Guarding your heart means protecting it from hurt. Being disappointed and hurt is *kind of* inevitable, but how you prepare for it and react to it is up to you.

1. Stop fantasising about your future with someone who hasn’t even proposed. 

That means not calling him ‘hubby’ if he hasn’t actually put a ring on it, and deleting that Pinterest board full of wedding ideas. I see you.

2. Stop seeing every single guy you meet as a potential partner. 

Friendship is such a beautiful thing, and you kill any chance of that when you move too fast and put him into a potential partner box, before you even know his middle name.

Get to know a guy before asking him “what are we?” drunkenly at 3am (by the way, if you have to ask, you aren’t anything) and sending him running because he really thought you were just friends.

3. Be truly single for a significant period of time.

If you’re always looking, or always taken, are you ever really looking after your heart in between relationships, and treating it like the prized possession it is?

4. When you see a red flag, run away or fix it. 

That means addressing the baby mama drama/girl who is in his snapchats every day/baby pictures on his walls as soon as they come up.

5. Don’t be so available. 

Spending all your time either with or thinking about a person means you don’t have time to take stock and figure out how you really feel, and how they really feel.

Their actions might be telling you they’re not really interested; they never call you first, they don’t make plans to see you, they put other people before you, but you are spending so much time with them that you don’t realise, until it’s too late.

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it – Proverbs 4:23.