Navigating Love and Independence in Your Early Thirties
The External Pressure of Finding Love
If you’ve experienced independence in your early thirties you know that the path here may have been paved with a mix of good intentions and a simmering level of resentment or frustration. From “you’ll meet them when you’re not looking” to “your cousin met their partner on Hinge,” friends, family and even random strangers may have given you their two cents about where to find love and perhaps, why you haven’t found it yet. They seemed to suggest that while your achievements are impressive, opening your heart to love could bring even more fulfillment.
These statements, whether they are well meaning or subtly critical, can leave a mark on how we feel about ourselves especially in the highly vulnerable area of interpersonal dynamics. With all of this external messaging, how do we begin to figure out what it is that we’re looking for in partnership and what type of person we’re trying to attract?
“If you’ve experienced independence in your early thirties you know that the path here may have been paved with a mix of good intentions and a simmering level of resentment or frustration.”
Evaluating Your Relationship with Independence
In order to answer these questions, we first have to evaluate our relationship with independent decision making. The ability to decide where your life is going can feel exhilarating or it can feel like the unwanted prize after failing to join “the norm” (i.e. whatever the majority of your peer group is doing at a certain time in your life). If you have been the single person at every friend’s wedding, you may know what I’m talking about. It’s the sensation of watching others achieve what some would term a societal milestone while your life is on a different path.
This high degree of separation between you and your peers can trigger a lot of feelings. Some experience an immense sense of freedom. It’s the notion that they don’t have to subscribe to what everyone wants which then allows them to design a life as they please. But for others, this separation can trigger a high level of sadness and perhaps, even shame. Being outside of the majority is isolating. It can create a sense of loneliness that is unmatched in other areas of life. Watching others pair off and build different iterations of life can make us feel like we are doing something “wrong” or failing to achieve what was expected of us from family members or larger society in general.
If you’ve navigated this stage in your twenties, you may know the feeling I’m talking about. The shame and sadness create a mixture of self-doubt and frustration triggering questions like “why can’t I find someone” or “would my life be easier with a partner?” The second set of emotions including anger, resentment and grief bring on a whole new dimension of inner dialogue. Statements like “I don’t want to move into another apartment alone” or “I don’t want to move to another city but there’s nothing left for me here” bring to light the relationship we can have with independent decision making. In this headspace, freedom of choice doesn’t feel exhilarating. It feels like the price we pay for not finding love.
Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs
Signs You're Putting Your Life on Hold
When we carry this mindset, every decision begins to feel burdensome and stressful. I have seen countless individuals put their lives on hold in the hopes of partnership finding them. They stay in the same job for longer than they need to. They stay in the same apartment arguing that they won't move into a new space because what if they meet someone and have to move again? They turn down promotions or the chance to change cities in an effort to make their current circumstances work or to perhaps prove that they can fit themselves back into the "norm" of their particular dating culture. But trying to fit ourselves back into the box we were never meant to be in is a recipe for stress and self-criticism. The more we try to make something work that doesn't fit our lives, the more we miss out on opportunities that can be meant for us.
“But trying to fit ourselves back into the box we were never meant to be in is a recipe for stress and self-criticism.”
Embracing Intuition and Self-Trust
The Power of Following Your Gut Instinct
So how does one make the shift from trying to fit in to embracing independent decision making? The answer is quite simple to state but challenging to execute: you follow what you feel called to do, regardless of whether it fits into your current life. For instance, if you feel called to change jobs, change jobs. Don't stay in your current position because it's impressive to your family or it gives you something to talk about at dinner parties. If you feel called to stop using dating apps, stop using dating apps. If you feel called to pick up and move to a different city because your current location has burnt you out, do so wholeheartedly. Making these changes doesn't mean you won't experience fear. Of course you will have moments of fear, doubt and even worry. But by challenging your fear in healthy ways, you are rebuilding your relationship with yourself. You are quieting the noise from others about what you "should be doing" at your age and instead, you are learning how to listen to what some would term your intuition or gut instinct.
Following your gut instinct is a pivotal turning point in adulthood. Everyone does it at some point in their lives but doing so early, especially in your thirties can promote a complete change of trajectory in your life. The simple act of listening to what you want and need and following through with it invites you into spaces where other like-minded individuals may be. Meeting your own needs first will begin to redefine how you view relationships. I have seen first-hand how this subtle shift in attention from outward to inward need meeting completely changes how we define partnership. No longer are we seeking partnership to make us feel whole or complete. Instead, we begin to look for a partner who complements our lives and adds to an already fulfilled environment. When we make this shift, the partners we seek are true partners: individuals who celebrate who we are, invite us to embrace life's adventures and support us during times of joy, sadness and all of the moments in between. Likewise, we become that version of a partner for them.
Practical Steps for Balancing Love and Independence
If you are someone seeking love in your thirties and redefining your relationship with independence let me gently offer you two things:
Make a list of your needs. Ask yourself what you truly need in life including the most basic needs like are you hydrating enough during the day or getting enough sleep. It might sound foolish but the simple act of attuning to your needs and meeting them creates an environment where we show greater care for our minds, bodies and emotional wellbeing. This act of kindness pays off ten-fold because the more you meet your needs, the less likely you are to bend your boundaries when someone new comes into the picture. As you meet your needs, you may find that making the larger decisions in life like moving away or starting a new job feel more manageable and less scary because you feel called to do it on a deeper level than before. You trust that you can change your life and still be fine in terms of taking care of yourself regardless of what life's circumstances throw at you.
The second thing I would suggest is after you have gotten into a rhythm of meeting your needs regularly and to a degree you feel satisfied with, read the book Calling in the One by Katherine Woodward Thomas. You may read that title and think it's a dating book but I promise you it's not. This book is a masterclass in therapeutic relational work broken up thoughtfully into daily exercises that encourage readers to turn inward. Woodward Thomas, a Marriage and Family Therapist who struggled with relationships herself, created the book as a means to get in touch with what she wanted out of a partner and more importantly, what internally was an obstacle to her achieving that. This book encourages its readers to release the fear we hold about turning inward, confront our relationships with love and the concept of feeling "undeserving of it" and embracing what it looks like to embrace ourselves as whole, independent, inspirational designers of our own lives.
At the end of the day, being the designer of our own lives and finding the right partner to design it with is exactly where love and independence can grow in harmony.
