see that this choice is increasingly being celebrated and supported in our culture.

But I empathize with you, dear reader, because like you, I was not one of those people. I dated a lot, but often struggled to find a sense of connection with the men I’d meet. I tried to keep in mind the matchmaker’s maxim, “if it’s not a hard no, it’s a yes” — meaning that you should default to going out with someone again unless you truly can’t stand them — but in practice I came home from most dates feeling hopeless.

I wanted to answer your question because something did shift for me in the months before Albert and I got together, and there are also things I’ve learned since that may be helpful.

For those who don’t know our story, a little background: we began working together around the time I turned 30, and I had the worst kind of crush on him for that time. We often took business trips together and ended up having long, wonderful conversations over dinner, but one or the other of us was always dating someone else, and anyway, I didn’t believe there was anything he saw in me.

Then, one day we were catching up and it all came out — the crush was mutual. We were engaged eight months later, and married a year and a half after that.

committing to not settling

So, let’s take a step back about a year and a half before all this. I had just ended a 10-month relationship with a guy I worked with (a pattern, possibly because there was some self-selection based on our careers, and possibly because I worked all the time). The relationship had been going nowhere, and as someone who knew I wanted kids, that wasn’t going to work for me. I remember bringing him (dragging him?) as a date to my best friend’s wedding in Bermuda. I was in the wedding, and while I spent the day doing bridesmaid things, he was in bar pounding dark-and-stormies.

None of it was great, but the clarifying moment was when the groom made a speech about his new wife. I realized that I wanted someone who would say those kinds of things about me, and if I didn’t break it off with this guy, I was effectively telling the universe — and myself — that I didn’t believe I deserved that.

In truth, I’m not sure I fully believed I deserved it, but I wanted it, so I made the decision that it was better to be alone than to settle for scraps. Looking back, this decision was pivotal because it made me commit to this choice: either I was going to find a great love, or I was going to live an amazing life alone. There was no middle ground.

Why was this so pivotal?

Because it forced me to look head-on at the possibility that I might never meet “the one.” Up until this point, that thought had always been a late-night fear, one I never wanted to look at directly. In facing it, I still didn’t love the idea, but it brought it out of the shadows, took the shame out of it, and made it something I could work with. It wasn’t the life I wanted, but I could make it a spectacular life nonetheless.

This opened up a lot of creativity. I started to envision other possibilities than the traditional meet – get married – have a child. Maybe my story would involve having a child and then meeting my person later. I decided I would focus on what was most important to me, and let life surprise me with the rest.

What was most important to me was having a child, so I started to ask my doctor about preserving my fertility. I also started to ask myself, at what age would I feel comfortable deciding to have a child on my own? I ended up not getting far down this path, but starting to ask the questions took a lot of pressure off the idea that I needed to find someone or I’d lose my chance to be a mother.

Of course, my decision — that I would rather be alone if I couldn’t find a “great love” — might be different than yours. For example, in his book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman suggests that people should settle. (He also suggests that everyone settles, which to me is something you say when you can’t fathom that others might have a different experience to you.) It’s a perfectly valid choice, but the point is to decide for yourself and then act accordingly.

Making space

Around this time, I was also reading a lot of poetry, specifically Rumi. In the poem, “The Fragile Vial,” this verse spoke to me:

Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.
Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,
where something might be planted,
a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad RūmI, translated by coleman barks

I thought about the way single women are told to fill their lives up with activities and hobbies to pass the time, keeping busy as a way to distract from what was missing in life. I’d embraced this idea to the fullest, packing my weekends with yoga classes, brunch, gallery hopping, meetups with friends. There was nothing wrong with this, but these lines from Rumi caught hold of something within me that wondered if maybe instead of distracting myself from that wanting, it might be a good idea to lean into it for awhile. I still saw friends and did yoga classes, but I pared back the schedule, dialed back the dating, and made large swaths of time to be alone. Whenever I felt lonely, I thought about this idea of being a spot of bare ground, leaving space for something new to grow.

As spent more time with this emptiness, I came to feel that my constant busyness had become an unconscious signal that I had no room in my life for something new. Making space, however uncomfortable, seemed to send the opposite signal: that my life wasn’t full, and that I could accept someone else into it.

I ended up getting together with Albert just a couple of months later, and I always think about those Rumi verses and what effect they may have had.

Another thing I did during that year and a half was a lot of things I’d putting off, or waiting to do with a partner. I took a trip to Iceland by myself. I hosted dinner parties. I started working on my stalled book proposal, taking whole days to go work in the gorgeous Rose Room at the New York Public Library. In this spirit of making space, by clearing the backlog of things I’d been waiting to do, I created a kind of blank slate so that when I did meet my partner, I wasn’t trying to live out old dreams. I was ready to co-create new ones with him.

exploring hidden obstacles to love

As I write this, I’m coming up on ten years of marriage, and nearly twelve years of therapy. And in this time I’ve learned a lot about the emotional obstacles I carried toward love that probably made it harder for me to find a partner. I discovered that I experienced what’s known as attachment trauma during formative years, and while I was lucky to have some very loving, involved grownups in my life, a key link was missing for me that has created ripples that resonate to this day.

I coped so well and seemed so normal for so long, yet deep down I wondered: “Is there something fundamentally broken and unlovable about me?” Being single for a long time stirred this fear even more. “What if it’s not just that I haven’t met the right person,” I worried, “but what if I’m just not lovable?” If you’ve felt this, or something like it, it’s very possible that someone who was supposed to love you unconditionally didn’t quite do it the way they needed to. There’s nothing wrong with you at all, only that you have a wound in need of healing. In fact, the survival skills I’d cultivated to get through the darkest parts of my life were both a lifeline to me and a barrier to love, both when I was single, and in the early years of my marriage. Healing means finding ways to survive and let love in at the same time. Doing this work now deep into married life, I often look back and wonder what might have happened had I started therapy earlier. Maybe doing some of the work to unpack my childhood trauma would’ve helped me avoid certain relationships that I now can see were not the right fit, and feel truly worthy of love.

I think this is important because you mention certain things that sound like ways to be ready for a partner: “I stay in shape, have good character, and have done a lot to improve myself.” Yet it is one thing to be ready for a partnership, and another to feel (as society uniquely makes women feel) that we need to be good enough or desirable enough to be worthy of a partner. You do not need to be perfect to find and deserve love. Every day people find love who are out of shape, whose character is uneven, and who have no interest in improving themselves. These are all good things to do, if they are things you inherently are interested in doing, but when it comes to finding a partner, I think far more important would be to explore your sense of self-worth and your relationship to love, ideally with a capable therapist.

There’s no downside to doing this, and in my view, it represents an investment in the kind of relationship you hope to build in the future. Society makes the wedding seem like a kind of finish line for the single woman, or like hitting home plate in a run around the bases — a moment where you’re “safe.” Yet loving and letting yourself be loved is what you’re really after, and learning more about what unconscious obstacles you may have toward love is the bravest and most important thing you can do to ensure that when you do meet that person, you actually find the love you’re seeking.