you can’t be happy with someone if you’re not happy alone

There are many women I that know – intelligent, sweet, beautiful women – who feel as though they need a partner to validate everything that they are. They think that they need to hear that they are pretty or special from a member of the opposite sex before they will begin to believe it themselves. But the problem they discover is, when they do find someone who whispers those sweet nothings into their ears, that they still don’t believe it. One kind word from someone whose face lights up when they see you does not erase decades of telling yourself the opposite. That realisation, that one person doesn’t make it all better, can be a hard pill to swallow.

When it comes down to it, you can’t be happy with someone if you’re not happy alone. To rely on someone to make you feel worthwhile, to make you feel as if you really are someone special, is not fair on them and it’s not fair on you. Because nobody can do that if don’t already believe it yourself. And so you will be doomed to failure from the start.

To allow someone to dictate how you feel about yourself is to devalue who you are. And you’re devaluing them too. It can be difficult not to hate someone for being unable to bring you the happiness that you were so sure, and still are so sure, that a person other than yourself can give you.

You feel disappointment when the right words don’t automatically come out of their mouths. They may be sweet words, kind words, but they are not the exact words that you played over and over again in your head. The words that you were so desperate to hear. You feel hurt when, for the first time, they forget to tell you that you’re beautiful when you dress up. Because until they say it, it can’t ever be true. Slowly, you drift away from them because you are tired of feeling hurt; or they drift away from you when they realise that they can’t ever live up to your expectations.

No one will be able to live up to those expectations, because when it comes down to it, nobody can make you happy but you. It is when you realise this; when you take your happiness into your own hands and refuse to wait around for someone to hand it to you, that you will open up your heart enough to let somebody else in for keeps.

(Image credit: 1.)