To Remain Calm in the Face of Uncertainty

A few weeks back my friends and I at our weekly get together got into a disagreement about the state of my love life. I don't even recall how it started. More than likely I said something stupid to draw attention to myself. I still haven't learned to just keep my mouth shut.

The gist of the conversation became how I'm not actively looking for love and that is my problem. I find this to be such a contradiction of everything people say about love "It comes when you aren't searching for it." or "Comes in through a window you didn't realize you'd left open." "Go about your life and it will find you when you're ready." I'm thinking it's all fairy tale.

None of my friends found love by looking for it. All of them found it when they weren't looking. Not only that they didn't find their husbands by searching sketchy web sites or clubs. They all met their significant others through friends. Yet, apparently I have to search harder for it.

I just don't think like them. I figure that if I was lucky enough to find someone it would have happened by now. To me this area of lacking in my life is my biggest failure as a human being. What kind of person is completely undeserving of love?

My friends are always telling me about what a great person they think I am. They keep reiterating what it is they admire about me. The words they use I can never completely believe. They don't seem real. They seem superhuman sometimes. I'm not superhuman. I'm not even more than ordinary.

My problem with all these things they say about me is that if they were true then there would have been a man out there who would have seen those things in me too. One of these men in my past would have looked at me and saw that I could be a good wife, mother, friend and lover. None of them have. None of them even really wanted to know me. Once they had been around me for a bit I guess they realized that behind what you see there is nothing here worth keeping. There is nothing that they couldn't bear to let go of.

So this discussion with them just led to them telling me that I should try Plenty of Fish. UGH. All I really got were comments about how I don't try or don't put myself out there. Maybe I don't but I think I've had enough humiliation to last me a lifetime.

I'm not afraid of putting my heart on the line. I've done it when I really believed in someone. What I learned from doing this is that my instincts are ALWAYS wrong. It ALWAYS ends up that I'm throwing myself at men who wouldn't even look twice at me. Men who were just only ever being polite. If you put me next to any other girl in the world I guarantee you that any man will pick the other girl.

I've lost all my boyfriends and even potential ones to other women. That is how appealing I am. I'm so desirable that I'm always being left.

I look around myself at all my friends and family members and I see how I am the only one who is completely inept at love. They have all found someone who loves them. Who chose them over all the other people in the world. There is nothing wrong with any of them. I wish I could figure out what was wrong with me.

So after spending a week at home and getting to meet my new niece I've started having a major panic attack. Time is running out so quickly and I don't know what to do about it. I'm not going to run out and just find someone for the sake of finding someone. That much I know to be wrong. I know it's better to be alone than in an unhappy relationship.

The problem is that I don't want to be alone forever. I can be. I'm capable of it. I would survive if that were my fate. I just don't want to.

I read a quotation once that said "courage is the ability to remain calm in the face of uncertainty." I admire that. I try to live that quotation but I have to say that the person who is truly able to do that has an immense core of steel that I do not. I do things because I have to. I continue on because curling up in a corner and waiting to die is NOT an option. I don't consider that strength, I just consider that getting by.

I can't help but be disappointed because I know that my parents and my grandparents expected more of me than just getting by. So not only have I disappointed myself I have also disappointed them by being such a failure at love.