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Get help. Learn about how relationships work, and don't work. Visit a counselor. Talk to your friends. Talk to each other. Be willing to open up at least some of your personal issues to at least some other people, in order to get their ideas and assistance. Talk to your partner about what you are okay with discussing with others, and who, in particular, you both feel comfortable knowing details about your relationship
If you talk about relationships, your own, your friends, the ones you see on TV, as a policy, you will build a fund of ideas and solutions that will be readily available when you need them, and you will communicate to those who care about you that you care about them, and you care about maintaining your connection to others. They will think of you as a good friend, as a potential date for other singles they know, as a source of advice when they need it. When they set you up on a blind date (if they do), you will have greater reason to believe that person will be someone compatible with you and as interested in enjoying life in the company of others as you are.
If you wait until problems arise, it will be a little harder to reciprocate when your friends need help. You still can. Now is always a good time to start talking about relationships and collecting ideas and advice and sifting through them to find what is useful for you.
When you offer advice, try to offer advice that you have seen acted upon, and describe how it turned out. When you are given advice, ask for that information.
I've tried to give advice in this book that applies to everyone who is working to improve their interactions with others, to enjoy greater intimacy, a stronger sense of connection to others. If you're using this with a particular goal in mind -- making a new set of friends in a new company or a new town, or meeting a new romantic partner -- I urge you to continue what works for you, and redeploy what you have learned while developing and maintaining other relationships in the years to come.
In particular, if you are on that cruise stuffing yourself silly, please keep throwing parties, keep making new friends, of all ages and in all situations. Help those people meet each other. The world needs you helping to set everyone else up in as happy a situation as the one you've found.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created February 9, 2002 Updated February 14, 2002