How to stay positive when dating feels like the worst.

I was asked a brilliant question this week.

"How do I stay hopeful when dating just feels like years of disappointment?" Honestly? I think every woman who has been single for a while has asked herself some version of this.

👉 How do I keep believing it'll happen?

👉 How do I get excited about dating when I feel completely burnt out?

👉 How do I stop feeling like everyone else has found their person except me?

I know exactly how that feels because I spent years there myself.

I wasn't one of those people who always seemed to have someone on the go. Love never felt easy to me. It felt like hard work. I spent years swiping, going on dates and wondering what on earth I was doing wrong. At one point I'd seen the same men on the apps so many times I was convinced I'd genuinely run out of people to date in London.

I googled everything. I read every book. I asked the universe for signs.

And, slightly more embarrassingly, I even asked my friends' boyfriends when they thought I'd meet someone. (Don't do that by the way. They have absolutely no idea.)

What I didn't realise at the time was that the problem wasn't feeling disappointed.

Of course you're going to feel disappointed sometimes. Dating can be frustrating. It can be exhausting. Sometimes you need to throw your phone across the room, delete the apps for a month and announce to your group chat that you're joining a nunnery. 

All perfectly acceptable.

The problem comes when disappointment stops being a feeling and starts becoming your identity.

You become "the single friend."

You tell yourself that relationships just don't happen for people like you.

You decide all the good ones are taken.

You start believing love is for everyone else.

Eventually, you stop questioning those thoughts because they become your truth.

The stories we tell ourselves matter.

Not because pretending everything is wonderful magically brings you a relationship, but because those stories quietly shape the way you date.

They affect who you choose, what you tolerate, whether you put yourself out there and how much hope you allow yourself to have.

One of the biggest shifts I made was learning that I could protect my hope without pretending dating was always fun.

I could acknowledge that I was tired without deciding that love wasn't going to happen.

Those are two very different things.

If this resonates, I've got an old YouTube video that I still absolutely love. It walks you through five practical ways to stay hopeful when dating feels like the last thing you want to be doing.

It's one of those videos that's a few years old now, but the advice is just as relevant today.

C x