Contents
- 1. “You will not be alone. Just look around and start looking.”
- 2. “Your standards are too high, try lowering the bar.”
- 3. “Don’t bother with online dating! Live your life, and the meeting will happen by itself.
- 4. “You only need to look for a soul mate. Stop wasting time on everyone and everyone.”
- 5. “Maybe you’ll have better luck if you change your image?”
- 6. “You always choose the wrong ones…”
Breakups are almost always accompanied by a lot of stress. When a close friend is going through a difficult breakup, we naturally want to help, support, and alleviate their suffering. But you need to be careful when expressing sympathy – there are words that should not be spoken.
1. “You will not be alone. Just look around and start looking.”
First, your friend may not be in need of a new relationship at the moment. Secondly, it is possible that he is already doing something in this direction – you just don’t know it yet. He keeps it a secret for the time being. You still don’t know how many times he went on a date with a pretty colleague from the next department, or how many new dating apps he downloaded to his smartphone. Then deleted. And uploaded again…
Trust a friend to be in control, says Isaiah McKimmie, a Melbourne-based sexologist and family therapist.
“Your Lonely Friend may have been on these terrible blind dates more than once, and it is possible that some of them have failed completely.
He was introduced to “friends of mutual friends” and “mother’s friend’s daughter.” All in vain. In such a situation, it is not surprising to lose confidence in yourself. Sometimes people need time to take a break from active searching and just relax. Don’t burden your friend and don’t push.”
2. “Your standards are too high, try lowering the bar.”
Everything we call “high standards” has its reasons. Sometimes they lie in his former union, when a friend, for example, financially pulled the whole family. Hence his desire now to see a financially equal partner next to him. Each of us has a unique experience. What would make one person unhappy (for example, marriage without children) may not be significant for another. Honesty is always valued in any relationship.
The main idea in online dating is that the wider their circle, the easier and more natural the meetings are.
“When you advise your lonely friend to lower the bar, you unwittingly invite him to give up his inner goals and needs,” says Danielle Kiper, a psychotherapist from Chicago. – In order for his new union to be happy and harmonious, such an approach – to lower standards, to close one’s eyes to too much – is wrong and is unlikely to bring happiness.
It is very important not to lose yourself in the end, even if you really want to find a new partner.”
3. “Don’t bother with online dating! Live your life, and the meeting will happen by itself.
Of course, this advice is given with the best of intentions, like all the previous ones. But he’s already outdated.
Why not combine the expectation of a pleasant meeting with modern ways of finding a partner for your single friend or girlfriend? For example, you can sign up for a cooking class and meet a nice gourmet who knows how to cook chicken in wine. And at the same time download the application and register on the dating site.
The main idea in dating is that the wider and more diverse their circle is, the easier and more natural the meetings are. In addition, statistics provide convincing evidence. If at the age of 20 people easily get to know each other in real life due to their mobility, then after 30 years the chance of finding the other half is increased through the Internet. This is our current reality, and we must use all its advantages.
“I don’t see anything wrong with dating sites,” says Susan Gadua, family therapist and author of a new book, Marriage for Skeptics, Realists, and Rebels: I’m Agreed in a New Way. “On these sites, we get access to a huge database with almost no effort. A lot of people will know about you.
Even 20 years ago, this was impossible. So your lonely friend needs to use modern technology to improve his personal life!”
4. “You only need to look for a soul mate. Stop wasting time on everyone and everyone.”
It’s very hard to get someone to change their core beliefs and go from “shirt-boy” to monogamous and couch potato, says Tom Murray, a family therapist in Greensboro. There are adherents of the theory of two halves who are ready to wait for their only (th) all their lives, refusing to meet with others, and there are those who meet each new person with an open mind. It is better to invite your lonely friend not to wait until he meets the embodiment of the ideal, but in each of the new acquaintances to pay attention to those basic qualities that are important to him: kindness and honesty or audacity and determination.
5. “Maybe you’ll have better luck if you change your image?”
Even if you think your friend looks ridiculous in their clothes or hair, don’t insist that they change their style just to fit your idea of them. He’s comfortable like that, period.
6. “You always choose the wrong ones…”
This is a brilliant phrase! Indeed, if a friend chose “those”, he would not be alone. There may be deep psychological reasons why a person chooses people of the same type.
“Something makes him repeat the same scenario, and if you don’t look into it and just start a relationship with a radically different type of partner, this will not solve the problem. Here, the help of a specialist who is impartial and able to delicately convey the essence and outline a plan for how to effectively begin to work on oneself would be very useful, ”says family therapist Isaiah McKimmie.
The best thing you can do for a lonely friend is to listen silently and carefully, and then say: “Everything will be fine, you’ll see! I believe in you”.