What Is Your Next Partner Like?

Recently in a consultation with a client, she mentioned that she would like to meet someone and settle into a committed relationship and have children. When I asked her what she wanted in a partner, after a few minutes she came up with a few ideas that were fairly vague.

I suggest that as with anything you want in life, it is really important to get very clear about what you want in a relationship and the kind of person with whom you could forge that kind of commitment.

I suggest getting it down on paper. What kind of qualities does your future partner have? Do you want someone who is kind, attentive, fun, values family, likes to have lots of friends, shares some interests with you and yet also has some of their own? Are they mature?

What are their values? Do they mesh with yours? What about communication? Are they able to express their feelings and deal with conflict in a mature way?

Do you want your future partner to take pride in their appearance? Are they someone who thinks it important to look after their health?

If you see yourself with children, are they also someone who wants a family?

What about money? Is it important to you that they have a high-paying job for instance? How do they behave with money? Is their behaviour with it in line with yours, bearing in mind that many conflicts in relationships revolve around money.

Get it all down on paper. This makes it more concrete. I have given you some ideas but you can flesh this out as much as you want. Then read what you have written every day. This is how it will become more crystallised in your mind so that when you meet prospective partners, you are more likely to gravitate towards those that are most likely to meet your criteria, and in the early days of dating someone new, might help you decide whether the relationship “has legs“ so to speak before you get in too deep.

Doing this may also give you some idea of where you are most likely to meet such a person. Of course because of the restrictions placed on us at the moment, some of the usual channels by which we would normally meet new people, are no longer there, at least at the moment.

Perhaps though, you could think about joining some online groups that have regular meetings around your interests. Perhaps you could let your friends know what kind of person you would be interested in. If you are doing online dating, perhaps doing this will help you write a better profile.

If as you do this exercise, you find yourself resisting or you do it and then put it to one side, ask yourself why. Is it because in fact you are not ready for a committed relationship or do you have some blocks that you would need to address beforehand? If this is the case, hypnotherapy or some other kind of therapy would be able to help you with this.