What's Really Blocking You from Finding Love
The unconscious beliefs nobody talks about.
Hi there,
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why so many people — genuinely good people — are not finding good people to love. They’re stuck swiping, stuck in situationships, stuck going on first dates that lead nowhere, and stuck wondering what the hell is wrong with everyone out there.
The uncomfortable truth? The problem is often with our unconscious beliefs and habits.
Here are three things that might be preventing you from meeting the “right person.”
You resent the people you’re trying to date.
I know. But hear me out.
Whether you date men or women, there’s a really good chance that somewhere underneath the surface, you carry some version of fear and resentment toward them. Because you’ve been hurt. Because your friends have been hurt. Because we are marinating in a cultural moment that is essentially a gender war, and it is bleeding into various interactions people are having on dates right now.
When we experience relational pain, our bodies learn to protect us. We begin to generalize. We tell ourselves stories: all men do this, all women are like that. These stories feel like protection. But what they’re actually doing is keeping us in a state of low-grade threat response every time we try to connect with someone new. And here’s what’s so important to understand: people feel this. Not always cognitively. But somatically — in their bodies. When someone is sitting across from you carrying the weight of “I don’t trust you because of what people like you have done,” your nervous system registers that.
What I think is actually missing from the conversation is empathy.
For example, women deal with an insane amount of pressure around their bodies, their age, and their emotions. They’re told they’re too much and somehow not enough, often at the same time. Past 30 and want a family? You’re desperate. Don’t want kids? Something must be wrong with you. Show your feelings? You’re too emotional. Your body doesn’t look a certain way? The world has opinions about that, too. The pressure around age, specifically, and the fact that so many women start feeling “old” in their thirties, is genuinely heartbreaking.
That’s a story we’ve been sold, and it does real damage.
Men have intense pressure too: the pressure to provide, to achieve, to have a certain physical presence. The impossible standard of being emotionally available while simultaneously being told that emotional expression makes them weak. So many men have never been given permission to simply feel, and that unprocessed pain shows up in relationship in ways that can look like unavailability or shutdown — but underneath, it’s often just a person who never learned that their inner world was safe to share.
Every single one of us is walking around with some version of the fear that we are not enough. The specific ways that fear shows up are different depending on who you are, how you were raised, and what the world has told you about yourself. But the fear itself? That’s universal. And if you can actually feel that in the person sitting across from you — instead of seeing them as the enemy — everything starts to shift. When we can hold compassion for those distinct wounds rather than weaponizing them against each other, we then begin to create the conditions for real intimacy.
You don’t actually believe you can make a relationship work.
This one is hard to admit because most people don’t even know they believe it. But if somewhere in your subconscious you’re convinced that you’re going to blow it, that you’ll get into something real and then somehow ruin it, you will find a way to make that true. Or you’ll never get close enough to find out.
Being in a relationship is genuinely confronting. It asks you to be less selfish. It asks you to say things that are uncomfortable, to stick around when your instinct is to leave, to let someone see the parts of you that you’ve spent a lot of energy hiding. And, most of us don’t have great models for what that actually looks like.
But here’s the thing: not believing you can sustain a healthy relationship doesn’t mean you can’t. It means you have to get honest about what your patterns are. What you’ve done in the past that didn’t work. What you’re afraid of. To communicate needs rather than suppress them. These are learnable skills. But they require us to first acknowledge that we need them.
Awareness is where all real change begins. Because as long as this belief lives only in your unconscious, it will run the show.
You’re wasting time in connections that aren’t meant for you.
I’ll say it plainly: Our nervous system finds familiarity comforting even when that familiarity is painful. This is why so many of us stay in relationships long past the point where we know, somewhere inside, that this person is not our person.
Every day we spend in a connection that keeps our system in chronic stress, and that erodes our self-worth, or asks us to be someone who we are not, is a day we are not available for something that could genuinely nourish us.
I want to be careful here, because I’m not talking about leaving at the first sign of difficulty. Real relationships require repair. They require us to stay in discomfort and work through it. But there is a difference between productive relational friction and an ongoing pattern of suffering that we keep hoping will resolve itself.
Sometimes the most loving thing we can do — for ourselves and for the other person — is to release the connection with honesty and care.
That’s not a fun sentence. But I really believe it’s true.
Look - if you’ve had a lot of pain in dating, I’m not dismissing that. I know it can be super hard out there. The goal here isn’t to minimize what you’ve been through. It’s about doing the careful exploration of how we might be getting in our own way.
The good ones are out there. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. But you have to do the work to be ready for them. And that starts with getting real about what’s actually going on beneath the surface.
That’s the work. It’s not always comfortable. But it’s worth it.
Love,
Jillian
P.S. Have you listened to this week’s episode of Jillian on Love? I sit down with Dr. Nicole LePera to talk about the powerful ways our past shapes how we think, feel, and relate to others, why we get stuck in patterns we don’t understand, and what it actually means to heal.