Why It Is Always Better To Be A Hopeful Romantic
Life is better when you stay hopeful.
When you are constantly told by people not to get your hopes up or to lower your expectations in dating, it’s hard not to get to the point where you want to scream — be it internally or to their face.
“You need to be more realistic…”
“You need to tone it down a bit…”
“You’re on too many dating apps…”
If I had a dollar for every time someone gave me unsolicited (and, frankly, useless) dating advice throughout my life, I could buy top-grade noise-cancelling headphones to drown them out completely.
Because it’s one thing to offer constructive advice and help guide someone in a direction that will lead them to more success in their dating life, and it’s another to basically say, “You’re doing it wrong,” and leave it at that.
Even if there is some truth or good intentions weaved into their advice, it just becomes exhausting and irritating to hear over time. You can be doing everything right, but just because you haven’t found the right match yet everyone pokes and prods at your dating life like some middle school science experiment.
I’ve been told that I would never find something serious on a dating app, and I’ve been scolded for seeking more casual relationships on dating apps by the same people. I’ve been told that I would never find a “good girl” at a bar, and I’ve been chastised for driving 45 minutes to meet someone for dinner on a first date by the same people.
It’s enough to make someone hopeless in their pursuit of love. It certainly did for me.
And then someone said the five words that changed my entire outlook on life: “You are a hopeful romantic.” Ironically, that person was my now-ex-girlfriend and is now a close friend.
I had never heard the term “hopeful romantic” before, despite writing about love, dating and relationships for years. I always considered myself a “hopeless romantic” because I never thought there was an alternative. I quickly realized how significant of a difference that one word can make.
When you call yourself a hopeless romantic, you are putting yourself under a negative light. What starts off as a playful joke about being unlucky in love can morph into a toxic state of mind where you start to believe you are actually hopeless and will never find love.
Every awful first date, every text message that doesn’t receive a response, and every break-up chips away at you a little more each time. Experience enough of them and you’re bound to ask yourself, “How much longer can I keep this up?” It’s not unreasonable to believe your emotional tether has a finite amount of wear, and that it is eventually bound to snap if things remain the way they have for what seems like an eternity.
But when you embrace the title of a hopeful romantic, it changes everything.
When you start looking at potential partners as someone who will add happiness to your life instead of being the cause of it, you build confidence within yourself. When you start to believe that someone would be just as lucky to have you in their life as you would be to have them in yours, you add value to yourself. And when you accept that being single is not a burden, it opens a world of possibilities for your dating life.
When you say you are a “hopeful” romantic, you are suddenly validated in your quest to find lifelong love and happiness with a partner — not shamelessly bashed for being on another dating app or going on another first date. By saying you are a hopeful romantic you are saying, “I’m hopeful someone comes along, but until then I’m doing just fine on my own.”
I considered myself a hopeless romantic for the better part of three decades, and had nothing to show for it other than a number of failed relationships that never lasted more than three months, a mountain of dinner receipts, a slew of contacts in my phone with flames and bees next to their names so that I tell which dating app we matched on, and more tough love from my friends than I could probably endure.
By embracing the mindset of a hopeful romantic, it led me to the woman who is now my fiancée. We’ve been together two years, and it has been everything I had ever believed a healthy and successful relationship should be. It honestly makes me wish I had believed in being a hopeful romantic sooner.
For all the lessons I’ve learned when it comes to dating, one of the most important is this: Life is better when you stay hopeful.
