Sometimes, if you have been burned by love in the past, it isn’t always easy to figure out if you are emotionally ready for a new relationship. By doing some brutally honest soul searching and answering some of the questions below, you can gain a better understanding of where you are emotionally and whether or not you might be ready to invest in a new relationship that will be healthy and fair to both you and your new partner.

• Are you still struggling with your last break up? If you are still lamenting the loss of your last lover then you should probably be focusing more on healing those wounds and trying to gain a sense of closure than on looking for a new love. Lingering and unresolved issues with an ex will almost always sabotage the potential success of a new relationship.
  
  
• Have you figured out what went wrong? - Things usually happen for a reason. When a romantic relationship ends, it is up to you to try and identify that reason so that you can learn something valuable from the experience and ideally avoid making the same mistakes in future relationships. If you are only able to see what your ex did wrong in your last relationship then it is probably safe to assume that you haven’t learned much. Playing the blame game will get you nowhere fast when it comes to emotional development. In order to mature on an emotional level and improve your romantic forecast for future relationships, it is important for you to understand where things went wrong in your last relationship and what role you personally played in its demise. Though this is certainly not an easy thing to do, it is definitely a necessary part of the healing and growing process so try to keep your ego in check as you work to get through it.
  
  
• How is your self-esteem? - If you find that you are constantly beating yourself up about stuff or if you don’t think very highly of yourself then you probably need to do a little more emotional work before you will be ready to get back out there in the dating scene again. Sometimes people use rebound relationships as a way to artificially boost self-esteem and convince themselves that they’ve still got some game. While this strategy might seem to be temporarily effective, it is not a permanent solution since true self-esteem must come from within.