I Didn't Know I Needed This: The New Rules for Flirting, Feeling, and Finding Yourself—An Unfiltered Relationship Manual with Candid Insights, Embrace the Chaos of Modern Dating

by Eli Rallo

I love fearlessly and deeply. I am proud of how I love even though it fucks me over at least once a year. I love more than anyone could ever return to me and I know that to be true.

I wanted to be a woman who liked herself.

Even when I didn’t have a boyfriend, I always made sure to have someone feeding me affirmation.

I was always the one seeking, obsessively searching for someone to make me feel valid. But what if I let these things come to me instead? What if I just lived my life? What if I focused on Eli, and let things happen how they were meant to happen?

Being single is no greater and/or worse than having a partner.

you may also be addicted to dating apps because the gratification and validation are instant—you

Why would you ever want to beg someone to fall in love with you?

You deserve someone who WANTS to be with you, not someone you have to convince to be with you.

friends with benefits—which is an excellent idea in theory and an absolutely horrific idea in practice.

all that matters, truly, is not what other people think about me, but what I know about myself.

If you have trouble with viewing every first date you go on as very casual and not very serious, I implore you to pretend like you are going to have dinner or drinks or coffee with your friend.

But no carefully worded sentence, or what you said or what you withheld, what you wore, what you posted, or what you ordered can swap your spot from yes to no in someone’s mind. Especially if you’re being yourself.

I’d rather go to bed alone than be with someone who wasn’t right for me.

We forget to tell ourselves that there will be someone good. There will be someone great. We won’t have to beg the someone great to stick around and hang out. They’ll have already decided that they want to be here.

This is the origin of my anxious attachment style as it relates to romantic partnership—the more he pulled away, the more relieved I felt when he came back.

being envious and jealous of someone else’s happiness—wishing they didn’t have it or that I had it instead—isn’t healthy.

It’s always better to be alone than in an awful relationship, a relationship that feels wrong, or a relationship that doesn’t serve you. And being alone isn’t lonely. It just is.

didn’t understand why he fell for me, why he even wanted to be with me, if he knew, all along, that it wouldn’t work out.

I convinced myself it couldn’t go anywhere—that if there was something between us, it would stay there. That way there was a shred of hope. It never occurred to me that it could just be over.

We’re all either heartbroken or in love or somewhere in between.

But here’s the truth: we cannot convince someone to want to be with us. And furthermore, we shouldn’t beg to be someone’s maybe when there’s someone else out there waiting to look at us and say “fuck yes.”

spent every day questioning if it was the right choice and wondering if love could ever get better than something that wasn’t even that good.

realized that I never missed either of them—I missed the feeling that it was to love them. The feeling I had when I loved them—a feeling I realized I would have again.

Sometimes closure takes forever.