Why is it that guys seem so important to our happiness? They pretty much dictate our moods by their behaviors. When they flirt with us or pay attention to us, we are in great moods. But then if they don’t act the way we want or they are not paying attention to us, we feel bad about ourselves. When my boyfriend and I broke up, I felt so bad about myself. For weeks I couldn’t eat and was sad all the time. I kept thinking about what I could do to get him back. I was willing to do pretty much anything he wanted if it meant we would be together again. I felt there was an empty place that was never going to fill full again.
But I have been thinking about it, and why do I have to give so much power over my happiness to a guy? I mean, without a guy I can still be happy, can’t I? I started thinking that maybe we, as girls, need to make ourselves happy first and stop worrying about what those guys are doing. So I started keeping a journal of all the things I like to do. I wrote about hanging out with my friends and shopping with my mom. But then I started thinking on a bigger scale about what would make me happy in the long run. I thought about if I wanted to go to college and what I wanted to do for a living. Surprisingly, most of the things that I thought would make me happy in life had little to do with a guy.
So now every evening before I go to bed, I write down what made me happy that day. I also right down things I plan to do on the next day to make myself happy. No longer am I worried about finding a guy to make me happy. For the first time I can actually see what people are always talking about when they say you have to love yourself before a guy will love you. Well I’m not even talking about love, just liking myself and doing the things that make me happy.
Don’t get me wrong; I like guys and I definitely understand it is fun to have a boyfriend to do things with and spend time with. But a guy should make your life better and enhance who you are as a person. Guys are not there to complete us and make us people. We are people without them. What makes you happy about being in a relationship? Is it the closeness, the attention, the feelings of understanding? Maybe instead of finding the things in a guy we should be looking for them in other places: like volunteering, helping others, meeting new friends, or even just sitting and talking with our families.
As teenagers and young women I think we need to change our focus inward. We should start thinking about how to make our own dreams come true and stop waiting for those princes on white horses to come in and sweep us off our feet.
Mardie Caldwell, C.O.A.P. is the founder of Lifetime Adoption. She is an award-winning author of AdoptingOnline.com and Adoption: Your Step-by-Step Guide and radio talk show host of “Let’s Talk Adoption…with Mardie Caldwell”. Mardie has written and spoken on parenting, adoption, infertility, and women’s concerns, writing in all areas of the media. She speaks nationwide to groups on issues such as this one. Contact Mardie at through her radio site at http://www.LetsTalkAdoption.com.