You’ve finally realized that romantic love is not the end-all-be-all of your existence. It is no longer your top priority, most unrelenting obsession, or deepest interest. You are not solely invested in finding someone else to give you the attention and respect and admiration you now know how to give yourself.
You’re starting to focus on the love you can give, not the love you can get. You want to love someone as much as you want to be loved; you’re going into your relationships with the mindset of “what can I offer?” as opposed to “What can I get?”
You’ve taken enough time to work on yourself. You don’t have to be perfect to be loved, but for a relationship to work, if not thrive, you need to have any real crippling emotional issues at least addressed beforehand.
You’re hurt, not devastated, over your last breakup. If you didn’t mourn the loss of someone in your life you wouldn’t be sane, but when it gets to the point of utter devastation, it’s usually a signal that you were unhealthily attached, not actually in love.
You want a relationship, but not desperately so. Yes, you want to date, and yes, you do want to maybe find someone you can commit to, but you aren’t broken or reeling if this isn’t the case. You still have a life to run outside of your romantic interests.
You’ve let go of the idea that you can predict, or measure, whether or not someone is “right” for you. You’ve tossed the “checklist” out the window, and are starting to focus more on who you connect with as opposed to who appears to be the most “right.”
You don’t feel the need to rush. You aren’t attached to the timeline anymore; you realize that the need to rush into things is usually a product of insecurity and fear rather than passion and love.
You believe there is love out there for you. If you don’t think it’s there, it won’t be. You simply won’t open your mind or heart to the friend of a friend you get set up with, or the person sitting next to you at the bar. It all begins with how you *think* about your love life, and the most important thing is that you believe you’re going to have one.
You’re choosing to be yourself more than you’re trying to be someone else’s ideal. You’re at the point where convincing someone that they love you for someone you’re not is scarier than being rejected for who you really are.
10. You’d all but given up. You were just at the point where you thought you’d never find love again, and that you’d have to be alone forever – and you more or less accepted this, to a degree. It’s always when we’re most inclined to throw our hands up that the thing we’ve been waiting for walks through the door.
