How To Date For Your Soulmate: 6 Keys To Finding The One
Tired of endlessly swiping and feeling like your opportunity for lasting love is passing you by? Dating can be frustrating but there is a strategy for dating that increases your odds of finding the one for you. Changing your mindset and approach to dating is the key to date for your soulmate, end dating burnout, and make no date a waste.
Most people haven’t thought about their strategies for dating. They use the same approach they started with as a teenager hoping to stumble into an ideal mate for life. Dating ends up like playing darts blindfolded. If you’re lucky, you’ll hit the dartboard and only the luckiest hit the bullseye and end up with their soulmate.
Leaving your love life to chance relies on magical thinking like, “Love happens when you least expect it,” or “With the right person, it’ll always be easy.”
Taking an intentional approach to love may appear as unromantic. As if there’s something wrong with approaching dating the same way you’d approach changing your career or becoming healthy and fit. Instead, you’re convinced you should stop trying so hard, and that when you stop trying you’ll somehow magically find the one.
The fantasy that you’re supposed to just bump into the love of your life at the supermarket or Starbucks may make you feel inadequate and doubt you’ll ever find the one. It’s time for a mindset shift to change your results and uplevel your dating game.
Everything worth having in life requires a skillset along with practice and being intentional. Adopting a deliberate strategy allows you to leverage your opportunities and increase your chances of achieving long-lasting love.
Living the rest of your life with the love of your life is one of the most worthwhile goals you could ever set.
Accidental Dating Leads To Frustration And Heartbreak
The dating habits you’ve cobbled together may have you stuck in a pattern of short-term relationships or being perpetually single. The most common mistakes lead to more frustration and heartbreak. These typical strategies include:
- Rushing into exclusivity with a stranger.
- Relying too much on attraction and chemistry and ignoring possible red flags.
- Being so particular that no one measures up to your standards.
- Being so easygoing and setting your needs aside.
- Fear of being scammed leaving your heart closed off.
- Putting little effort into how you present yourself online.
- Treating your dates like job interviews.
- Looking for your soulmate in an online profile.
- Putting your self-esteem and lovability in the hands of a stranger.
- Creating an extensive list of the qualities and rejecting anyone who doesn’t match up from the start.
You can avoid these common dating pitfalls and date for your soulmate by upgrading your dating strategies.
Our Dating To Discover™ formula embraces slow love allowing your focus to be on yourself first. This approach gives you a ton of useful information about yourself and speeds up the journey to finding the one.
Rather than wondering if the person you’ve just met is your soulmate, you stop looking for an instant connection. Focusing on yourself, you can quickly discover your hidden blocks to love, end dating burnout, and short-term relationships that don’t pan out.
Using dating as an opportunity to discover about yourself first allows you to reap the benefits of dating as a process and accelerate the time it takes to find your soulmate.
You’ll stop wasting time with people who aren’t a good match for you long-term. If you want to date for your soulmate, identify and break your negative patterns once and for all.
Date For Your Soulmate: 6 Keys To Finding The One
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Go on A LOT of dates!
Exactly how many dates you need to go on is not a specific number, however, it’s essential you gather enough data by going on dates with multiple people.
Stop combing through profiles looking for reasons to say “No” to a date with someone. Look for reasons to say, “Yes” to a date instead.
Don’t create barriers to meeting new people. Every person you meet presents the opportunity to learn more about yourself.
Gather as much data from the dating lab as you can. The more information you’re able to gather about your habitual thought patterns, emotional triggers, and limiting beliefs, the more ways you can adjust your approach to finding the one for you.
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Focus On Self-Discovery First
It doesn’t matter how much self-growth work you’ve already done, or how much therapy, or how many relationships you’ve had. Whether you are thirty or seventy years old, your age doesn’t matter. The discovery process is rich with information regarding your current blocks to love.
Resist the urge to evaluate if the person is a match for you or not until after 5 to 6 dates. Instead, put the focus on you and see what you can discover about yourself through the dating process.
Use dates to practice good communication skills by being authentic. Are you more relaxed when you don’t find your date attractive? What’s different about your behavior and your inner dialog when you find your date hot?
When you find a date attractive do you start looking for clues about what they like so you can adjust accordingly to win their affection and approval?
Do you go along or agree with what they say even if you disagree, just to keep the peace and hope they like you?
Twisting into a pretzel to earn love from someone is not a good strategy for lasting love. Eventually, you’re going to get tired of your own needs and wants not being met and you’ll grow angry and resentful.
Instead, start tracking your emotions and your behaviors on your dates. Notice the difference in yourself when you find a date attractive vs. when you didn’t.
This will give you important insights into your own emotional and behavioral patterns and your hidden blocks to love.
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Attraction Is NOT A Requirement For A Date
Chemistry and attraction are a requirement for a relationship, but not at all for a date. It’s just a date! You’re not committing to spending your life with this person.
To truly put yourself in the dating lab you’ll need to collect data on your dating strategies and behaviors through many different experiences with a lot of different people.
Going on a date with someone you’re not attracted to is how you’ll make some of your best discoveries that will lead you to your soulmate.
We’re not suggesting you get into a committed relationship with someone you don’t find attractive — quite the opposite. Don’t settle for less than you desire, but a date is only an hour or two out of your life.
Also, when you release the need to find attraction before going on a date you’ll find more people to date. This allows you to evaluate yourself and your dates from an entirely new perspective — one that leads you to select a match for long-term satisfaction and commitment over time.
When you’re not attracted to your date, you don’t have a lot at stake or high expectations it will lead anywhere. This gives you the opportunity to be authentic and to simply be unapologetically you.
When you date for your soulmate, the goal of dating is finding the person who wants to be in a relationship with you, not just some companionship that is convenient right now. This is how you find the one who gets you, who claims you, and who ultimately stands by you no matter what.
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Delay Exclusivity
If you’ve been using your dates to investigate your strategies and practice being authentic, then you can evaluate if the person is a good match for you after date 5 or 6.
This doesn’t mean that you’re ready to get into an exclusive relationship just yet.
Be careful that you don’t rush into a commitment too early and take yourself off the market. Anyone who wants to be exclusive with you will patiently wait for you to be ready to commit. If they don’t wait for you, then they’re not a good match for you anyway.
Putting off exclusivity allows you to evaluate your dates for who they really are instead of through the rose-colored glasses of excitement. Never give a stranger the benefit of the doubt.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is they Date Backwards™. They give the benefit of the doubt to a stranger and then once they’re in a committed relationship, they take off their rose-colored glasses only to find fault and disappointment with their partner.
It’s only after you’ve pledged to share your life with someone that they’ve actually earned the benefit of the doubt. Extending grace with your soulmate is a skill that’s required for love to last and stand the test of time.
So, to date for your soulmate, date without the rose-colored glasses, and set them aside for later on when the agreement to share the rest of your lives together has already been secured.
Additionally, putting off exclusivity means you’ll no longer have a bunch of short-term relationships. This speeds up the process of finding the one through the dating process. You’ll date multiple people for a longer period of time and only go off the market for the person who has made efforts to win your heart.
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Lean Into Uncomfortable Conversations
Utilizing the dating process to discover about yourself first, you’ll uncover things you never considered before like the vision of your ideal relationship and how it functions.
How do you feel when you spend time with this person?
How do the two of you navigate miscommunication or disagreements?
How do they respond to you when you’ve been triggered, or upset?
How do the two of you reconnect and repair after there’s been a dispute?
Are they accommodating or demanding?
Your answers to these questions are the important foundation for the vision that guides you to finding the one. This roadmap is more revealing of your lasting partnership than looking for someone who enjoys the same kinds of music and hobbies as you. Just because someone is easygoing and easy to get along with doesn’t mean they’re your person.
Don’t shy away from uncomfortable conversations throughout the dating process. You’ll learn more about yourself and the potential of your date when you can risk and speak up about what’s important to you.
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Look For Someone Who Is A Match To Your Values.
Connecting with someone who has the same values as you makes that person a candidate for a long-term match.
Through the dating process, notice where your date spends their resources: time, energy, and money. This reveals to you what they truly value in life.
It’s not possible to have a conversation with someone about their values. The reason a conversation about values is useless is because, for example, no one will tell you they don’t value honesty. Values are something you discover as you spend quality time with them.
There will always be challenges in life (whether you’re in a partnership or not). Life will throw you curveballs. Having shared values creates longevity in an intimate relationship. You can always find your way back to each other no matter the challenge because you both have the same priorities.
Ultimately, when you date for your soulmate the dating process is a selection process and it’s just as important to know who to deselect as it is to select.
Dating with these strategies will invigorate your dating life because you’ll never waste time on short-term dead-end relationships that send you back to the dating pool over and over again.
If you’re looking for a complete guide to transform you approach to dating and mating, reorder our debut book: GETTING IT RIGHT THIS TIME: Break Free from Your Hidden Blocks to Lasting Love. Order the hardcover edition, email us the receipt to be enrolled in our virtual Book Club, three LIVE masterclasses in the New Year for no additional cost (this offer expires December 22, 2024). We’ll discuss the concepts presented in the book and answer all your questions.
About the authors
Orna and Matthew Walters are dating coaches and founders of Creating Love On Purpose with a holistic approach to transforming hidden blocks to lasting love, and the authors of Getting It Right This Time. They’ve been published on MSN, Yahoo!, YourTango, Redbook, Newsweek, Best Life, and have been featured guest experts on BRAVO’s THE MILLIONAIRE MATCHMAKER with Patti Stanger, and as guests with Esther Perel speaking about love and intimacy.