Tip #1: Love yourself

This is the first and most important step in coping with a single life that goes on forever. If you can't do this, none of what I say from this point forward is going to matter. As a single adult, you must learn to love yourself first, because the person you'll be spending most of your time with is the person you see in the mirror.

I don't mean that you don't have a social life. Indeed, you probably are — and definitely should be — whittling hours away with other folks. You might even live in a big city, have a roommate, carpool or use public transportation to get to your job, and work in teams so that "alone time" is quite rare. That's not what I'm talking about. You can feel lonely even in a crowd, even when engaged in conversation when the conversation is about surface topics like the weather, current events, work, sports, politics, and other things that allow you to stay comfortably behind your shield. A shield is not necessarily a bad thing. In some ways, we must have shields to protect ourselves from bad people who look to exploit the weak for their own selfish gain.

But that shield isn't who you are as a person, deep inside. We have our vulnerabilities, our shadows, our skeletons that we don't share publicly. A caring and supportive significant other can be instrumental in bringing your dark patches into the light and helping you work through those issues in ways you could never do on your own. Likewise you, as a caring and supportive partner, would (should) return the favor.

But what happens when you don't have a caring and supportive person to lean on? Well, in that case, you only have yourself. In fact, I would venture to say that self-love starts with yourself even if you do have a significant other, because human beings are flawed creatures, and no one human being can rely on another human being to completely fulfill their needs. This step to love oneself may be extraordinarily difficult for some people, especially those inclined to negative thinking. You may be your own worst critic. You know all the bad things that you did, thought, or said. You have dirt on yourself that would send you into a pit of shame and infamy if it ever came out into the open. You may hate yourself for all the mistakes and missed opportunities that have shaped your life for years. In extreme cases, your self-loathing may have snowballed to a point where you thought about doing harm to yourself.

That's the kind of thinking you must stop immediately! Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Look at the positive aspects of you: talents you have that others don't have, qualities of your personality that make certain people like hanging around you instead of running for the hills, emotional gifts that you can and are willing to offer others. Stop dwelling on what was and concentrate on who you are now. If you can't even love yourself, what makes you think other people will want to love you?

I can hear someone laughing already, saying "Here we go. Another one of those 'positive-thinking' morons." In fact, that someone sounds an awful lot like me. No, I'm not saying "think positive." I'm saying "choose to like yourself." We can't control who likes us, but we can control who we like, and we can choose to like ourselves.

Personal note: I can't wrap up this entry without mentioning this at least once. I personally believe that no human being is born with the innate fortitude to completely love oneself. The power to do that, I believe, comes from beyond the physical realm. I believe it ultimately requires the assistance of a spiritual guide. I respect that many people don't believe that, and that they think they are perfectly capable of reaching this point of self-love completely on their own without any help. Maybe they can, but I never had that kind of strength in my own life. I needed help and still do today.