Locus of Control: What You Can Actually Influence in Dating

By Elise Dalrymple-Keast | Owner and CEO of Compatico

This week I found myself in a spiral. Last week brought a surprisingly large tax bill, thanks to an incorrect tax code in 2024 that my accountant was late to flag, due in nine days. Cue cancelling Easter plans, scrambling to redirect funds, and a general sense of being hard-done-by.

The thing about a bad day is that once you're in that headspace, you start spotting evidence everywhere that life is out to get you. By evening I'd constructed a full narrative: ‘every time I get ahead financially, something comes up to knock me back’. I recognised the spiral was going nowhere, so I had two choices: stay miserable, or do something about it. I went for a run, listened to a podcast about reframing setbacks, and cheesy as it sounds, it really did shift my mindset from one of self-pity to something more solutions-focused. A few days on I'm not thrilled about the bill, but I'm grateful for the lesson (don’t dither on your tax code), and the reminder that resourcefulness kicks in when you need it.

This mirrors a conversation I had with myself years earlier about dating. After unsuccessful dating experiences, I'd built a story that I always went for the wrong type, i.e. people who ticked boxes on paper but never made me feel great. I told myself either I was bad at choosing people, or I just wasn't attracted to anyone genuinely kind.

Feeling fed-up and frustrated after finally ending a two-year on-again-off-again ‘situationship’ where I repeated every pattern, I realised something had to give. I sat down with a journal and wrote out everything I wanted to feel in a relationship: I wanted someone who was proud of me, someone where I always knew where I stood, someone who had their own passions and drive, and was supportive of my passions and drive, someone who was open to trying new things, and who I could have a good laugh with. Interestingly, nowhere in those pages did I mention the things I'd been filtering for on the apps.

I won’t pretend shifting my focus was an overnight fix. It took a good year or two of unlearning patterns and attending therapy. When I met my flatmate (who eventually became my partner—but that’s a story for another time), we were quite different on paper, and he was different to the people I had dated in the past. But the more time we spent together, the more I felt everything I'd written down. With my new understanding of what was important to me in a partner, paired with multiple nudges from friends, eventually I got up the courage to make my move. Nearly four years in, I’ve learned that shared interests can develop, but how someone makes you feel can't be manufactured.

There's so much we can't control in dating and in life: whether the right person crosses our path, what the world throws at us financially, what Trump decides to do next, how much butter costs and so on, it’s all out of our hands. All we can do is look at what we can influence. Sometimes that's mindset. Sometimes it's approach. And sometimes (as in my case) it means going to therapy and getting up close and personal with arbitrary criteria that could be holding you back.

There's no one-size-fits-all here, and everyone's situation is genuinely their own. But taking ownership of the things within your reach doesn't just feel better. It puts you in a much stronger position to recognise something good when it comes along.