Attempting to improve one's love life is fine, actually

There's a strain of argument in dating advice that says: Trying to improve your love life is making it worse.

This strain pisses me off.

The worst way of putting this is that "the universe will provide." Straight-up woo soulmate shit. Cosmic justice. Eternalism.

A more reasonable frame: "If you give up on anything romantic happening then you'll get the love you want."

Probably the most respectable framing I've seen is this: That when you give up actively pursuing love, that's when you tend to find it. They say it's because you stop doing the needy things that make you unattractive (desperate, or manipulative), and grow meaningful relationships with candidates you didn't think you could find attractive. I find these more respectable: At least they offer Reasonable Explanations. They don't demand trusting in anything so absurd or disgusting as cosmic justice. They do still amount to believing in something.

Here's the problem: Even this respectable framing amounts to believing that one can be against what one wants. That wanting to find love, and acting accordingly, is subverting one's own desire. This amounts to believing in unhappiness.

This framing is a basilisk, awful in its recursiveness. By basilisk, I mean that if you take it seriously will make you miserable and you will recursively "prove" that it should make you miserable. What if I try not pursuing? Well, I'm still motivated by finding love, so actually not-pursuing is the real pursuing! Therefore, it should have all the same awful consequences. As long as I am motivated by what I am motivated by, I must be self-undermining. I want to be motivated by what I am motivated by so I will not change what I am motivated by. Therefore, I am unhappy and I am in hell. QED.

This is not a very helpful framing.

I think what people are trying to get at when they say such things is that needing to find love (and being unhappy if one doesn't) is subverting one's own desire. I think that's okay in option method terms. That's saying unhappiness is contrary to happiness, and, well, duh.

I find this still unhelpful. Bruce Di Marsico often says that one does not make oneself unhappy in the full clarity and light of day. His analogy: You don't wake up and drive a nail through your head with a hammer. It's something you do in a half-aware state. And needing is being unhappy, because anticipating unhappiness is feeling unhappiness now. If I notice what I am doing it dissolves. It is helpful to notice when I am needing something, but I experience such dating advice as simply an invitation to unhappiness. If I wasn't unhappy before reading it, I might be after.

Believing that one must be unhappy if one doesn't find love may be a barrier to finding it.

Pursuing love and trying to improve one's love life is no cause for unhappiness.