Are you looking for a mate?

If you are currently single and lonely, you may care little for learning techniques to boost your self-esteem or to expand your circle of friends. Your primary concern is how to meet your special soul mate, and soon.

You may be wondering if you need to learn different techniques to find and win a mate than those you would use to meet and make friends. Should you be concentrating your efforts on making friends? Or should all your social efforts be focused on your search for that special someone?

If we have been lonely for a long time, we may dream that our special someone will come along and we will never feel lonely again.

We may spend a lot of time imagining what our life will be like once we find this special person. We are sure that we will have a wonderful closeness with this person. That we will never disagree. That all we will ever want to do is to make our partner happy.

People who dont like themselves think they will be healed when someone else decides to love them. The truth is, if we dont love and respect ourselves now, we have a very good chance of settling for a mate who wont love or respect us either.

If we havent learned how to get along with the friends we already have and learned to handle being close to them, we wont know how to get along with and be close to someone just because we have married them.

Have you put your life on hold while you wait to meet your ideal mate? Sometimes very lonely people believe their real life wont start until they meet and marry their one true love.

This belief is a fallacy. Your real life is going by right now, whether you are married or not. A single life is just as real as married life. An inability to be happy while you are single will most likely continue when you are married.

If you have had trouble developing a sense of identity, or self-esteem, or if you have difficulty expressing your needs and standing up for yourself in your single life, this will not automatically change once you are married.

Successful long-term relationships are built on the foundation of many interpersonal skills, and these skills are developed through practice.

In the course of our relationships with other people we learn many important lessons. We learn about handling disagreements and disappointments, we learn about balancing independence and closeness, how to handle conflict, and how and when to compromise.

These skills are built up in all the many relationships and encounters we have throughout our entire lives, with our relatives, our friends, with acquaintances and strangers.

No matter how wonderfully dazzling a romantic relationship is in the first stages of falling in love, sooner or later you will run into situations where you will have to handle some difficult and painful emotional situations with your partner.

If you have not been able to successfully employ these personal skills in your friendships, you will find it even more difficult to do it in an emotional relationship where your feelings are far more intense, and the stakes are much higher.

There are many valid reasons for continuing to meet new people and make new friends even while you intensely long for a soul mate. After all, you might meet your soul mate as a result of the friends you already have, or those friends you make in the future. The person you fall in love with might be the brother or sister, or college room-mate of someone you already know.

Even if you do meet your special someone you will continue to need other friends and social outlets. No matter how happy your relationship is, one person can never meet all of your social needs. You will be renewed and refreshed by having other close friends in your life.