I Love Being Alone & Single, But I Miss Having A Girlfriend. What Should I Do?

How to determine if it’s best to be single & date & when to seek a long term relationship.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a 32 year old viewer who has been following my work for about 3 years. He’s read 3% Man, 12 times. He’s been single by choice for the past 5 months after breaking up with his girlfriend. He’s successful in his mission and purpose. However, he’s not enjoying being single as much this time around and misses having a girlfriend and companion to spend his life with. He’s torn between casual dating and seeking a long term relationship and asks how to be happy with either consistently. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

Hi, I’m Coach Corey Wayne and this is my Video Coaching Newsletter. And the topic of today’s Newsletter is going to be, “I Love Being Alone & Single, But I Miss Having A Girlfriend. What Should I Do?”

Well, this particular email is from a viewer who’s 32 years old. He’s been following my work for about three years, and he’s read 3% Man about 12 to 15 times already he says. And it looks like basically once a quarter he goes back, goes through The Book again. So he’s a pretty serious student. And so he’s done real well in his dating and relationship life. And so he’s been single for about five months now.

And there were a lot of things that he loved about his ex-girlfriend, but it sounds like he’s the one that ended it because there were other things that he just couldn’t live with. And so it’s interesting. Now he’s getting a little older and his business is doing well, his career is doing well. He’s kicking ass in his mission and his purpose in life. And because I’ve talked about this many times, it’s like when a guy is stable and he’s doing well financially and cash flow is coming in, his revenues are exceeding his expenses, whether he’s an entrepreneur or he works for somebody else, he’s really stable.

He’s got a stable house. Things are going well for him. That’s when a guy is going to be more inclined to be comfortable, to be in a long term relationship with somebody. If he’s struggling, maybe he started a new business or he’s young in his career. He’s changing jobs. He’s moving around. He’s working a lot, he’s unsure of his future. Most guys are going to be more comfortable just kind of having short term, casual hookup, friends with benefits kind of relationships, nothing serious.

And so after he came out of this last relationship, he notices he feels a little different now. And so his question is like, “How can he be happy being single and dating, and or be happy when he’s in a long term relationship?” Because when he’s single and dating, he really enjoys it. He enjoys the company of women, but he also misses having a long term, stable companion. And then when he’s in a long term relationship, he kind of misses the single life. So he’s kind of scratching his head.

He’s unsure of what really to focus on. The one thing we always got to remember is, “What is our outcome?” We got to know what we want. We got to know why we want it, and we have to have emotionally compelling reasons why we want it. And that also includes your personal life. What kind of a relationship do you want? Do you seek? Do you just want to casually date and hang out and have fun and hook up and enjoy the single life?

Are you looking for somebody, or are you more traditional, and looking for somebody to settle down with? Maybe get married, have kids. Or maybe you just want somebody to have children and a family with. You don’t necessarily want to get married and involve the state. You got to figure out again what is it that you really want? What’s most important to you?

And it’s different for everybody depending on what kind of life phase that they’re in. I was just talking to a guy the other day. A very successful guy. He’s older than me, been with the same woman for many decades. His kids are grown and they’re doing well. But he was unhappy in his marriage and his relationship.

And so, he left to start dating and get back into single life after pretty much most of his adult life being with the same woman. And so he had a great run with his ex-wife. They kind of grew apart. Their goals and values are no longer the same, and he’s enjoying his success.

The fact that he’s older now, he can work less, kind of semi-retired. He can date, obviously date younger women that really turned him on, and he kind of feels like he has a new lease on life again. And so it’s different strokes for different folks. My job as a Coach is to help people get what they want, not make their decisions for them. So with that in mind, let’s go through his email and see what his conundrum is.

Viewer Email:

Hi Coach, 

My name is Bob, I’m 32 years old and I’ve been following your work for about 3 years now.  I’ve read 3% Man 12-15 times, listen to it on audiobook about once every 3-6 months and watch your videos almost daily. 

Yeah, it’s like once or twice a year is perfect. Maybe three times a year it just keeps the information fresh. Because you have to remember, if you’re watching TV and traditional movies, you’re consuming propaganda that is going to brainwash you whether you realize it or not. It’s a lot of dysfunctional archetypes in the media, and you got to understand the music and the emotions that elicits in you will emotionally anchor you to oftentimes dysfunctional behaviors that are unnatural and go against what you feel internally.

And so whatever you observe, you participate in. And so if you’re going to continue to consume traditional media. It’s good to continue to go back to The Book from time to time, just because the longer you stay away from The Book, especially over the course of many years, it’s like you kind of go back to sleep in essence, and forget the things that made you so successful. So just keep that in mind. Whatever you observe, you participate in.

You’ve answered two of my emails, both relating to an amazing woman who I am no longer with (my choice) which has led me to these past 5 months of single life in which I’ve been having a lot of doubts regarding what truly makes me “happy” in terms of relationships – being single vs being committed. 

Well, if you’re going to be with one person long term for many years or decades, typically it’s because you want to have a family. You want to have kids, you want to raise children. And raising children is not something that takes a couple of years. It’s at least a 20 year investment. And like, you know, my client I was talking about, because I get this a lot. I have a lot of older guys that were got married when they were young.

They had a good marriage, they had a good family, but, over the decades, they just kind of grew apart. They have different goals, different values, different interests, things that are passionate and interesting to him that he wants to pursue. She has no interest in and vice versa. She has things she wants to do and it’s just sometimes people grow apart. And so again, it goes back to, “What is it you want? Why do you want it?”

And you got to have emotionally compelling reasons why you want something. Because that’s what keeps you committed and pursuing the things that you want in life. So back to our email here. So this guy’s been single for five months, and he’s got a lot of doubts on what makes him happy. And the other thing we got to remember about what is happiness? What causes us to be happy? Well, being successful for one, and success or being successful or feeling like you’re successful is the result of making progress towards your grandest goals and dreams.

And if you don’t feel like you’re making progress, oftentimes it’s hard to have hope and be excited about a compelling future for you. Because when you look around at the evidence of your life, you don’t really see it changing very much. Even though things tend to take forever, life is just painfully slow and how things evolve. And as I talk about in Mastering Yourself, which might be something really good for this guy to read, is that you got to think in terms of decades. Great things take time.

You build a great business, a great life for yourself. You got to figure everything takes ten years. It’s always at least ten years or more before we find out about the future, Elon Musk or Sergey Brin or Larry Page or the Mark Zuckerberg’s of the world, or the YouTube’s of the world for that matter. It’s like we don’t find out about these things until they’ve been around for ten years, but nobody really looks at or sees all the struggling and silence the late nights and continuing to pursue things when it’s still small and most people don’t know about it. Success is not a light switch. It’s a process.

And at the end of the day, the circumstances of our lives and whether we’re happy or not, we either choose to be happy because we assigned good meanings to the things that are going on in our life, or we can choose to be sad and upset and feel hopeless. So again, no matter what happens in your life, You decide what it means to you. You decide, “Hey, that’s good, that’s great.” Or if it’s something that’s bad, that happens, “What’s good about this? What can I learn from this? How can this help me? How can this failure help me to be better next time around?”

And so success is feeling like you’re making progress. And if you feel like you’re making progress in life, it’s much easier to be happy and hopeful because you see things. Even though it’s ever so slowly. You see things slowly changing towards your life, evolving into what it is that you really want. So it’s a process. Success is a process.

So you have to commit to the process of making progress in your life and making success just part of the process of going from where you are, to where you want to be ultimately. And that’s a result of taking action, day in and day out, noticing what’s working, noticing what’s not working, and changing your approach based upon your failures and the things that are still suboptimal. Because success doesn’t come all at once.

It’s real small incremental behaviors, just like applying what’s in 3% Man, it’s slow process, slow success initially, but the more you connect the dots, the more time you spend with The Book, the more time especially you spend practicing and dating and being in relationships, the quicker you’re going to get better at this stuff. And then as you get better at it, then you evolve, you grow, and then new challenges come along. New mountains to climb, come along.

I am an attractive man, run my own businesses, live all over the world, great shape, following my mission etc. and since finding your work, I am able to attract most of the women I like.  

Well, that’s my job as a Coach is to help you get the tools and the wisdom so you can have the successes that you need and to make an intelligent, informed decision. I’m not here to be your priest. I’m not here to make your decisions for you. I’m here to help you get what you want, and it’s up to you to decide whether you want to keep it or not.

For most of my life I had the mentality that I am happy being alone, which is why most of my interactions with women were casual and short lived.

That was your outcome. That’s what you focused on. It wasn’t really on your radar to be in a long term relationship. I mean, really because you’re pretty young. I mean, things didn’t really click for me in my personal life until I was in my early 30s, where I really felt like I got women, I understood women, I was no longer talking to women that were already predisposed to liking me, out of liking me and chasing them out of my life. And I had a lot of suffering and a lot of failures in the decades prior to that.

I enjoyed simply dating beautiful women along the way while I follow my mission. However, after the breakup (she was an amazing woman but there were certain things which I couldn’t get over and ignore about her past as much as I tried), I’ve continued dating very attractive women, some with great personalities, while others were just eye candy, and I can’t help but feeling a void inside that my ex left. 

So it’s clear that he enjoyed the companionship, and especially as you get older and you get more stable, you know? For me, when I was in my 20s, I was moving around a lot. I was changing jobs a lot, went through a bunch of different relationships, obviously got married and divorced in my mid-twenties, spent a lot of time dating after that, and really trying to learn and connect the dots and figure out why the hell it was I had such a hard time keeping the women that I really liked in my life.

And it took time. It took experience to go through that. And as my life became more stable, my business became more stable, and as I got into my early 30s, I started gravitating more towards long term relationships and companions.

I got used to having a loving woman, catering, keeping me company and supporting me, and although I was excited to go back into the single life (and I still do enjoy it), it’s as if my mentality has changed. I feel as if I want a serious long-term companion but at the same time, I believe I might have commitment issues. 

Well, if it didn’t feel right internally, then that’s what really matters. Your feelings really are your truth. Wayne Dyer used to say that, “When you trust in yourself, you’re trusting in the same wisdom that created you.” And my favorite quotes by Steve Jobs was “You got to trust your heart, your curiosity, and your intuition because they somehow already know what you want to become.” And so you ended this previous relationship. It was better than most probably.

It’s probably better than all the other relationships you had, but it wasn’t completely ideal. And that’s ultimately why you ended it, because it just didn’t feel right. As you said, there were things you couldn’t get past and I don’t know what’s in your heart. It’s only you and the creator know what’s in your heart. And so therefore it’s up to you to make the decision. But at the end of the day, if we look at your actions, you did what felt right, but the relationship was on a different level compared to the shorter term relationships you’d had in the past.

And you really started to grow to enjoy the long term companionship of a woman, even though she ultimately wasn’t somebody that you wanted to stay with long term. You stayed with her longer than most. And the other thing is, when you spend a lot of time with somebody and you’re not used to that, and then you end the relationship, you’ve got to remember your whole identity is wrapped up in that relationship.

You wake up together every day. You’re living together. You shower together. You sleep together. You travel together. You eat together. You socialize together. You spend holidays together with friends and family and people you care about. And then all of a sudden you’re no longer in that relationship. And so everything you did, your whole social life, the way your life was structured, what you did day in and day out, the people that you hung out with, you end up having couples that you double date with and spend time with. And then when you’re single again, you’re no longer with that person.

Sometimes people pick sides or whatever, and some relationships go by the wayside because of that. And so it’s a complete radical change to what you got used to. And so that’s why it’s often hard to kind of get back to enjoying the single life, because your whole life revolved around the relationship that you were in, and now you’re no longer in that relationship. It’s like the old Etch A Sketch. It’s just completely wiping the slate clean and starting all over and building something brand new.

I’m not sure if I am even asking the right question, but how do you deal with this indecisiveness, this “void”? How do you know whether you’ll be happier with someone or single?

You got to roll the dice. You got to take the risk. And so what you do know is you have a better idea for what it is that you like and what’s most important to you after being in a relationship. You really do love having a long term companion, and you clearly miss that. And so there were things you got used to that you hadn’t had in previous relationships. This is how you grow. This is how you evolve. This is how you have to experience life in order to decide what it is you like and what it is that you don’t like.

This is part of the process of discovering what’s most important to you, what your goals and what your values ultimately are. And so now you’re gravitating more towards long term companionship and relationship. And typically that leads to the next question is, what about kids? What about family? Do you want to do something like that? And then if you do want to have kids, then you’ve got to, now, going forward, you have to vet the women that you date to be considering, “Is this somebody you want to co-parent with? Do you want her to be the mother of your children?”

And most importantly, “Do you like her family? Do you want her parents to be grandparents to your kids? Do you want her niece, her nieces and nephews, or her cousins to be aunts and uncles to your kids?” So you’re vetting her and you’re vetting her family. And so those are additional considerations that when you were dating casually and just hooking up, that stuff was never really important.

And so what you should be doing is dating and vetting and looking for a long term suitable companion, potentially somebody to have children with that have similar goals, similar values, but whatever was missing or whatever qualities she didn’t have or whatever deal breaker she had that ultimately led to you ending the relationship, you got to make sure that the next girl doesn’t have those things that you don’t want. And does have the things that are really super important to you that may have been missing from this relationship.

But again, this is life. This is the process of life. He had this experience. He learned a lot. He came out of it. And now he’s like, I kind of miss having a long term companion. But it’s much better to be alone than in bad company. Because being in a long term relationship where you have a lot of your needs met, but not all of your needs, you’re still going to be left feeling unfulfilled and like something is missing.

Again, that’s why it’s important. You know, you got to know what you want. You got to know why you want it, and you got to have emotionally compelling reasons why you want what you want. Because that’s the fire and the fuel that gets you to stay committed to what you want and keep taking action even when it looks like it’s not working out or progress is so slow it seems like it’s never going to happen for you.

There are days I love being alone, visiting different cities, different women, different experiences which eliminate the mundane habitual lifestyle. 

Something else you should also focus on is, wouldn’t it be nice if I met a really beautiful, great woman to date and have great sex with, but also a great companion and potentially somebody to co-parent with down the road? And so you should think in terms of that, even though you don’t know when this is going to happen.

It could happen tomorrow. It could happen five years from now. It could happen two years from now. It might happen in six months. But if you’re clear about what it is that you want and you know why you want it, and you have emotionally compelling reasons why you want it, you’ll stay committed and you won’t settle.

You don’t see planes taking off and going, hey, where do we want to go? It’s like before they even take off, they need to know exactly how much fuel that they need to make the trip, how much time it’s going to take and the route they’re going to take, and how the weather patterns along the way are going to affect the route that they take. They know what they want, they know why they want it, and they got a compelling reason how to get there, obviously.

But there’s days I find myself missing the feeling of companionship I shared with my ex. Maybe it’s just a phase, but it bothers me a bit to have this “feeling” of wanting a companion which I never really had before. 

Yeah, it’s called growing up. That’s basically what it is. You grow up and you mature, and you really like having somebody with you for the journey. But 95% of your happiness comes from who you choose to spend your life with. And obviously, the last girl was not completely ideal, but she made you look at life in a different way.

Makes me think that all of the sudden I am not content being by myself. 

Well, that’s a good thing.

And at the same time, I struggle with commitment.

Well, if you’re going to commit, you got to make sure you commit to the right person. And so there’s obviously going to be some level of fear, like, “What happens if I commit to the wrong person? What happens if the next girl comes along who’s just like this last one? And what if I don’t find out soon enough?” So you’re going to have a look. Remember, we’ve got two primary fears.

Fear that we’re not enough. In other words, we don’t have what it takes. And fear that we won’t be loved. But life is dangerous. Life is risky. You got to roll the dice and take the chance on things on not working out. Take the chance on getting your heart broken. But that’s part of the juice of life is rolling the dice and going for it.

And being excited about what opportunities are coming along. And at the end of the day, all long term relationships come from casual hanging out, having fun, and hooking up. Eventually you just come across somebody that you click with so well and they fit into your life so easily. It’s like putting on an old comfortable shoe or a nice glove that fits perfectly.

And at the same time, I struggle with commitment, leaving me in a limbo not knowing what the right path is for me.  How did you figure out what you wanted? How do we get rid of this “void”? 

Well, it’s clear you like beautiful women. You like having a companion. And you like being in a long term relationship. But you’re also fearful of being in a relationship with the wrong kind of woman. And so therefore, you just don’t commit to somebody until it absolutely feels right. And so maybe you made mistakes last time around. Maybe you stayed in the relationship too long. Maybe there were red flags that you ignored.

And then after the relationship ended, you were kicking yourself, thinking, “Man, I should have never got into the relationship with her, or I shouldn’t have stayed as long as I did and put up with things that I put up with.” But you shouldn’t look at what happened as being wrong, it’s what was necessary. Because in order to get from where you are to where you want to be, you got to go through life. You got to have experiences. You got to get beat up a little bit. You got to get your heart broken a little bit.

It’s the only way to figure it out. If you don’t know what you want to do with your life, your mission and purpose, you got to try something that seems interesting. If you do that for a while and it’s not exciting or it’s not what you thought it would be, then try to find something else, potentially that’s more interesting, exciting, and compelling, until you figure out what it is and find something you’re really good at. It’s like life happens when you move. Stagnation happens when you die.

And so I wouldn’t look at what you did as bad or mistakes were made. I mean, because that’s just part of life. You got to give yourself permission to fail and you got to give yourself permission to make mistakes. That’s how we learn and that’s how we get better. And so this is just your process. So don’t freak out about the process.

Be excited about it. You are man enough to recognize that the relationship you were in was suboptimal and you felt you could do better. And so now you’re trying to do better. And so on some level, you’re probably also afraid that the next girl is not going to be as cool, which is a natural fear for anybody to have after they’ve had a breakup after a long term relationship.

I live the life of my dreams so not sure why this feeling came out of nowhere.  Maybe the breakup is still relatively fresh? 

Well that too.

Just hoping you can share some clarity as you have experienced both the married/committed lifestyle and the single life. Thank you for your work, it has truly been life changing. 

Bob

Well, there’s really no reason to be upset or sad or to feel lonely. You should be excited. You had a great experience. You got better. You learned a lot. You learned more what you wanted and what’s most important to you. So again, whatever was missing from your last relationship and whatever qualities you didn’t like about your last partner, those are the things you need to pay attention to. So when you’re vetting for the next person you get into a long term relationship.

You don’t commit to somebody too soon or too prematurely before you really get to vet them properly and get to know them. And so it’s clear you’re looking more long term now. It’s like, also ask yourself like, “What kind of qualities do you want a woman to be a baby mama, potentially?” Because even if you might not be planning on having kids, I mean, most of us like to raw dog it. You might, what happens if you slip one past the goalie? Then what? You got a 20 year commitment at least.

So you have to think about all of these things and take your time. Like Rumi said, “Slow and steady. Like the river that never grows stale. No hurry, no rush.” I think you’re doing great, Dude. You’re beating yourself up unnecessarily. And this is just a process. And your process is going to be a little bit different than mine and everybody else’s that’s watching this. So you should be excited. You should be elated.

You should be optimistic about what the future holds. And continue fine tuning and tweaking your criteria of what you’re looking for in a partner as you continue to date and you continue to learn and you continue to have experiences. So I think it’s great where you’re at, man. I’m excited for you.

I mean, 32 years old, I was connecting the dots at 32. Things were really coming together for me at 32. And so you got the benefit of my Book and all the years of experience you have of following me. And it’s like, the world is your oyster, Dude. Take your time. Enjoy it. Find a way to make your life a masterpiece.

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you’d like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen on any page, and book a coaching session with yours truly. Until next time, I will talk to you soon.