Maybe one of these scenarios sound familiar: You get rejected. Your date cancels on you. Or even worse, she just doesn’t show up at all and leaves you hanging. In those moments, all hope leaves the building. You don’t even want to continue, so the idea of “how to have hope in dating” sounds totally ridiculous.

Welcome to the club. We all go through it — even in relationships. I personally just went through a pretty hairy breakup (we ended up getting back together) but still, life is difficult, right? We have those moments where we feel like we might completely lose hope.

Dating can be as cruel as it is fascinating. The key is to be able to date long enough to find the right person. So in order to stick it out, you need to figure out how to have hope in dating. Here are two big things I learned from my own dating life that may help you.

How to Have Hope in Dating: Two Lessons From My 100-date Experiment

Several years ago, I was very skeptical when it came to dating. I believed that love might exist, but I had no external evidence that it could. So I figured, if love didn’t exist, I’d just marry rich and be a stay-at-home mom or whatever. But honestly, that felt kind of icky to me.

So instead, I came up with this idea to do a 100-date experiment. What was really driving that for me was hope. And during my experiment, I learned a couple of really important things.

To Find Hope, You First Need Curiosity

At that time in my life, I became very curious to know if love was real. I figured, what better way to find out than to do a hundred different dates to see if love could exist or not?

Note that the real driver of hope for me was my curiosity. And after 100 dates, I got the best answer anyone could ever have — that love was real. The fairy tale was real. It was beyond what I’d ever thought it could be, even though sometimes it shows up in a different package than what you’re expecting.

Of course, it didn’t come easy. I had those dark moments — what some call the dark night of the soul. Several times during the experiment, I’d have these depressing realizations, like how I was attracted to men who were mean to me, and how I couldn’t figure out how to be attracted to guys who were nice. I thought to myself, “This is hopeless. I’ll never find The One. I’m gonna end up with either a guy who’s really mean or a guy who’s really like too nice and too feminine.”

But the curiosity about whether love was real carried me through. It kept me going through the process. And it made me realize something else, too.

Hope Is the Little Flame That Can’t Be Extinguished

Like I said, I started my 100-date experiment with hope. Mind you, it wasn’t a big hope. It was a little tiny flicker; a little tiny flame of hope.

But I’m so grateful that it couldn’t be extinguished, even in those darkest moments.

I just want you to listen to that. The next time you get rejected, the next time someone doesn’t show up for a date, or the next time she gives you some BS reason why she can’t actually meet up with you, I want you to ask yourself: Is there just a glimmer of hope that you can feel? Just a little tiny itty-bitty light? Once you find it, focus on it and don’t shut that down.

An Inspiring Story of Hope

I had a client come to me recently who, like 40-50% of other people in this country, had gone through a divorce — and it had hurt him deeply. He said, “Look, I’ve been really hopeless. I haven’t taken any action in the last 20 years. I want to join your Signature Program but I just don’t know if I believe that I can have it.”

Then, he even tried to quit before it got started! He told me, “I don’t think I can do it. I’m not going to find what I’m looking for.” I expected him to walk away from the whole thing.

But suddenly, there was a shift. “I have a little bit of hope,” he said, “that maybe you know what you’re talking about.”

“You know what? I have faith that you’re in the right place,” I told him. Now, he’s already been on several dates… and his hope is growing more every day.

How to Have Hope in Dating: Wrap-Up

That’s the thing about hope. It starts with both curiosity and a tiny little flame that cannot be extinguished. If your heart is still beating, and if your blood is still pumping, remember — hope is not gone. It’s in there! Even if it’s teeny, tiny, itty-bitty.

Also, hope grows. It reminds me of a quote from Gandhi about how happiness spreads: “A thousand candles can be lighted from the flame of one candle.” Even if you have no external evidence that what you want is possible, just know even in the most hopeless times, that flicker of hope can be expanded. It can be brightened.

I believe in you. I hope this helps, but I also know the best support I can give you would be one-on-one. Figuring out how to have hope in dating can be so frustrating, and it’s much easier when you have someone else to guide you through.

Join me for an intro call so we can talk about where you’re at in your journey. And if you join my 3-month Signature program, we’ll have 12 sessions together where we can uproot all the negative beliefs that may be holding you back — and uncover that little flicker of hope.