I can completely relate to how you’ve been feeling, because the feeling that I need a relationship has directed many decisions and a lot of my energy over the past year, and it’s only with the help of tinybuddha that I’ve started to realise that feelings of lack and loneliness are coming from inside and need to be addressed there before a beautiful and loving relationship can be found. Maybe the first place to start is with loving yourself?

You could start with accepting that you’re allowed to feel beautiful. Perhaps if you let yourself feel beautiful and believe yourself to be beautiful, it will add to feelings of contentment that you sometimes have. Being your own friend means looking in the mirror and saying ‘hey, you look pretty today, and it’s going to be a lovely day’. If you cultivate that kind of practice of self-love, it will help your self-esteem grow, gently bit by bit. And it’ll also make you more receptive to relationships that help cultivate love, both self-love and other-love, in a mutual way.

Another thing is that, it’s ok to think about love and finding a soulmate or boyfriend a lot. It’d probably help not to beat yourself up about that, because it’s a preoccupation almost everybody experiences quite a lot of the time! 🙂

Being happy with yourself and being keen to love yourself is probably one of the best gifts you can give to yourself and to a future partner, because it would help them to love you well too. So maybe just try reframing what you’re feeling this way? 🙂

These are tiny buddha posts you might already have read but that seem helpful to this:

The Surprisingly Simple Secret to High Self-Esteem

How to Love Your Authentic Self

Amp Up Your Self-Love: 7 Tools to Feel Great about Yourself

Good luck and much love

How is it going? I’m feeling the same way Stephanie, are you still experiencing this? I wonder if it’s hindering my experiences by me making the issue important and making interactions stressful because the possible failure is heightened by the importance.

PS. The pleasure that we get from sex strokes out catecholamines (dopamine, serotonin, norephinephrine, etc).  We can mistake the pleasure of another’s sexual company for something going on in our soul, when in reality it’s just something going on in our brain.  If one feels deficient in regular life but especially wonderful from another’s attention then that’s probably what it is. Finding a balance to ones own brain chemistry would be a healthier means to accomplish a sustainable lifestyle. Nothing is more unpredictable that another person and relying upon someone else to feel good is the sure way to not feel good. A couple great drugs that don’t fuck up ones sex life include buspirone and selegiline. Proper use of them can increase serotonin and dopamine levels without the lows of other drugs. Check them out. Self work first.