Most of us won’t admit it, but one of the goals we have in our lives is finding true love, whether it's next week, or in 10 years from now.

Why do most people complain about dating these days?

It’s because we are looking for the wrong traits in our significant other, and we aren’t asking the right questions when we need to.

We have to be bold.

There are far more important qualities we need to make sure exist in our dream person than the baggage they carry around.

We all have baggage, but making sure the person you’re dating shares the desire of wanting a future, to settle down one day, or where they desire to live in the world is far more important than worrying about irrelevant traits such as how much money they're making at their current job.

We’re so terrified of being straightforward that we end up wasting our time and energy, which could have been poured into someone elsewhere.

Sometimes, everything is going so smoothly in a relationship that we tend to overlook little red flags.

I don’t care how little that reg flag is, do NOT overlook it and ignore it because sooner than later it’s two years into the relationship and the red flags are getting worse and you’re stuck in a relationship that you don’t know how to slip out of.

Red flags are warning signs, and when we ignore being warned, we end up getting crushed.

When we do, we lose ourselves trying to please the other half in the relationship, when really, we should be acting as two wholes.

Every relationship takes work and compromise, but you shouldn’t have to live for anyone else or settle for anything that makes you upset.

We can't change people or what they want, and we shouldn't have the desire to do so.

When someone communicates with us that they aren't "relationship material", why do we still stick around when that's what we're looking for, and they aren't?

Why do we try to convince people to settle down, when they're happy with exactly what they're doing?

When we don’t recognize ourselves anymore, this is also a red flag that we need to leave.

Our friends and family know more than we like to admit, and they truly want what’s best for us.

If our parents don’t like them, they probably aren’t good for us.

If our friends keep bringing up red flags that we continue to ignore, we are wasting our time, and the relationship will crumble eventually. Instead of keeping it this simple, we end up crumbling the relationships of the friends and family that truly love us.

Instead of pushing away the people that want what's best for us, we need to stop thinking “oh, they’re just jealous.”

No, they aren’t blinded by the stupidity like we are, and they see something we’re too naive to.

We must trust our community surrounding us since their gut instincts are more trustworthy than our own.

Another thing to remember is it's perfectly okay to NOT be in a relationship

Sometimes, instead of pouring energy and love into someone else, we really should be pouring it into ourselves.

How can we jump into a relationship when we don’t know who we are, who we are striving to be, and what values to find in a person that will truly benefit us?

Happiness really does come from within ourselves, and until we can obtain that, we can’t commit to anyone else 100%, and we end up damaging ourselves more than we were without jumping into a relationship.

True love does exist, and we should stop believing otherwise, but before we go to find it in another person, it has to be found within ourselves.

If we aren’t ready to ask the deep and intense questions within the first three dates, then we are setting ourselves up to waste time and let our expectations get crushed once again.

We need to keep our standards high, and make sure we stay wise in choosing what to look for in a partner.

We need to stop worrying if they’ll like us, and worrying more about if we’ll like them instead.

We have to stop sacrificing our wants and desires, and staying strong in what we refuse to tolerate in a relationship, or even within ourselves.