The other day while I was working, this movie “How to lose a guy in ten days” was playing. When I work at night I have this habit of having something running in the background, be it music, a show or Netflix.

I have never seen this movie before, but I remember that it was a very popular movie at the time it came out. When I saw it on Netflix, I just put it on.
I was not fond of it, I found it rather annoying and degrading towards women.

This very beautiful hot blond girl has to write an article about how to make a guy break up with her in ten days. Her method? Act extremely pathetic and needy, be desperate “as women” obviously can be.

As horrible as it was the movie got me thinking about how people are in relationships.
I talked to one of my friends about these thoughts and about how people can go berserk in relationships.
Trust me, I’ve been there and failed miserably, even been borderline crazy in the relationship ( and after).

Where does this craziness come from?
“Is it a part of being a woman?”
Or is there a bigger picture?

What is selflove? read more here.

I have come to realize this; when we raise girls, we don’t teach them about taking care of themselves.
We don´t teach them about self-respect, self-love, their uniqueness or that they are enough, that they don’t need someone to make them happy.

Instead, as a society, we teach girls to aim to find someone to live happily ever after with, get married and have kids.
We let our girls play with Barbie and Ken dolls, we read them fairy tales where the princess ends up with Prince Charming.
For most girls that just becomes an aimless search, looking for love, searching for “The One” etc.

When girls start getting interested in boys, there is no guidance. They are just supposed to go out there and learn by experience.

This experience can have huge consequences for impressionable young teenage girls.
Rejection can destroy a girls self-esteem completely, and for years to come, she will walk around feeling not good enough, not pretty enough or not deserving better.
I have been one of those insecure teenage girls, I know how hard it can be.

Looking back to my teenage years, I realize I was a popular girl in my youth. Back then I didn’t know that and used all my energy on battling this insecurity, instead of just enjoying what I had.

The reason that I couldn’t enjoy my youth was that I didn’t see all that I had. I had a really hard time navigating through all those feelings of insecurity and all I saw was the lacks that I felt I had.

There is no proper education in schools about this period of life that shapes us and our dating choices in the future.
There are no parent-teenager talks about what to watch out for, how to take care of yourself and how to make good choices.

Regardless of what we do as a society, there are some set of rules that we need to follow before we learn a skill.
Like when you learn to ride a bike, there are certain things you have to learn before you can bike proper.
When you are learning to cook, you have to follow a recipe.
With driving, you have to learn to drive and get approved, before you can take the car out.

But when it comes to our girls, we don’t teach them “a set of rules” on how to take care of themselves and to not let ANYONE take them for granted.

This is my experience on how to take care of yourself:

1/ Always follow your gut feeling.

• If you met a guy and everything is perfect, to begin with, and suddenly he does something, that makes you feel bad. Then it is bad!
• If he has been good at replying and suddenly take hours or don’t have time, leave! It is not going to get better, you’ll go insane analyzing and he’ll end up leaving you.
• If suddenly he doesn’t have much time for you, leave. You know it if you like someone you want to spend all your time with them and make an effort to make it work.
• If he tells you that he doesn’t trust you or doubt you or make you feel bad about yourself, run as fast as you can, it’s a one-way road to hell.
• If he is jealous, leave. It’s not sweet nor cute. This guy got issues and need to work on himself.        Staying with him and do whatever he asks, will not stop him from being jealous, but just make matters worse.
• Don’t ever change yourself for a guy, he will end up leaving you because you are not the person he fell in love with anymore.

2/ Don’t settle for less

If all you girls have boyfriends and you are the only one missing out, don’t just take the first guy coming along.
Even if you have been single for a while and just want a boyfriend, don’t take the first guy showing your interest.

If you chose to be with a guy it has to feel right ( follow the gut feeling), everything inside you should say yes!

Should you feel more like “Hmmm, he is ok”, then you are settling.
If you settle it will go wrong and you’ll end up feeling bad and blaming yourself, so don’t go there.

3/ Stop chasing!

I have always been the type that can do everything myself including finding the one before he finds me. Don’t be like me.

There is no such thing as “go find love” or “in search for love”.
Trust me, love will find you when you are ready.
Being ready means loving yourself, living the life that you want to live and when you meet a nice guy, he will be a nice add-on instead of the rescue from loneliness.

So let love come to you, swim with the stream and not against it. It will only cause you to make wrong decisions.

4/ If he leaves (or threatens too)

Let him go! Him leaving is in no way a reflection on you. It just means that you were not meant to be. It is always hard to let go and more often then not we keep looking at the closed door hoping that he will come back and things will work out. 98% of the times if he comes back, it is not to work things out.

Stop wasting your precious time, you are worth so much more to someone else, someone who is waiting for you.

The best thing you can do is to delete him completely from your life, detox and take all the time you need to let go.

5/ How to handle rejection

If you got rejected and in that moment realize, exactly how much you love this guy and cant live without him.
This is not love, it is fear of losing and missing out.

Often times when we get rejected we already know that there is something wrong in the relationship. But we still keep going and try to make it work.

Even if we already know we should break it off we don’t. When the other part says stop, our world falls apart.
We are not ready to say stop and the fear of ending up alone makes us hang on and try to fix things that are unfixable.

I remember being rejected, it almost got me psychotic obsessed and stalkerish. Poor guy.

But It taught me two things:

1. How low I could go and how bad I was at handling rejection.
2. How bad I needed to work on myself. I took a step back and reassessed my life. I was raised believing that marriage was the end goal and that is what you should aim for.

For a long time, I spent the time to find the right one.
After my meltdown, I stopped looking for love and I erased the idea of ever getting married. It gave me incredible freedom.

Instead, I started focusing on myself and enjoyed life just as it was.
I started a journey of self-love, I started spending more time with myself in contrast to before when I couldn’t stand being alone.

Learn how to visualize anything, even a great relationship.

It changed me and taught me that the only way you can truly be happy is to take charge of your own happiness, don’t let it depend on others. You’ll only end up getting disappointed.

You have to understand, that you are amazing and you deserve the best. Love yourself just the way you are and life can turn out amazing for you. Someday you’ll meet someone how will appreciate YOU, for all that you are.