The One Behavior That Actually Increases Your Odds Of Attracting The Right Partner
A whole new world of opportunities are about to open up for you.
Daniel Xavier | Canva It can be difficult not to judge yourself when a relationship ends or you've been single for a long time. You can find yourself reliving everything you ever did in the past, wondering where you went wrong. This triggers feelings of guilt and shame — which won't help you attract the right partner in the future.
When you begin the journey of forgiving yourself for your past mistakes, you learn to love and accept yourself for all parts of you — the good, the bad, and the ugly. And that's how you find real love in the future.
Why forgiving yourself increases your odds of attracting the right partner:
1. You come back into integrity with yourself
Self-judgment leaves you disconnected from yourself, blocking you from connecting with others. You may feel alienated and lonely, judging everyone around you, which leads to further detachment.
This downward spiral can leave you feeling unlovable. Judging yourself means you're out of integrity with yourself and out of touch with your lovability and your humanity.
To show up authentically in a relationship, you have to be connected to yourself and the truth of who you are. Holding onto guilt and shame about your past relationship mistakes will block you from connecting to your authentic self.
Forgiving yourself for your past mistakes gives you a sense of feeling whole and complete, which then makes you more available to connect with others.
When you don’t need to be with someone, but rather desire to share your life with a partner, it's easier to be discerned through the selection process of dating. Self-sabotage and destructive behavior can manifest when you are out of integrity with yourself.
Try this practice taught in the Hawaiian tradition of Ho’oponopono:
- Place your hands over your heart.
- Visualize the earlier version of you who made those mistakes.
- Repeat these phrases as you expand the love you feel for this earlier version of you: "I’m sorry", "Please forgive me", "Thank you", and "I love you."
- Repeat for five to 10 minutes.
- Practice daily at a minimum.
Do this first thing in the morning and last thing before you go to bed for a minimum of 21 days, and you will experience a transformation in how you feel about your past mistakes.
Forgiving yourself puts you back into integrity with yourself, leaving you available to connect with others.
2. You release the energetic bonds to the past
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Imagine that there are strings and ropes of energy attached to you from past events connecting you to those feelings of guilt and shame, holding you back from moving forward in your life.
Forgiving yourself is the key to breaking these energetic ties so that you can move more freely into the future.
Release the negative emotions you’re holding onto from your past experiences. When you do, you’ll be disconnecting a chain that your mind has cobbled together.
Your subconscious likes to clump similar information together saying, "This is like that" to help you survive so you don’t have to learn similar things from scratch. However, this strategy often gets in the way of your ability to thrive.
Releasing the shame and guilt from your past mistakes allows you to let go of the past so you can be present and more resourceful. There is no reverse in this life, you can’t go back and change what happened.
You can’t go back and change your behavior.
You can change your relationship to that earlier version of you, and the meanings you assigned to those past events. You can heal those feelings of regret and make better choices now and in the future. A 2023 study suggested both self-compassion and unconditional self-acceptance are valuable as interventions for self-blame and guilt-proneness.
Forgive that younger version of you who was doing the best they could with the information and resources they had.
When you honor that you did your best and swear you’ll make the best efforts to make better choices in the future, you release the past and put it all behind you.
A whole new world of opportunities will open up for you to make better choices and have new experiences.
3. You free your heart to love again
Carrying guilt and shame over past mistakes burdens your heart, closing it off from new experiences.
Forgiving yourself and putting the past behind you allows you to free your heart to love again. A free heart is filled with grace. It is open, light, and ready to love again.
If you don’t take time to heal and forgive yourself when a relationship ends, then you could end up stuck in a rebound relationship, further delaying your connection to your soulmate.
It's the love you have for yourself that is reflected to you in your beloved’s eyes. So ultimately, you do not get love from another person — you share the love with them.
Rebound relationships are like a Band-Aid over a gaping wound. The wound doesn’t heal and instead, festers and creates cyclical patterns causing you to choose similar circumstances again and again.
Forgive yourself and free your heart to love yourself. This love becomes a magnetic attraction for your soulmate.
4. You move forward on your path to lasting love
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As you grow into the person you are capable of being, you learn from your past mistakes and don’t repeat them.
Take time to journal about the past experiences that still haunt you. See if you can discover what those situations showed up to teach you.
The Universe is always presenting us with situations where we can either step into our higher selves or fall back into our conditioned behavior.
What were those situations asking of you? How could you have behaved differently?
When you can answer these questions without judgment, take some time to write a letter to that earlier version of you. Let them know that you love them and have compassion for them.
Tell them how grateful you are for the experience to do better and become a better person, that you will always love them no matter what, and that they are not alone.
5. You don’t have to stress about being perfect
A 2021 study argued that "it is possible for individuals with extreme moral guilt/shame and non-moral shame to genuinely forgive themselves." Being human means you will make mistakes. If you can’t accept your mistakes, you'll have trouble accepting your partner’s errors, making lasting love impossible.
Holding on to guilt or shame about your past mistakes will cause problems in every single relationship, so it's important to find a way to accept yourself as is — flaws, mistakes, and all!
The truth is, that you are always doing the best you can with the resources you have. The younger version of you didn’t have the knowledge and experience that you have now and was unable to make a better choice.
We love someone for their imperfections — their crooked smile or goofy laugh. Keeping an unrealistic expectation that you will behave perfectly sets you up to be disappointed again and again.
Release the unrealistic expectation that you'll be perfect, or it will be very difficult for you to create the lasting love you desire. Every single person will make mistakes, including you.
It’s time to love yourself so you can connect with your soulmate.
Acknowledging your mistakes, accepting your humanity, and making a sincere effort to change is the best that can be expected of anybody.
Forgiving yourself allows you to release the baggage from your past relationships and start with a clean slate moving forward.
Orna and Matthew Walters are dating coaches, the founders of Creating Love On Purpose, which takes a holistic approach to transforming hidden blocks into love, and the authors of Getting It Right This Time.
