The strange world of dating and relationships is a place that many of us have difficulty with. It’s a lot like getting into a swimming pool: Do you test the waters or just dive in? Once interactions begin, things either go well or they don’t, and you move on.

Sounds simple enough, right? Absolutely not.

The majority of issues happen even before things become “official.” People who are in relationships aren’t the issue (unless you’re PDA-ing on social media, which is a completely different issue). It’s those who complain without searching for any solutions. All women (and a few gentlemen, too) are guilty of this, myself included.

We like to play the blame game. It’s never our own fault, is it? Wrong again. Instead of re-evaluating ourselves and our life choices, we blame our bad luck in relationships on other people or thing other than ourselves. By making this mistake and several others, we start to lose respect for ourselves and what we’re really looking for in life and love.

We can start correcting these mistakes by not holding our standards so high. I’m not saying to not have standards. In fact, you should have standards for your potential significant other. Just don’t make your standards so unreachable that you’ll never be happy with anyone.

Thanks to Blake Lively, we can all stop searching for Ryan Reynolds and start looking for qualities that mean something to us. Don’t sacrifice things like laughter, good conversation and dependability. Sure, looks are important to a lot of people, and that’s perfectly normal. But don’t let it be a deciding factor. If they look perfect one hundred percent of the time, what are you supposed to laugh at? Just kidding.

The second mistake so many people make is transforming themselves into somebody they think is likable, but in reality, they’re getting rid of all the qualities people like about them in the first place. Don’t pretend you like old American literature if you hate reading, and if you really want to order a chicken Caesar salad on a date, order the salad. It’ll be a lot easier to impress people with who you are and the knowledge you already have, instead of trying to stumble your way through a discussion of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” which you should have already read in high school.

More often than not, people will sacrifice friendships for a potential or current significant other. This is common in the honeymoon stage of things, but once things start to calm down, they’ve lost sight of friendships that were once important to them. What happens if the relationship doesn’t work out? You’re probably not the person your friends once knew. Forgiveness takes awhile, and those friendships will be hard to get back to where they were in the first place. Is it really worth the sacrifice?

The biggest mistake anyone can make is not respecting themselves. It could be a combination of different things: maybe we just don’t care about ourselves, or we’re too desperate for attention. We are so desperate to make things work that we’ll do almost anything to try. Why doesn’t he/she like me? What’s wrong with him/her? What do I need to do?

The answer to that last question is to MOVE ON. This lesson comes from one of my favorite movies, “He’s Just Not That Into You.” The movie title in itself is another valuable lesson. Many of us are naive enough to believe that text messages after midnight still mean that it’s movie and cuddle time. Wrong again.

Don’t let yourself go for an hour of “fun” to get your hopes up and to get hurt later. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. Rejection will happen often enough that we’ll get used to it. Sucks, doesn’t it? I’ve only just started to wrap my head around this concept, but it’s been a refreshing and eye opening experience.

Stop worrying about when you’re going to find Ryan Gosling (he’ll be single again eventually) and quit stressing yourself out. Life is about making yourself the best person you can be. A significant other may or may not be a part of your life plan, but if it is, it will happen. 

In time, you’ll find that focusing on yourself will actually help you find that special someone, and soon you’ll be saying: “And they lived happily ever after.”