From an email exchange with a spiritual brother, my friend Phil writes:The feeling you want is what matters. Focus on the feeling that you want in the relationship--being loved, being seen fully, being appreciated, and feeling the power of a union with a person who is exactly right for you. The Universe will provide.
The only thing I might add to Phil's teaching is to become or be the man you want to attract, being loving to everyone, seeing others fully, appreciating others no matter what they can offer you, and realizing that you are a beautiful son or daughter of God, regardless of your flaws.
Love, romance, partners - the ultimate mystery of life. What attracts them to us? Who knows? Before I met Ayad, I swore off love/relationships in one of the fiercest public statements I ever made before friends. I damn well meant it. Not wise to cross Venus! She sent her minions of cupids and they shot me up good with their arrows. In retrospect, I see I had sworn off ways of loving that no longer suited me. This partnership became then, a challenge to do it differently.
ReplyDeleteI don't think any technique to attracting a partner "works." "Becoming the man you want to attract," "being more loving," etc. There are plenty of dastardly people in long-term relationships that are wholly happy in those partnerships. They are not in them because they are "good" people or "deserve" them.
I try to avoid falling into the "if I do this, I will get this" law of attraction trap. For me, that becomes part magical thinking and part "I'm not good enough the way I am." Of course as you know your damn good the way you are in or out of a relationship. It's the continual wanting that's the pitfall. It's like myself - wanting more success/money in my career. Oh, I've wanted and wanted and wanted that. It wasn't that I wasn't taking action, I was. But this past year, I gave up the wanting, and focused on taking much larger risks. It's beginning to pay off.
In the end, love chooses you. It's very much like one's true work and passion/career in life. If finds you, you don't find it.
That may not be very encouraging. We don't get all the love we want from specifically those we want, all the time, as you know. I have an extremely narcissistic mother who more often is cold-as-ice with me, despite my continual efforts to warm her. This is a huge, seemingly unsolvable issue in my life that has had me shaking my fists at the sky at times, and other times aching with a deep pit of despair. Yet I see that I have a pact with her, formed from infancy and maybe before that. We are fated to live out that pact. In whatever way each of us chooses.
In the end, I believe that we don't get the love we want. We get the love we need.