You Won’t Find A Secure Relationship on Hope Alone, Make Love Your Purpose
A Guide To Living With Love In Mind
If you’re reading this, then the idea that you can have a secure relationship with someone who cares about you — and you, them — might feel like a faraway fantasy rather than a tangible reality you’ll ever experience.
You just don’t see it for yourself, and even if you did, your past tells you otherwise through a long list of failed situationships/relationships marred with insecurity.
On some deeper level, you sense your destiny is to always come last: to want the ones who don’t want you, or to sabotage relationships with the ones that do.
You live on hope and fantasy as a result. You hope the right person will come your way, and you hope that you won’t mess up this time. If you’re trapped in a dynamic with someone who treats you unfairly, you hope they’ll treat you well.
This hope will only get you so far. Hope is pure, but without action, it’s intangible.
You need to make love your purpose.
The Difference Between Hope and Purpose and Why It Matters
Mere hope without action keeps us stuck. Life is left to chance: We wait for the right person to come our way, and we hope people will change, and yet things stay the same.
If you were modelled insecure types of love growing up, this may be because you have self-defense mechanisms and bad habits rooted in fears of intimacy or rejection. Without conscious awareness, you’ll act these out, sabotaging good relationships or attracting the same types of people.
If we identify that we hope to love and be loved, then making it our purpose ties that wish to reality and allows us to think of secure, healthy love as something we can work towards — not just a universal fate that will or won’t befall us.
I say this as someone who has lived on hope before. Hope can be a good procrastinating agent and an illusionist when it paints us false promises.
When you make finding and sustaining healthy love your goal, you’ll be aware that there are things you need to do to turn your fate into reality.
Once we see that hope without action keeps us waiting, the natural question becomes: what does action — or purpose — look like in practice?
What Living Purposefully In Love Looks Like
Recently, I’ve been reading Nathaniel Branden’s 6 Pillars of Self-Esteem, and pillar no.5 is living with purpose.
He mentions a couple of things as key to living purposefully, whatever your goal, and I’ll reference these with a desire for healthier relationships in mind.
“To live purposefully is to be productive in your pursuit”: Productive purpose means to have a goal that we work actively towards. For example, there was a time I was afraid to state my needs. If someone appeared disinterested, I’d hope they’d come around. I’d wait for replies, I’d imagine alternative realities where things were good. I was unproductive in my pursuit of love because I was afraid to take action and set boundaries. In this example, being productive means working to understand why you struggle to speak up and ask for what you want, and, from there, to begin setting healthy boundaries.
“To live purposefully is to be self-disciplined”: It can be uncomfortable to start asserting your worth. It means saying you want more, and accepting that some people will walk away. This is unlikely to feel good in real-time. Setting boundaries can be anxiety-inducing, and letting people go who you care for but aren’t able to meet your needs can be painful. Discipline is what will keep you productive in your pursuit of more. It’s discipline that allows you to close doors so that others open. Discipline will carry you through this period of growth.
“To live purposefully is to be self-responsible”: Taking responsibility for your role in your relationships, and how successful or unsuccessful they are, is essential. Yes, there are things outside of our control: We can’t make people like us, and some people may mistreat us no matter how diligent we are in the dating process. People unravel over time. Still, we can practice self-responsibility: Who are you letting in? Why are you letting them in? Is this rooted in a genuine attraction or insecurity? When the red flags start showing, do you take notice? All this, and more, matters.
Living purposefully means turning your hope into a reality you can work towards. I don’t want to oversimplify this work because it’s hard work.
Living on hope is easier, which is probably why we do it!
Final Thoughts
All the things I’m talking about here: Being productive, self-responsible, and self-disciplined, all tie back to the whole point of Nathaniel’s book: Self-Esteem.
Low self-esteem is what keeps us stuck in unhealthy patterns of love. It’s also what stops us from turning our hopes into reality.
That said, when I say love is our purpose, I don’t mean we tie our worth to whether someone likes us or not, or how successful a relationship is, or isn’t.
The target of this work is YOU, and you’ll be amazed at how the Universe reorients itself in line with your desires when you cultivate a healthy, nurturing relationship with yourself.
Thank you for reading this article today. I write several times a week on topics relating to personal growth and relationships.