How to be Single and Happy by Jenny Taitz
Jenny Taitz is a clinical psychologist and an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at University of California, Los Angeles, and is a board-certified expert in both cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy.
Passionate about spreading evidence-based hope to a wider audience around common challenges, she is the author of How to be Single and Happy: Science-based Strategies for Keeping Your Sanity While Looking for a Soul Mate and End Emotional Eating: Using Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills to Cope with Difficult Emotions and Develop a Healthy Relationship to Food. Both of her previous books earned the Seal of Merit from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies for readability and allegiance to research. How to be Single and Happy is a Forbes and Women’s Health recommended book. In addition to working with clients in her practice, LA CBT DBT, she is a frequent contributing writer for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
To learn more about Jenny visit her website and follow her on IG @drjennytaitz and on twitter @drjennytaitz.
If you’re tired of swiping through dating apps, ghosting, and hearing well-meaning questions about why you’re still single, it’s hard not to feel “less-than” because you haven’t found your soul mate.
Until now.
How to Be Single and Happy is an empowering, compassionate guide to stop overanalyzing romantic encounters, get over regrets or guilt about past relationships, and identify what you want and need in a partner. But this isn’t just another dating book. Drawing on her extensive expertise as a clinical psychologist, as well as the latest research, hundreds of patient interviews, and key principles in positive psychology, Dr. Jennifer Taitz challenges the most common myths about women and love (like the advice to play hard to get). And while she teaches how to skillfully date, she’ll also help you cultivate the mindset, values, and connections that ensure you’ll live your best, happiest life, whether single or coupled up.
The following is an excerpt from How to be Single and Happy: Science-Based Strategies for Keeping Your Sanity While Looking for a Soul Mate by Jennifer Taitz that has been generously shared with our community.
He who is not contented with what he has would not be contented with what he would like to have. —Socrates
I’m assuming that you’re reading this book for one of two reasons:
You’re single and you’re feeling disappointed by dating or convinced you’ll never meet “your person.”
OR
You’re unhappily coupled but you dread being single again.
Over the years I’ve spent as a clinical psychologist, one thing I’ve learned is that many of my clients are pretty much convinced that when they meet someone, they’ll finally feel happy. I definitely empathize. Women get the brunt of this pressure to couple up; there’s still no acceptable female equivalent to a “confirmed bachelor” in our culture. Ages ago, older women who weren’t married were looked upon as “old maids,” a concept that’s never entirely left our psyches. Even the most well-intentioned family members and friends can make uncoupled women feel like there’s something wrong with them with comments like, “Don’t worry, you’ll meet someone” (as if that is the only way you’ll be okay) or “He doesn’t seem so bad. Maybe you’re being too negative. Why don’t you just give him a chance?”
I know the fear and sadness that being single can bring. I also know how disappointing it can feel to stay in less-than-optimal relationships because it seems too scary to risk being alone in case you never meet someone else. My goal, as I said earlier, is to show you that you can live with happiness and fulfillment, with or without being in a committed relationship. After all, over the course of life, most people will spend time in relationships and also experience periods when they are single. Once you get to the end of this book, you will feel liberated by a new approach to being single, one that will allow you to find more satisfaction.
For a long time, I certainly believed that meeting my soul mate was the key to my contentment. And it’s true that finding someone wonderful might increase your joy, though perhaps not as much as you might think. In the pages ahead, you’ll learn more about what psychologists know about love and how it relates to happiness, but first, I want you to take a moment to come up with your best estimate of how much you believe that meeting your dream person might increase your joy. Five percent? Fifty percent? One hundred and fifty percent?
Now hold on to that number as you read this next sentence: The belief that your happiness hinges on an external circumstance that you can’t control (i.e. meeting a romantic partner) not only makes it harder to find love, but it also sets you up for unhappiness. Letting go of the maddening myth that happiness comes from coupling up is the first step to freedom. Stressing out about meeting someone will not help you meet that person any faster. The healthiest way to increase your chances of finding love is to increase your happiness, right now.
How to be Single and Happy
How to be Single and Happy
Excerpted from How to be Single and Happy: Science-Based Strategies for Keeping Your Sanity While Looking for a Soul Mate by Jennifer Taitz with permission of TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Jennifer Taitz, 2018.
