Written by: Sarah Duff, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
“Why am I always the single one?” I thought as I looked around the room at all the couples, during yet another holiday season dinner where I was the only single gal in the room.
No, I’m not Bridget Jones!
But I am a 43-year-old human who identifies as a woman who didn’t crack the code of how to successfully meet someone, date and navigate being in a healthy loving relationship until I tipped over the hill of 40 (more on my unique pandemic long-distance love story in another article).
And you know what? I hold Disney and the rom coms of the late ’80s and ’90s to be partly responsible for my struggles!! Seriously this is not a joke, I really do!!
There’s the story of the prince on a white horse who rides in and rescues the flawless cartoon woman, or the good old story of a woman who meets a totally unavailable guy (normally the splendid Matthew McConaughey ), works hard to woo him and suddenly he becomes available and they live happily ever after. It was no wonder I was confused and wondered what was wrong with me.
Because out in the real world the men I met were not princes on horses, more like boys on donkeys who couldn’t rescue a kitten from a bush! Giving us the message that we need to be rescued by a man and this is what love looked like, did a complete number on young girls everywhere.
And no amount of wooing ever changed a guy’s mind. The unavailable guys stayed unavailable!
But I say partly responsible because we can’t ever discount the role that our childhood experiences, how we were parented and the relationship dynamics we witnessed, play into how we as adults show up in our romantic (and non-romantic) relationships.
We cannot discount how these factors (Disney included) programmed us to think and act a certain way when it comes to matters of the heart.
If your love life is something you continually struggle with, no matter what you try, then I want to put your mind at rest and let you know that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you.
You simply have a set of conflicting beliefs around what you say you want and what you believe is possible. Possibly a slightly unrealistic or squiffy idea about what real love looks and feels like.
And you are lacking the awareness and skill set you need to succeed in this area of your life.
Disney and rom coms were wrong – successful dating, love and happy relationships don’t just happen. In the real world, they require thought and effort, and the right skills.
To be successful you need to understand how to be a savvy dater. You need to learn how to be in a good relationship with yourself.
You need to learn how to navigate relationships so you can experience a happy, healthy one that feels right and good. You need to learn what real love looks and feels like. You need to learn how to communicate and speak your needs in a positive and constructive way.
You need to learn about love and relationships just like you learnt maths or geography at school, not just assume you know about them already because they’re just a part of life.
But here’s where it goes wrong for most of us.
We only know what we know so we don’t understand the gaps in our knowledge, and that there are things we need to learn.
Thanks to Disney and our own perception of how the world works we have a narrative that loves just happens and if you’re struggling then that must mean that there’s something wrong with you. That compared to everyone else around you, you’re lacking in something.
I’m still aghast that love and relationship education is not on the agenda at school. Amongst all the skills that are taught, it seems to me that this topic should be deemed as one of fundamental importance for the healthy development of young people.
Anyway, I digress.
Healthy, happy relationships don’t happen by accident they require a certain skill set, one that so many of us were never taught.
The good news is, like with any other skill, it can be learnt. No matter what your age, your past experiences, your current narrative about dating and relationships, you can learn a new skill set and completely change the results you experience in your love life.
In the work I do with my clients I refer to this process as learning your inner love code.
Your inner love code is the internal programming that determines:
How you give and receive love
The people and relationships you attract
How you show up in those relationships
The results you experience in your love life.
Put simply, your current love code has been determining your love life results up until this point. So, to change your results you need to change your love code.
As part of this process, you need to decode your current love code (the one responsible for the undesirable results you have been experiencing) and then create a new love code that is based on the skills you need to navigate the path to finding and thriving in love, relationships, and life.
To give you some context of how that might look here are some important areas you need to explore and learn skills around:
Knowing your relationship patterns and attachment style, learning how to control your natural impulses and tendencies when it comes to picking partners and how you behave when you’re in a relationship.
Being aware of your current narratives about love and relationships and learning how to change the ones that are sabotaging your love life results.
Being aware of the masks (not literal!) you wear in love and relationships, learning how to remove them and show up authentically and fully expressed as yourself.
Knowing how and when you self-abandon in relationships, learning how to stay grounded and true to yourself when you meet someone so you can change your pattern of self-abandonment.
Knowing your triggers and wounds, how they feel, when and how they tend to show up. And then learning how to self-soothe and parent yourself, how to manage inner experience and self-regulate.
Understanding what parts of you are driving your bad decisions in dating and love, learning how to make these decisions in a more deliberate and different way from a part of you that has a foundation of self-trust, understanding your high worth and value for simply being you.
In conclusion, dating can be a minefield and finding the relationship you want can be a little bit hit or miss. But getting the outcome you want isn’t going to happen by throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks.
It isn’t going to happen by simply playing a numbers game, taking part in an experiment of trial and error, or sitting with your fingers crossed hoping it will all work out. It needs a strategy, and it needs you to have an inner love code that matches the results you want.
When you have these things in place watch the magic that begins to unfold for you.
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Sarah Duff, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Sarah Duff is a life, dating and relationship coach. After years of repeating the same dating and relationship mistakes. By age, 40 Sarah was sick & tired of being unlucky in love. She decided enough was enough and, she began to dig deep into what was behind her struggles. After cracking her inner love code, she attracted her partner and is now in her first healthy relationship at age 43. She has decided to dedicate her work to helping women crack their inner love code. She doesn’t want other women to struggle in their love life as long as she did. She's the owner of the brand Thrive With Duff, and her clients span the globe. In 2022 she launches a new program dedicated to helping women thrive in love at all stages of their life.
