Tag: Valentines Day alone

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Loving YOU in 2022: How to be alone on Valentine’s Day

They say it’s the season of love, but I know some of y’all aren’t coupled or feeling the love. I’ll go back to saying what I always write and say … Nurturing the relationship you have with yourself and learning to love yourself first is the key to having healthy, fulfilling relationships in every aspect of your life. This is especially true when talking about romantic relationships.

Take a look at this video, and let me know in the comments if you found anything helpful in it. I even sing a little bit in this one. Just know that you are deeply loved, and I think you are magnificent, wonderful and lovable! Show some of that beautiful love you have to give to yourself this love season … Especially if you have no one in your life to give that love to right now. It will happen. Just keep the faith.

Do you have a question about life that you want Senée to answer? Leave it in the comments or email it to PrincessGuide@BecomingPublishing.com.

Senée Seale is a book author, mental health professional and life guide passionate about helping people create positive changes in their lives. Are you ready to start attracting positive things into your life through practicing daily affirmations? Get your free copy of The Princess Guide to Gratitude Affirmations. If you’d like to book a personal session with Senée, she’s accepting new clients.

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Being alone on Valentine’s Day

It’s Valentine’s week, and I know some of you are feeling the love while others of you are down in the dumps. Trust me when I say that I can relate — mostly to the last scenario.

Senee Seale The Princess Guide

I had single friends in 2014 who started showcasing their hatred for the Valentine’s Day holiday on social media a week in advance. I didn’t think they hated the day as much as they hated being alone on the day and not getting to participate like everyone else. I have felt the same way for most of my life. I was thinking the other day about it, and even having been married twice, I’ve only celebrated Valentine’s Day with a man 7 out of 48 times … That isn’t even 20%, y’all. I have felt like I was standing at a window watching everyone else being happy and having fun while I was not allowed to join the party.

I dated a guy once who told me early on that he didn’t like Valentine’s Day nor did he participate. I’m not stupid and knew he was just using that as an excuse to not do something for me. I wish I would have listened to myself and left then and there, but I stuck around to see how cruel he could really be.

After spending most of my life not getting any attention and watching everyone else get flowers and candy at school, work and the college dorms, it’s important to me to have those things now — no matter how silly it may seem to others. Most women would probably agree with me, if they were really being honest with themselves.

Apparently, Mr. Wrong wasn’t alone in how he felt. ABC News reported in 2007 that a Yahoo! survey found people go “crazy” (my word) between the December holidays and Valentine’s Day and were more than twice as likely to consider breaking up with the person they were seeing. A reason why wasn’t given.

In 2020, AskMen.com reported on a survey conducted about love day. “The experts at eMediHealth surveyed an even split of 2,200 men and women to find out exactly what each expects from their partners this Valentine’s Day. The survey also uncovered just how ‘lonely’ single folks are when the romantic holiday rolls around, and the outcome is somewhat surprising.” The survey found that 55% of men and women were neutral (didn’t care) about being alone on V-day while 22.5% felt a little sad about not participating.

Researcher Gunny Scarfo writing for Fox News in 2019 shared the findings of her research, and it doesn’t necessarily align with the findings from the eMediHealth survey. “Unfortunately, according to a survey of 692 people across the country and dozens of interviews my research partner and I conducted last year, many Americans feel isolated — surrounded by people in their lives but feeling that no one truly sees them … By the numbers, our findings are chilling,” she wrote.

“Nearly 45% of Americans reported dreaming of deep emotional connections with others, only to wake up with nobody in their real lives with whom to share those kinds of connections. Almost 30% report that they are unsatisfied with their ability to open up to people they enjoy being around,” she shared. Sadder still, 8% of respondents reported that they do not have a single close friend.

I have conversations with men online all the time, and these numbers sound about right to me. We’re all just broken people, and I believe the COVID-19 lockdown has exacerbated any and all mental health and psychological issues people have. I’ve seen many people self-medicating loneliness with alcohol and isolation. While substance use is a short-term fix to help you forget, in the long-term it creates avoidance and doesn’t solve the problem. As I’m always writing about, going to the kingdom within and doing the internal work is the only positive solution.

If you’re spending Valentine’s Day alone this year, I will reiterate what I posted last week from my bookThe Princess Guide to Loving Yourself First: “I used to think that the only way a gift mattered was if it was given by someone I loved. I now realize that giving gifts to myself in love is just as important, and it comes with no strings or expectations attached. If you long for someone to give you your favorite flowers, go buy some for yourself or plant them in a pot so that you can have them near you most of the year … Do things now that make you happy and show positive love for yourself.”

Senée Seale is a book author, mental health professional and life guide passionate about helping people create positive changes in their lives and relationships. Are you ready to start attracting positive things into your life through practicing daily affirmations? Get your free copy of The Princes Guide to Gratitude Affirmations. If you’d like to work directly with Senée, she’s accepting new clients.

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How to love yourself this Valentines (season and all year long)

It’s still love month, and we’re focusing on loving yourself here at The Princess Guide. This post from three years ago is appropriate for today’s Flashback Friday …

February can be one of the hardest months if you’re single. It seems like everyone around you and everyone on social media is being celebrated and loved.

how to love yourself, loving yourself,

I dated a couple of guys who disappeared around Thanksgiving and didn’t reappear until the flowers began blooming. Make no mistake … They disappeared so they wouldn’t have to do anything for me during Christmas and Valentines. It made me feel terrible and less than important. I began making one of the qualifying questions to get a date with me, “Do you celebrate holidays and look for ways to make it special for the woman you’re dating?”

Being in a long-term relationship with someone who chooses not to do things for you can make you feel even worse.

In my Lifecycles class (in graduate school), we learned that women who are highly educated and professionals have a higher rate of divorce. My instructor said it has something to do with women having more choices today with increased income. (Previous generations of women got married to have an income.) While being married appears to be the goal for many women, some find that staying married is a lot more work than anyone will tell you about.

“We see Christian young women who love the Lord, get confused about their role in marriage or whether marriage is even worth it to start with. And you take that into sexuality, they’re very confused about sexuality and how to express that in a way that honors the Lord,” author Juli Slattery told Focus on the Family.

So, what can you do to honor yourself if you’re all alone this Valentines Day (season or any time during the year)? Relationship expert Dr. Margaret Paul gave the Huffington Post these suggestions:

  1. Listen within to your own feelings. Many people easily tune into others’ feelings yet have no idea what they feel. If you ignore a child’s feelings, that child will feel unloved. Ignoring your own feelings has the same result — your inner child feels rejected, abandoned and unloved by you.
  2. Be compassionate with your feelings. If you judge your feelings, telling yourself you are wrong for having them, your inner child will feel rejected and abandoned by you. If you are kind, gentle, tender, understanding and accepting of your feelings, your inner child will feel loved by you.
  3. Be open to learning about what your feelings are telling you. Just as an actual child feels loved when you are compassionately interested in why he or she is hurting, your inner child will feel loved when you explore what your feelings are telling you. All feelings are informational. Just as physical pain alerts you to a problem that needs attention, so does emotional pain. Painful feelings are telling you that you are abandoning yourself, or that someone is being unloving to you, or to themselves or to others, or that a situation is not good for you. Compassionately attending to your feelings, learning what they are telling you, and then taking action to remedy the situation, will make you feel loved.
  4. Create a solid connection with a spiritual source of love, wisdom and comfort. Love is not a feeling we generate from our mind. It comes from the heart when our heart is open to our source of love. When you open to learning with your higher power about loving yourself and others, love flows into your heart and you feel loved.
  5. Choose to be around loving people. We don’t always have a choice — such as in work relationships — but when we do have a choice — such as in personal relationships — choosing to be around caring, supportive and accepting people will make you feel loved. If, when you have a choice, you consistently engage with unkind, judgmental or abusive people, the message you are sending to yourself is that you are not worth loving.
  6. Take loving actions for yourself around others. When you are around someone who is being unkind, speak up for yourself, letting the person know that you don’t like being treated that way, and then either open to learning about what is going on, or lovingly disengage from the interaction. Allowing others to treat you badly sends a message to your inner child that he or she is not worth loving.
  7. Take care of your body, your time, your space and your finances. You will feel loved and lovable when you feed yourself healthy food, and get exercise and sleep. When you ignore your health, you are giving yourself the message that you are not worth loving. When you respect your own and others’ time and space, you are letting yourself know that you are worth it. When you overspend, putting yourself in unnecessary debt, you are not taking loving care of yourself, and your inner child will feel scared, alone and unloved. Just as an actual child needs to feel safe regarding the necessities of life, your inner child needs to feel the same way.
  8. Find work you love. Since work takes up a big part of your day, finding or creating work that fulfills you is vitally important. If you continue to force yourself to stay at jobs you hate, the message to yourself is that you are not worth doing whatever it is you need to do to create a fulfilling work life.
  9. Create balance. We need balance in our life to feel loved and lovable. We need time to work and time to rest and rejuvenate. We also need time to nurture our body and soul through activities that bring us joy.

Loving yourself and practicing those loving actions will not only help you get healthy self-esteem that no one can take away from you, but it will also give you the skills you need to love others when the right relationship comes into your life.

You can find these Flashback Friday blogs posted every Friday. If you want to know more how to have successful relationships and peace of mind, you can get a free PDF sample chapter of “The Princess Guide to Healing a Broken Heart” by filling out the form in the sidebar on this page.