Love is a fundamental human need.
It's not just something we want, it's essential to a fulfilled and happy life.
Loneliness is at the heart of all depression and human beings are not meant to be alone. We are meant to live in community and cooperation with each other. We are meant to be in relationships.
It's obvious how much we crave Love, especially romantic Love. Our culture is literally obsessed with it.
You see it in music, movies, and TV. Over the centuries people have written plays and poetry about it, even fought wars over it. The desire for Love and connection is woven into the fabric of being human and when you really look at it, there's no way to deny it.
Despite this, we have developed very sophisticated ways of blocking ourselves off from Love and even avoiding it.
For something that everyone wants, we make it really difficult to get.
Modern dating is mostly a power play and even in long-term relationships we often become so disconnected that we can't find the place in our hearts where we used to Love our partner.
For most people, the insanity that we experience in our Love lives remains an inexplicable mystery, we end up thinking that something is wrong with us, that Love just doesn't work out, or that we're doomed to suffer in relationships.
In this post, we're going to help demystify this situation. We're going to explain what it is that we're really looking for from our Love Relationships and why it feels so difficult to find it.
So What is It that We Really Want?
When it comes down to it, what we're really looking for isn't that complex.
We want to feel safe, comforted, appreciated, and Loved. We want to have people in our lives that we can rely on implicitly. We want to know that when s*** goes down, they'll be there.
We all struggle with the feeling of being alone. It's built into life itself.
You come into this world alone and you leave alone. You can only ever experience life from your perspective and nobody else can ever see it from yours. In so many ways, this is a personal journey.
Safe and healthy relationships are a way to soften that feeling of loneliness so even though you are on a personal journey, you're not on it alone.
When life gets overwhelming, scary, or heartbreaking, we want to know that someone is there to hold us, listen to us, and care for us until we're ready to take care of ourselves again.
When we really get to the heart of the issue, this is what we're looking for. All of our power plays, fights, games, and sexual conquests are really just an attempt to find safe and secure Love.
Most of us have so many false ideas about what Love is, how it's found, and what we are supposed to do to get it that our attempts to find Love become the very things that keep it out of our reach.
These false ideas mixed with our own self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness are a perfect recipe for a lifetime of loneliness. Many of us even get married and have a family but never escape those feelings of being alone.
To truly find the satisfaction and fulfillment we want in relationships, we must first uncover the limiting ideas that are preventing us from finding it.
Until that happens we are likely to repeat these same cycles for many years to come.
What are these limiting ideas?
We've all grown up in a world where softness and vulnerability were seen as signs of weakness.
Many of us weren't fortunate enough to have kind and loving parents and even if you did, you were still confronted with meanness from kids at school and others in your life.
In dating, our fears of vulnerability are exacerbated.
Your first heartbreak gave you a very real lesson in how dangerous it can be to open your heart and you learned to be suspicious of others' motives and protect yourself.
If you tried believing in ideas of True Love, you were called naive and told that's not the way things work. That, compounded by your own personal experience, made it very easy for you to buy into these cynical ideas and start doubting the intentions of others.
We start to believe that people are only out for themselves, it's dangerous to trust, and nobody will Love me for who I am.
These beliefs cause us to close off and guard ourselves against Love, so even though there are people around, you still feel alone inside. Even in your relationships, you don't feel truly understood or supported.
And this leads to all kinds of games and manipulations.
Because we are so afraid of being hurt, let down, abandoned, and rejected, we attempt to maintain control at all costs. Instead of authentically trying to get to know each other, we attempt to gain power over each other and maintain that position of power.
We try to keep people on the "hook", have sexual conquests, and "make them sweat" thinking about us. The more we do this, the more impossible it becomes to find True Love and the more hopeless we feel about it.
To ever feel safe and Loved in a relationship, you first have to recognize that the things you've regarded as weak and undesirable (i.e. softness and vulnerability) are the very things you crave the most in relationships.
You have to see that true weakness is being so afraid of being hurt that you hide behind games and manipulation, essentially hurting yourself and other people.
When you can recognize how this costs you everything and gains you nothing in return, you'll develop the courage to risk for Love and it's only in the risking that you find what you're looking for.
What Does it Mean to Risk for Love?
We think that our games and manipulations involve no risk but they do in fact cost us the most in the long run.
We make ourselves feel better with the ego boost of having someone's attention and distract ourselves in the insanity of our power struggles but all the while, we're slowly dying inside.
Every day we're shutting down the most authentic parts of ourselves.
That part of us that is calling out for Love, attention, affection, and intimacy is often ignored because it's seen as weak. We want those things but we want to manipulate for them rather than ask for them and put ourselves at someone's mercy.
All your efforts are wasted because even when you get what you're looking for, you don't know if it came as a genuine expression of how this person feels about you or as the result of a game.
You can enjoy these games in the beginning but you ultimately find that the longer the relationship goes on the more difficult it becomes and the greater the barriers are between the two of you. You shut each other out, disconnect, and grow apart.
Finally, you realize that this will never work out and if you don't know what to do at that point, you lose hope in Love altogether.
Risking for Love means being bold and authentic. It means asking for what you want and opening yourself up to rejection. It means being authentic about your feelings and needs in the relationship and recognizing that you are a human being who needs to be Loved.
It means understanding your worth enough to know that you deserve to be Loved and you don't tolerate less. It's being bold enough to accept that just because someone may choose not to Love you, it doesn't mean you won't find someone else who will.
It's having the courage to be your authentic self and honestly give others the freedom to decide how they feel about you. And it's giving yourself the freedom to honestly decide how you feel about them--no games, no manipulation.
Most of what we do in dating is unconscious learned behavior. It's the natural result of what we learned as a child mixed with our life experiences and fears of abandonment and rejection.
When you can recognize these unconscious patterns playing out in your Love life and see that they are preventing you from having what you truly desire, it will become very easy to let them go.
Most of our mistakes are driven by these false assumptions and if you've never done the work to discover what they are and see how they are playing out for you, they will unconsciously drive you into behaviors that will sabotage even the best relationships.
A Crash Course in Love is a 4-week breakthrough experience to release your limiting ideas about Love and relationships and experience the worthiness and clarity you deserve.
We'd Love to have you join us for the next class. Click here to learn more.
And thanks so much for reading. Lots of Love <3
Thank you so much for enjoying our content! Our greatest joy comes from knowing that people like you are using it to transform your lives and relationships and that the world is becoming a better place because of it.
We know the feeling of being alone, of struggling through what seems like an endless series of dead-end relationships, of waiting for the phone to ring, of being rejected and let down again and again.
We know what it's like to go to bed alone each night wondering if that will ever change and fearing that it might not.
We know these experiences all too well and that is why we do the work we do. We want you to know that you can find Love, that the application of these simple tools and practices can make a complete difference in every aspect of your Love life, ultimately leading you to the intimate, loving, lifetime partnership you so deeply crave.
You're not in this alone. We're here for you <3