How to Be so Happy Single, Men Fall in Love With You

Step One: De-Center Men With a One-Week Validation Cleanse

When you're a single person that hates being single, there's a disconnect: a lot of your happiness is coming from the validation of men. Snapchat, your texts, Instagram, Facebook, all of it creates an environment where your self-worth rises and falls on male attention. You can be celibate, you can be actively dating, and still have men de-centered. De-centering men means you have established a life outside of the approval and the desire of men.

Here's the test. You're talking to a guy and you notice that when he's delayed in responding, you're irritated and annoyed. Then he texts back and suddenly you're happy. Red flag. Your mood is on his schedule.

So here's your assignment, and I know you're not going to like it. Give yourself a one-week cleanse. You don't have to delete anything. Just turn off all notifications for likes, DMs, and comments on Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, wherever men give you the most attention, and starve the addiction for a week. As long as male validation is your only way of feeling good about yourself, you will never be happy single. That guy isn't what's going to make you happy. You making yourself happy is what's going to make you happy.

Step Two: Find a Purpose Beyond Girlfriend, Wife, or Mother

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a woman is believing your sole purpose on this earth is to be a man's girlfriend, wife, or eventually someone's mother. That is not all you consist of. We have to build who you are as an individual, and that comes down to three things.

First, your passions. What do you actually like to do? Eliminate anything that involves a date, a guy, or being around men whatsoever. If you're stumped by that question, perfect. Now we know exactly where to start.

Second, your personality. Yours, not the personality of whoever you're dating. I know some of you take on the personality of whatever guy you're with at the time. He acts hard, you act hard. He's a soft gamer boy, suddenly so are you. Stop that. Go back into your childhood like an archaeologist and start excavating: what made me different, what was I drawn to?

Third, your values. What do you tolerate, what do you not tolerate, how do you like to treat people and be treated? Build those pillars now, while you're single, so when a relationship comes you're not figuring yourself out on the fly. You're solid on I know who I am, and I'm only looking for someone on the same wavelength. Dating becomes very easy and very relaxed when that's true.

Step Three: Experiment With Everything Before You Judge It

Picture this. You love weightlifting alone at your gym, and every day you walk past the Zumba room thinking, they look like maniacs, sweating to 80s disco music, I would never. Then one day a free voucher gets you into the class, and halfway through you realize: this is kind of the perfect tempo, it doesn't even feel like a workout, and the girl next to me is cheering me on. Now you're part of a group that texts you when you don't show up, and accountability suits you better than doing your own thing ever did.

The number one thing holding you back in that story was assuming you wouldn't like it just by looking at it. So before you ever say you don't like something, try it first. Learn to sew. Learn an instrument. Work from a coffee shop. Start a games night.

And here's the part I need you to understand: success in experimentation is not finding the perfect thing on the first try. You try it and hate it? Success, now you know for a fact. You try it and love it in ways you never anticipated? Also success. Either way you're one step closer to your thing.

Step Four: Build Your Avatar Like It's a Video Game

Think of your life like a video game where you're building your avatar. You decide what gets added. Add to the body: fitness, better health. Add to the brain: read more, learn new skills. Want to spend a year chasing glass skin? Spend it researching skincare. Want a year becoming the fittest version of you? Do that.

Your hobbies need to be additive. Some should make you hotter, smarter, or richer. And some need to be nourishing to your soul, things that make you feel like a child again: cooking, pottery, dance, arts and crafts. We work in spaces so analytical and draining that you need something mindless and creative to drop you back into your feminine energy.

When you embrace this game, life stops feeling like something hitting you in the face and starts feeling like something you steer. The process of adding to your avatar becomes genuinely fascinating, and it takes up the time and energy you used to spend refreshing his last text.

Step Five: Let Your Tribe Re-Sort Itself

As you dig deeper into your identity, your inner circle will change. People on the outskirts will be attracted to the woman you're becoming, and some people currently close to you will be repelled, either because they have no use for you anymore (they were taking advantage of you) or because they realize you're simply not the same kind of person. Don't think of that as losing anything. You're transforming, and the new you attracts different people.

Your tribe is the people who are like-minded, aligned with your values, on your frequency. I would love for this to be women, because with women you can at least ensure the relationship is platonic. Find like-minded women who share your interests, and now you can be happy single and still have an abundant life filled with love: love for yourself, and love from people on your same frequency.

Step Six: Give Yourself Direction and a Daily Win

Big goals need small checkpoints. Say you want to lose 50 pounds in a year. You're never going to wake up and see minus 50 on the scale, and without visible progress, motivation dies. So set a goal for today: one extra rep, two more minutes of cardio, one more pound on the bar. You hit it, you check it off, and you feel it: I got a win today. Motivation is the key factor to consistency, and daily wins keep you from sliding back into old patterns.

I know some of you are thinking, what does the gym have to do with relationships? Everything. This is how you become happy single: you start being obsessed with you, finally. You tinker, you tweak, it snowballs. Remember what we did at the very beginning, we took away the dopamine drip of male validation. This is what we replace it with.

Step Seven: Embrace Messy, Non-Linear Growth

Your growth will not look linear. Some days you'll regress, some days you'll fail, and then you'll take three or four steps forward. That is the process, and being single is exactly the season to embrace it, because you have the freedom to make mistakes without answering to anyone. The freedom to mess up. The freedom to not be perfect.

I promise you, when you look back a year from now, you'll be shocked at how fast you grew. Being single stops being a waiting room and becomes a blessing: time and energy focused on just you, not on serving anyone or making anyone happy except you. Chasing deeper and deeper happiness becomes an addiction in itself, the healthy kind this time.

Step Eight: The Magic (and the Trap) of Your New Attention

Do you remember being in school when you or a friend brought gum? Suddenly everyone was your best friend. Remember that thing I did for you at recess? Can I please have a piece? People would do anything to be near the person with the gum. That is exactly the magic you will possess when you do all of this correctly: ten times the men approaching you, desperate to be with you. Everyone on this planet struggles with self-worth, and when a person quietly sits in their own energy and shows up for themselves unapologetically, people are drawn to them like a moth to a flame. They look at you and think, what does she know that I don't?

But here is the warning, and it matters. If you're a recovering attention addict and suddenly the validation is ten times louder, you can easily fall back into the same habits. All of these men, instead of asking for gum, will be asking for your time. If you forget that you only became this attractive BECAUSE you learned to be happy single, you'll hand your time out until there's none left for you. The gum runs out. Protect the source. Keep yourself at the center, keep the routine that built you, and let the men who want you adjust to a woman whose life is already full.