Some recent questions I've gotten from a few of our beautiful readers are: How can I stop being so nice? How can I stop being so emotional? I want to be the dream girl, not the doormat!

Here's my response:

You are nice! You are emotional! Not only do you not need to stop, you need to love about yourself the very fact that you have these beautiful qualities!

You have the ability to feel, to empathize, to care, to love - and to do these all so deeply. These are special gifts you have to share with someone who is worthy of you! Someone who is looking for someone just like you because these are the qualities you possess. But when you are just getting to know someone, there's no possible way to know if this is someone you want to share these qualities – essentially, your YOU – with. You don’t know him well enough yet to know if this is someone you really want to have anything to do with at all!

I know how this happens because it used to happen to me all too often. Someone would come into my life and start paying so much attention to me that I was so flattered I would immediately start going into my programming. If he was confident, attractive and had those other surface factors that piqued my interest, I was there. I was showing him just how much of a catch I was, how much I had to offer him and giving him every reason to stop looking any further because I was everything he could possibly want in a girlfriend!

But there was something I had missed in this process. I wasn't taking my time to get to know him. I wasn't slowing things down to a speed that would allow me to do this. I was too excited, too caught up in his potential and the pace he was setting that I wasn't taking the time to figure out if he was really the right guy for me.

What I didn't now then that I do know now is that if he was the right guy for me, he wouldn't think I was too nice, or too emotional, in fact he would love those qualities about me!

This isn't about pretending to be something you’re not. While much of the popular dating advice centers around how to play it cool and how to play hard to get – where it falls short is that if you’re not there, if you’re not in that place in your life where you’re so confident of your worth and what you have to offer and you have enough of a life that behaving like this comes from your real self, pretending is going to have the opposite effect. You’re going to be acting like something you’re not, and so you’ll be attracting someone who is looking for this other person you’re pretending to be and not your beautiful true self!

You see, this isn't about you being too emotional, too nice, or not playing it cool enough. This is about you being who you really are!

It's also about guarding this beautiful heart and soul of yours and not giving yourself away to someone you don’t even know yet. It’s about being your true emotional self but also bringing in that practical side that we forget to bring along all too often so that she can give us her honest assessment of whether or not he’s worthy of all you have to offer him – because you do have so much to offer!

It’s not about playing hard to get, but actually being hard to get because you know that no man is worth dropping your own life, your own interests, your own friends and family for.

No matter how tempting it is for us to rush into things, to get so caught up in being in love and letting our emotions run wild because we’re so ready to be done looking for love, it's never worth it. The reality is that the only thing this kind of reaction does is get us so caught up in our fantasies  - that are the farthest thing from reality - that we can’t get bring ourselves to get out once we’re in. And that’s what takes so much time!

Going through this process of falling so hard so fast and losing ourselves in another human being only to find out too late that you weren't on the same page, only hurts us in the end. Then we spend so much time in the recovery process – letting go and getting over someone who wasn't right for us if we had just taken the time in the beginning to find this out before investing so much of ourselves. It’s no wonder it’s hard to justify ending something that we've invested so much of ourselves in!

Take that time in the beginning. Slow things down. Make him wait for you. Keep living your own beautiful life that you've created for yourself and let him be a part of all this slowly enough so you can see just how compatible he really is with you. If he’s not the one for you, you want to find this out sooner, not later, before you've invested so much of your beautiful you!

It doesn't matter who he is, what he has to offer, or how much of a catch he seems to be; you’re the catch, my beautiful friend! You save your own beautiful, feeling, loving, giving self for someone who is looking for those qualities in you.

If he’s right for you and this is meant to be, there’s nothing you ever need to be except yourself. And that's true regardless of how nice, how emotional, or how whatever else you are!