How to stop being a hopeless romantic

How to stop being one

1. Knowing your own value

You must know your value. You must love yourself, to love others in a way that is still healthy. You must not think bad of yourself. This can help with knowing the value of the other person you might have "fallen in love" with. One thing that might be help is to have a list of good unique things about you, and right next to the list good things about the person you like. We do this so that we can see that nobody's that special. You will see that you and the other person are much more alike than you think, most likely not by having the same hobbies, but by having the same value. Surely the other person might look better and be more social, but those are things anybody can change, so why cry about it?

2. Try to limit your contact

You should limit your contact with that person to the minimun if it's needed, if not, don't talk to them. At all, this might sound weird to you, but remember it's all in your head. Someone else wouldn't have any problems with not talking to the person you like. The argument, "What about the chance of them liking me?" Also is invalid in this case, if they were so interested in you, you probably wouldn't need to read this. Ignoring them is one thing you should do, no matter how hard it seems. Block them on all social media, because why not? It's not being childish, it's actually a sign of how you take thinks in your own hands. How much are you really hurting your social value, by them not seeing your account pop up on some app? Before I hear something like "But, but, I will come across like a bitch then!" I just want to say that it doesn't matter right now, the only thing really mattering right now is your own well being. This well being is obviously in danger by these intrusive thoughts.

3. Make the person you like human again

Chances are that if you are a hopeless romantic, you most likely idealize/idolize the person you like. This makes it incredibly hard to find someone else, as you will also be comparing them to that one person. So before you get into the trap of "Oh they must look like the person I liked back then!!!!" You should take another look at the person you liked again, if you can't spot anything bad about them/bad qualities there's one last hope. Using your brain and writing.

This is a technique I taught other people, and I have seen success with it, basically you write down bad qualities about the other person. Time does not matter in this case. By writing you eliminate the need of telling someone else, but you also have this place of informational output. Journaling, as Hamza has said, makes overthinking and having stress happen almost never. Think about it, by not telling somebody your emotions, or journaling, you instantly just store it somewhere, and try to forget about it. But once other emotions and thoughts get into your head, you then don't have the space to store it all. It becomes too much, and you get stressed even more than before. So you might frantically tell somebody in hopes of feeling better/relief. But no, there's none in most cases, as it's too late.

4. Make time for YOURSELF

You should already have all the time for yourself, if you had the time to obsess over someone for 10 hours each day. So think about how much you could have achieved during that time. Now remove that thought, because now you have all the time in the world. Go improve yourself, not for the sake of others but for yourself. Stop texting with people for a long time in general, those who live close to you but would rather text instead of meeting up can especially be deceiving.

5. Change up your view on love

You most likely are young, or have no experience. The best thing to change up your view, is to just go in blindly. You will shape an own view, not a fairytaile one like ealier. Go out, meet some new people.

6. Be mindful, aware of the surroundings and the people near you.

The way idolizing happens is by not having a lot of contact with a certain individual, to make up for the low amount of contact, these people build up their on view/idea of someone. Be it them being nicer than they are, looking better than they do, it does not matter. To never idolize someone you must speak to them in person, in my opinion. Even texting is a bad way of communicating. A simple "Hahahahahah" could be written while the other person could care less about you. But you will instantly realize if someone is interested in you or not when speaking to them in person. That's why you should meet up with someone as soon as you get their number. Once again, like Hamza said, you don't want to become a texting buddy, the other person most likely has a lot of those.

7. Take things slowly

Yeah having sex is probably nice, being married is probably nice and having children maybe too. But remember you are most likely someone who's young. You should only be thinking about these kinds of things when you have actually been together with someone, who's not holding you back with things like self-improvement.

8. Delayed gratification

I like how we can tie it all together with this topic, the idea of delayed gratification is the idea of you having to actually work for gratification, for that feeling of being happy. Examples of instant gratification would be watching shows, movies, porn, playing video games, drinking and smoking, eating unhealthy and all of these things are most likely done for instant enjoyment. Things like being in a social flow, taking care of yourself and improving yourself, are often times things not really in the minds of these people. So you shoud learn how to be patient, because delayed gratification is guaranteed gratification. This way you will stop daydreaming, obessing, thinking, about someone or a future with them, to get instant gratification.