Dating : A Marriage Therapist Teaches You How To Find Your Soulmate

Hi, my name is Derrick Javan Hoard, and I am a licensed marriage and family therapist. Are you afraid of being alone? Are you tired of swiping left and right endlessly on dating apps, only to end up with the same type of person in the same kind of unfulfilling and dramatic relationship that ends just as quickly as it began?

Today, I am going to teach you how to find your soul mate. All I need is five minutes of your attention. Be Honest, you’ve spent more than that swiping today. I promise to show you how to find a genuine connection.

Step 1
Remember how I asked if you were afraid to be alone? Well, that’s not enough. In order to find your soul-mate, you need to be downright terrified of it. The fear of being alone needs to be so present in your life that you unconsciously make decisions based on it. Doing things like “obsessively reading articles that promise to show you how to find a genuine connection”, “feeling an impulse to close said articles when the information hits too close to home”, or “being unable to remember the last time you went to the movies, shopping, or dinner alone” are all pretty good indicators. Some would say this fear is unhelpful and might even be potentially damaging in a relationship. Not with your soul-mate. The fear is what starts you looking in the first place! It helps you overlook your soul-mates minor personality quirks such as “having no opinion on anything,” “having an opinion on everything,” or being “eerie similarity to your last 3 dates”. Without this fear, you might begin to think about and be intentional in your search for a partner. As you will see in Step 3, this is a grave error to make.

Step One is, “Be Terrified of Being Alone. “

Step 2
To find your perfect opposite who will help you solve all your problems, bring you happiness, and love you as you have never loved yourself. You have to believe that you are unloveable. If you’ve ever thought “I’m not *insert physical/emotional characteristic* enough,” “There must be something wrong with me,” or “I wish I could find someone who would just accept me as I am” you are halfway there. When you believe that, not only are these thoughts an accurate representation of yourself not at all distorted by childhood trauma and social conditioning, but they are also the reason that you are single you will have created a context where implicitly you are undeserving of Love. This will generate a chasm of emotional pain deep within you. An abyss that will be filled by the “basic human decency,” shown by your soul-mate. Without this reference point, your soul-mates behaviors would come off as things any reasonable person would do to show even a passing interest in another.

Step Two is “Believe That You Are Unloveable”

Step 3
Equipped with a debilitating fear of loneliness and an unshakeable belief that you are unloveable, you are now ready to begin the process of finding your soul-mate. Finding a soul-mate isn’t something that involves logical consideration, conscious intention, or a discussion about your expectations, needs, and wants in a relationship. It is about only your feelings. Relying on your feelings assists you in unconsciously seeking partners that allow you to replay dysfunctional familiar childhood patterns. Your swiping habits need to reflect this unconscious desire. Swiping behaviors that increase the possibility of matching with your soul-mate include, but are not limited to: “Swiping right on people you think are more attractive than you and that you would be lucky to go on a date with”, “Ignoring bio’s”, “drunk swiping”, and “paying for Tinder Gold”. Engaging in all these behaviors at once significantly increases your chance at a genuine connection.

Step Three is “Swipe Based On an Unconscious Desire to Replay Familial Patterns”

And That’s it. I don’t mean to bring logic into it and mathematically speaking someone is going to swipe right on you, especially when so many are following their own soul-mate plan. When you do meet them, limerance and habitual patterns of interaction will do the rest. Imagine it. You will both meet up for your first date and be taken aback by just how gorgeous each other is and how lucky you are to be on a date with them. You will both do the usual small talk, and because you both like to overshare, to quell the emotional chasm, you will slip-up and say insecurity you have about yourself. “I feel like I look like terrible,” “I always say something stupid” To which one of you will respond, “You look great,” “I think you’re funny.” You will feel an instant connection. You aren’t simply both experiencing validation of your selves from each other, validation you received little to none of as a child. It is “Chemistry” As you continue this dance of sharing insecurities and validating each other you will notice that it seems time has stopped, your heart will be racing, you will be flooded so many emotions, you will think so many thoughts but underlying them is this “Here is someone who finally accepts me in a way I don’t accept myself”. That’s when you know you’ve found them. Your Soul-mate. The conversation will be amazing, the sex will be amazing, the relationship will be so perfect that you never even have to talk about it.

“Well Derrick, I feel like I have been through that before and the relationship didn’t end well. What did I do wrong?.”

I followed this plan flawlessly, even before dating apps. I met my soul-mate in an abnormal psychology class. It wasn’t just some objectively arbitrary, statistically likely, and routine situation to meet someone that I gave more significance because it was tangentially related to my degree. It was fate. We were married for eight years, four of which I think we both experienced something which could be called circumstantial happiness, which because of our shared fear of being alone, was better than actually being alone. Over time, it became apparent that we weren’t able to just anticipate each other’s needs. For us to solve our problems, we would actually need to talk. Something that seemed strange for people who married each other a year after we met because “we just knew what each other was thinking”. We had this beautiful dance of pursuing and withdrawing. It was based on our shared fear of being unloveable. We each took turns pushing each other away because we both felt each other would leave first. When one of us thought the other emotionally withdrawing, the other began emotionally pursuing in an endless self-reinforcing cycle. This may happen sometimes, and it doesn’t mean that you need to completely re-evaluate your approach to not only the way you view relationships, but ultimately the way that you see yourself, it just means you didn’t find the right one. Just remember whether its eight years or eight days, these relationships always end just as quickly as they began. Don’t give up on the idea of your soul-mate, “The Love of Your Life”, or finding “someone who can love and accept you just the way you are”, they could always just be one bathroom selfie away.