Are you struggling with finding your purpose and understanding your place in the world? Jane Rubin, Ph.D., says that finding your purpose in life is a lot like finding a relationship. Here’s how.
What Are the Similarities Between Finding Your Purpose And Finding A Relationship?
I think there are three ways people go wrong when they’re looking for a relationship that is very similar to ways they go wrong when they’re looking for their direction in life:
1. Having A Checklist
Many people who want to be in a relationship start out with a mental checklist about the kind of person they’re looking for—what they want that person to look like, what interests they need to have, what kind of career they should have, etc. But, when they actually find the person they want to be with, that person usually has very different qualities from the items on the checklist. That’s because, when we’re really attracted to someone, the qualities they have seem attractive to us because the person is attractive to us.
Relationships are surprising. We don’t know we like a particular sense of humor until we discover it in the person we like. We don’t know that we like foreign films until our partner gets us interested in them.
When people are looking for their life purpose, they often think that they need to know in advance exactly what they’re looking for. But I think looking for your life purpose is more like dating. You need to try doing a bunch of different things until you find the one that’s the right fit. As with dating, everything you learn from the things that don’t work out lead you closer to finding what will.
2. Expecting Love at First Sight
There’s a myth in our culture that, when you find the person you’re meant to be with, it will be love at first sight. I’ve known a few people who’ve had that experience, but the vast majority of people don’t. Most people spend time with someone, share a lot of experiences with them, and, over time, come to feel that that person is right for them.
Similarly, most people don’t find their life purpose the first time they do something. The route is usually much more circuitous. You may be sure that you want to be an engineer or a musician or a small business owner. Once you start doing it, you find that it’s not a good fit. But the very things you don’t like can point you in the direction of the things you will like.
I had this experience myself. I was absolutely convinced that I wanted to be a professor. After I got my Ph.D., I got a teaching job at a university. Though I loved teaching, I really didn’t like writing or doing administrative work.
Over time, I realized that what I liked most about my job was connecting with individual students. When I thought about becoming a therapist, however, it sounded boring. Then I did volunteer work at a crisis line and found that I loved it. That experience led me to change careers. But I didn’t wake up one day with the revelation that I should be a therapist. I talked to a lot of therapists about what I would need to do to change careers; I did a lot of volunteer work; and, over time, it became clear that becoming a therapist was the right decision.
I don’t regret having been a professor. A lot of the skills I learned are very valuable to me as a therapist. But there wasn’t a straight line from one to the other.
3. The Myth of Living Happily Ever After
Finally, many people subscribe to the idea that the right relationship is a relationship without pain or conflict. They have the fantasy of a perfect relationship in which there are few, if any, disagreements and their partner is always available to support them.
But successful relationships require a lot of compromise and a lot of acceptance of qualities in a partner that we might not be thrilled about. The same thing is true of the things you care most about doing in life. In any career, you’re going to have to do things you don’t like to do. You’re going to have to work with people you don’t love to work with. That’s part of the deal. And, while that may seem so obvious that it isn’t worth saying, people who jump from relationship to relationship, or from job to job, often have trouble accepting this basic truth.
There’s no perfect partner out there, there’s no perfect career, or perfect expression of your life purpose, out there, either. Finding your life purpose involves knowing what you can accept and what’s intolerable to you. But you’ll need to accept many things that, in a perfect world, you would reject.
What Advice Do You Have for People Trying To Find Their Purpose?
It’s hard to give general advice since everyone is different. But, I can say that, if you look at what has and hasn’t worked in your personal relationships, that should give you pretty good guidance for finding your life purpose.
Click to learn more about finding your purpose with Jane Rubin, Ph.D.
Jane Rubin, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, California. She works with individuals in Berkeley, Oakland, the East Bay and the greater San Francisco Bay Area who are struggling with depression and anxiety. She also specializes in working with people who are trying to find meaning and direction in their lives.