S4E26 - Becoming the Partner You're Looking For

On this episode, I explore the idea of becoming the partner we want to find instead of focusing only on finding the right person.

I talk about what it means to meet ourselves first, how relationships tend to expose the parts of us we haven’t faced, and how alignment with our values changes how we approach connection.

If you’ve ever spent time wondering why relationships keep repeating the same patterns, or questioning whether you’re looking for a partner or looking for stability, this episode is for you.

We hope you enjoy this one.

Transcript

Rethinking The Perfect Partner

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Most people spend a lot of time thinking about the kind of partner they want. But relationships tend to expose the parts of us we haven't faced yet, which raises a useful question. Are you becoming the partner you're hoping to find? Welcome to Points of Failure. I'm your host, Steve Cothrin. On Points of Failure, we explore the quiet ways things break down at work, in relationships, in our own thinking, and what it really means to take responsibility without turning that into self-blame. Through conversations and topical episodes, we look honestly at what went wrong and what comes next. Most of us spend our time focused on finding the right partner. We build these long lists of what we want in someone. We want someone to be who we want them to be, what we want them to provide, what we want them to, how we want them to make us feel. And a lot of energy goes into these checklists, what most people call standards, which in my experience tend to just be preferences. They're not really standards. It's, you know, somebody's height is not a standard. Somebody's income is not a standard. All these lists that we make, and we spend all this energy trying to find the right person for us.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

But I don't think very many of us stop to ask the harder question.

Relationships Magnify What We Bury

Meeting Yourself: Fear And Grief

Avoidance Follows You Forward

Shifting From Preferences To Values

Emotional Availability Starts Within

SPEAKER_02 1:28

Am I becoming the partner that I want to find? When we focus on finding this perfect partner, in air quotes, we usually imagine it's someone who will stabilize things for us, someone who understands us perfectly, someone who gets us, they get my sense of humor, they they just know the things that I want in life, et cetera, someone who won't trigger those core wounds and past traumas, someone who confirms that we're lovable, someone who makes us feel like we're actually worthy of this relationship. The relationship becomes something that is supposed to fix things. We're hoping it will make us feel more lovable. It will make us feel better about ourselves, about our life. We won't feel lonely. But relationships don't fix the things that we bury. Relationships don't fix the things about ourselves that we haven't faced yet. They usually magnify them. Before we try to meet someone else, we have to meet ourselves first. And not the version that we we present, that we put on for other people, the the one that we think everybody will like the most and accept. It's the real person, the real version of ourselves, the one that still has work to do, the one that still has blind spots, still has fears, not this perfect version of ourselves or what we try to make look like we're perfect with our Instagram reels. Meeting yourself means showing up to the things that most people avoid. We have deep-seated fears of, you know, we're all pretty much afraid of rejection and things like that. But it's really not the thing that we're afraid of. I don't think it's the rejection that we're afraid of. I think it's the way that rejection makes us feel that we're afraid of, that we get rejected all the time. How many times have you just randomly applied to a job that you didn't really care about? It was just like, yeah, whatever, I'll see what happens. And then they turn, you know, they turn you down, they go with somebody else. You're not broken up about it. You're not distraught and having to drink yourself to sleep for the next week. You just, okay, cool, whatever, you move on. That's because you're not afraid in that moment of what that rejection will make you feel like. But with relationships, there's this strange tinge that we just can't avoid. That fear of rejection seems to exist no matter how confident we are in ourselves. So you have to meet yourself there, meet that fear, meet your grief. We all have dealt with grief in different ways. And sometimes it is incredibly traumatic, uh, those moments. And you have to meet yourself there. Meet yourself with that grief and allow yourself the time to process and grieve whatever, whatever thing that you lost. It could be anything. It could be a job, a partner, a family member, a friend. Maybe you had to move somewhere or you had to change your environment in some way. There's grief, you have to meet yourself there. We have to, we have to meet our attachment wounds, meet the place where uh the things that we believe for so long begin to unravel, whether we intend we do that ourselves. Sometimes, you know, myself, my past beliefs, I pulled on that thread and began to really look at those things. And so, but sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes, you know, it's not an intentional moment. Sometimes something just kind of hits you and you're like, oh, wait, what? And those things begin to fall apart. You have to meet yourself there. Meet your own superiority in the moments that you feel bigger and better than other people. Meet yourself there. Also, the places where you feel incredibly small, where someone or something makes you feel less than in some way. Meet yourself there as well. You have to show up to these things and you have to meet them honestly. Ask yourself the hard questions, process, feel. This is something that I still struggle with, uh, is being a little too cerebral about my feelings and not allowing myself to just feel them. I want, I think through them, I try to analyze them. Why am I feeling this way? And that's okay to some extent, but I think part of this process of meeting yourself is allowing yourself to be in that moment and not intellectualize all of it. Because if you don't meet these parts of yourself, they don't disappear. They don't just go away. Avoiding the hard conversations with yourself in the same way that you avoid conversations in a relationship or in a job or wherever your situation is, when you avoid things, they just build. They don't disappear, they don't go away, they keep coming back, and they will follow you into your next relationship, and they'll continue to follow you until you meet them and you deal with them. There was a point that I realized something about the way that I was doing this stuff, the it specifically dating, because this episode is about becoming the partner that we're looking for. And I realized uh that the way that I was dating, uh I was doing the same, this thing that I'm talking about. I was constantly trying to, oh, okay, well, how how did, you know, how did this this, you know, how did she make me feel? How did she show up to this date? Or how did, you know, did she text me? Did she put any effort in? It was always about, did that person do something that I expected them to do to meet a standard that I've decided in my head makes them the best partner for me? And I'll I should say again that those standards, quote unquote, were really just preferences most of the time. And until I took time to say to myself, wait a minute, am I this partner? Am I checking these boxes? You know, am I a list of green flags or am I yellow flags, whatever, you know, hopefully not red flags, but I'm sure at points in my life I was a lot of red flags. But I had to take the time to, as I've said, meet myself. I had to sit down and say, okay, what are the things that matter to me? I really hammered down my values. I had to decide what matters to me in my life, with or without a partner, what matters to me? And as I made that list, I had to begin to align myself with those values because you say you value fitness and you eat garbage all day and you don't ever go to the gym or even take walks and exercise of some sort, then you don't really value fitness or health. I had to really ask myself, what do I value? And am I aligned with those things? Former therapist of mine used to say, What do you want? What are you doing? And how's it working for you? And I think that applies here. Once I began to say, okay, am I emotionally available? Am I really emotionally available and work on that? And the first place I had to do that was with myself. I needed to be emotionally available to me. You know, it do I have a what is living these things? Am I honestly aligned with the things that I value? And once I began to work on becoming a person that I could be proud of, a person that if I met myself, I would totally go on a date with myself. So once I started doing that, things began to change. I started looking for women who were aligned with themselves, but with also aligned with my values. And my ability to read people, actually, uh, I got much better at it. But I began to be able to quickly determine: is there an alignment here? Not, you know, are they tall enough or you know, fit enough or this or that or whatever sort of preferential things, but are they aligned with my values? Are they are they aligned with their own values? Can they tell me? You know, can can this woman sitting across from me tell me what she values? And can I see from her life and her story that she lives those values? And once I was able to determine whether we were aligned, whether we wanted the same things, you know, I there was a space in this where I made a lot of overcorrections. And I'm sure that I I probably missed out on some good relationships. Missed out in the sense that I, you know, overcorrected and like, whoa, wait a minute, there may not be alignment here, or whatever it was. And I think some of that also was just a fear, still those fears inside me. Am I making the wrong choice? If I choose to date her, you know, is that the wrong choice? Am I going to find out a year from now that this, that, and the other, and it doesn't work? And then I, you know, I could have dated this other girl, but I didn't, all these things that were just in my head all the time, I really had to calm that noise. I had to silence that noise. Because realistically, if you choose to date someone and you choose that person and you commit to the relationship and it lasts for however long it lasts, and maybe it doesn't last long. Maybe it lasts six months, a year, maybe it lasts five years, and then it ends. That wasn't the wrong choice. That was just a choice, and it took you in a certain direction. And now you take time to do what you've got to do to work through the process and heal and do what you need to do on your own. And then you make different choices, right? We pivot, we correct. And I think that's just what life is. And part of this process is understanding what it is that you want and knowing who you are, being aligned with yourself, meeting yourself first, dating yourself first if you need to, and being able to choose somebody who also chooses themselves. I think that's a key. You know, we're always talking about you hear all this stuff with all these Love is Blind and all these other shows, and all over the Instagrams and the Facebooks and everything, and everybody's always saying, Oh, choose someone that chooses you. Sure. Yeah, I feel like that isn't as profound as it sounds, because obviously, if I tried to date someone who never chose to spend time with me or talk to me, or even worse still chose to spend her time with other guys instead of me, well, that doesn't make for a very good relationship. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to say choose someone who chooses you. Choose someone who chooses themselves. That's what I think is more functional in a healthy relationship. It's not about self-centeredness. They are aligned with themselves and their values that matters. That is someone truly choosing themselves. This creates an alignment with your values, but it also shows, it also allows you to see if they are aligned with your values as well, because they need to be aligned with theirs and yours. So you know who you are, you know what you value, what you can offer, you know what you won't tolerate. And the alignment that you have with yourself changes the way that you approach relationships. This is the difference between searching for someone to I'll say complete you. It's not really the best way to say that, but in a sense, when you're looking for the perfect partner, you kind of are propping that person up as a completion. I want the perfect partner because they'll give me these things as if I can't give them to myself. So we don't want to search for someone to complete us. We build something with another person. So you search for someone who wants to build with you. Because when two people have met themselves first and they value themselves and they're aligned with their values, the relationship changes. It becomes two people who can stand on their own feet deciding to build something with each other. Something else that same therapist used to tell me was that relationships are counterintuitive. And I don't know that they are really counterintuitive, but I think it helped me to understand it this way. The more that we focus on the other person and the relationship, the worse the relationship will be because you'd be so focused on that other person, what they're doing, who they're doing it with, where they are, all these things. And then is the relationship working? Is it not working? Are they giving me this? All these things, you're so focused on them and the relationship that it begins to fall apart, it begins to unravel. But this is the counterintuitive part, if you will. The more that we focus on ourselves, the more I focus on what I need to be doing, what's important to me, what I value, the more I'm focused on being the person that I want to be, that I'm proud to be, the better the relationship will be if my partner's also doing the same thing. So she's focused on herself and all the things that she needs and she's that are important to her, her values, et cetera. We're focused on ourselves. Eventually, we're building a solid relationship. It takes time, and there are things that you do have to commit to being in the relationship. So don't hear me say, just focus on you, and then everything's great. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying focus on the things that matter about yourself and being who you need to be, and let the other person do what they need to do and meet in the middle. The goal is not to find a perfect partner. The goal is to find someone who is capable of partnership. But before you can do that, you have to become someone who is capable of partnership. And then the two of you meet, and hey, but that process starts with something that most people avoid, and that's what I've been talking about.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Meeting yourself first.

SPEAKER_02 15:36

You have to show up in life, not just to your job, not just to your friendships, not just to the relationships, but you also have to show up to yourself, and you have to show up for yourself. And like I said, I'll repeat these because I think they matter. Show up to your fears, show up to grief, show up to the attachment wounds, show up to your beliefs, and the way they change, the way they fall apart, show up to the places where you feel better, where you feel self-righteous, show up to the places where you feel small.

Reading For Alignment, Not Ideals

SPEAKER_00 16:10

You meet yourself first, and then you can meet the world. And that is integration. So, as always, I will leave you with this. What kind of person are you willing to be if nothing is guaranteed?

SPEAKER_02 16:30

Be honest about what's happening, take responsibility for your part, and don't let pain turn you into something smaller than you are. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on Points of Failure.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

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