A bit of a guide for happiness and possibly, long term Loving.
Long Term Love shows us the importance of being understood and accepted as we are, reminding us that relationship and passion make life mean something.
Personal growth is a lifelong process and to keep love alive you’ll need two people to be engaged in the process.
How to Find a Lover
Finding a partner to explore love with is one of the most important responsibilities of your life. An unplanned approach will minimise your chances of securing the best possible partner, you wouldn’t just walk out one day with a pocket full of cash and buy the first car you saw, would you? (would you?) Or feed yourself by wandering in a daze through a supermarket haphazardly putting items in your basket? You can feed yourself this way, though to find a balanced diet requires thought.
Yet, we expect to meet our one true love wholly by chance, is this romance? Or maybe laziness of thought? Or some idea that romance can’t arrive by thinking about it…
If we are to maximise our chances of the best house, car, TV, Hi Fi or other commodity, we think about it first, our needs, desires, money available etc., yet to apply this thought to finding a lover seems somehow to turn them or ourselves into a commodity. Instead how about the idea that now is the time to think about how you will begin to find your true love. If you do this with care, forethought and knowledge, I believe you will find who you are looking for.
Meeting your true love partner needs only one meeting, one social function, one planned effort, one connection and anytime could be that one time, so you need to increase your chances of being there to make that meeting. Until you find your right partner, never give up searching for them to share your life, love and happiness with. To stop searching is to give up on a major part of life because you deserve love.
The number of planned, thought-out approaches you make will increase your possibilities for Love.
Plan a campaign, use your best resources, including you, your ability to think and create, and using your imagination to begin planning to get the loving person you want. Take this time to get to know yourself, your strengths and weaknesses and take time to improve yourself to become the person you have always wanted to be and you will become more attractive to this person. Whatever things you love in the world and if you are healthy, vibrant and spiritually alive, you will find the same kind of person attracted to you. If you love people and you are developing a strong sense of responsibility to your community, you will need the same from your partner and best friend. If you love long walks and deep conversation, you will be awfully lonely if you attract your opposite.
So take the time to get to know and develop Yourself before finding a lover.
People usually are drawn to people like themselves, with equivalent wealth, status, with similar attitudes towards family, commitment and fidelity. Think of this when looking for your ideal partner. One of the keys to finding a partner is to be open to love before we find potential lovers. We must be open too in looking beyond narrowly defined ideas of the ‘perfect partner.’
As children and adolescents, we are influenced from a variety of sources: Our peers; relatives; teachers; the culture in which we live; and, perhaps most profoundly, our parents. Children raised in difficult families may have to work that bit harder when adult to understand and overcome this. Forgetting past experiences is not the key but transcending and learning from them is. Without consciously recognising it, people often pick a partner who represents unfinished business from the past, this becomes important for lovers to communicate their negative emotions to each other as it is equally important to share happy and positive emotions as well. It may seem natural for people to want others to know when they are happy, but many couples are reluctant to openly express happiness to each other. This may be because they lack trust and are afraid to expose intimate feelings in each others presence. In a relationship this can create failure because intimacy and trust are vital in maintaining passion. How can you be in love with someone you can’t trust? If you were raised in an unhappy home and your parents were abusive or unhappy with each other (or you) then you may bring these experiences into new relationship.
So be aware of what you bring into relationships, how your parents fought, loved, argued, how they developed trust and intimacy.
Sharing your life is more than being under one roof. It’s about sharing your inner feelings, your processes, perceptions, what excites you, what makes you happy or sad and your fantasies. Learn to express these so your partner knows who you are; it will take trust to learn how to do this, so learn to do this together and learn how this builds trust. Intimacy is not simply talking, though talking is certainly essential if you want to be understood. Intimacy is not just listening but it is essential to the process of developing a sense of connection with another. If our partners withdraw, we learn not to show feelings and that some things are best left unsaid. This destroys trust and we have to begin again, to find out what stops them from sharing excitement with you and your trust. Find what gets in the way of their wanting to express excitement and letting you know how much joy they stimulate in you. Because that is why you are together, to be joyful.
When searching for a partner, be easy about approaching ‘possibles’ whether simply introducing yourself or using a chat up line. Many opportunities are lost through fear of what others may think. Even more opportunities are lost by fear of rejection. Develop the frame of mind that rejections are not personal, they are a quick sorting method to allow to you eliminate unpromising prospects. All you are doing is attempting an introduction, and simple grace from another is all you are asking. If they politely rebuff you, smile and accept their graciousness, remember it and learn for when its your turn to do so!
Protect your time by being selective and not allowing your life to be consumed by people that waste your time, stop your personal growth or work against your best interests. Accept graciousness and return it when it’s your turn to be approached.
Through fear of rejection, you may lose opportunities to find partners and most rejections stem simply from unavailability or come from inadequacies within the person doing the rejecting. Those who respond positively to your approach make the best prospects for partners, but if people respond with a put down or sneer, accept that you wouldn’t want to be with such a person anyway, you are looking for Love, a Soul mate and they definitely wouldn’t act like that.
People who value themselves (You) and their happiness place a high priority on activities that improve their chances of discovering the best possible partner, this is far too valuable or important to leave to chance. You need to think your way through to a plan that suits you. Others may think that seeking partners at singles dances, clubs, introduction services, lonely-hearts columns, the Internet, dating agencies and the like is demeaning, when the opposite is true. What these do is to put you in touch with people who are looking for the same thing as you, those looking for a serious partner. What you need to do is to use these services to help you find what you need. If you use a reputable service they will also give feedback, so this means, for you, that if you have issues difficult for others to deal with, you will find this out very quickly. Then you have a choice, either do something about those issues or narrow your search for those people that fit your quirks. All information is only as useful for what you do with it.
What you need to do next to help you in your search is to list your requirements in what you are looking for. Taking the time to think about your needs, your desires and what you want in a relationship. Knowing your requirements and listing them will help you focus and will help take fear away when talking to people who might fit your relationship requirements.Learn toknow what you want out of a relationship, are you clear about what you need? Or are you after ‘things’ your friends and family tell you that you should have? Talk with everyone about what you want and share your dreams by exploring the truth with them about what you want and not what others say you should have.
Finding love is fearful and you need to explore whether your fears are rational (objective) or irrational (subjective). Irrational fear is destructive whenever it prevents you from taking positive or needed action, whereas objective fear is protective of you. Fortunately irrational fears can be overcome with conscious effort, if you take action where no danger exists, fear disappears. Irrational fear causes inaction preventing you from finding prosperity, happiness and love. Here you can begin to overcome irrational fears by objectively beginning to work out what you want. Fearlessness to live is the most rewarding traits to develop and that’s You isn’t it?.
Three potential judgement traps that can wreck relationships:
- Inadequate information to make accurate judgement:
Everyone is subject to these errors, you don’t know the person enough to know who they are, they may hide their true characteristics, only time will tell these things, so: don’t be in a rush.
2) Infatuation:
Infatuation is the focusing everything on something about the other person, ignoring yourself, the other parts of them and not being present to see the whole of your relationship.
3) Reverse Infatuation:
tends to happen once a relationship starts, this is more focussing your relationship on the bad part of the other, if only they’d stop doing X…
The game gets even better when you can feel justified in your own bad behaviour because they do X…
Avoiding these means not focussing wholly upon the other person or yourself and not being in a rush. Other Dating traps follow.
12 Dating Traps
Marketing
Believing you need to make yourself more appealing to attract a partner and selling yourself with attractive packaging and presentation. High risks of disappointment and relationship failure as people discover that the excitement and promise of the presenting package has been mislabelled.
Solution: Be authentic. Show people who you really are, its much less hassle.
Scarcity
There is a limited supply of possible partners, so ‘I have to take what I can get or be alone’. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy where you get less because you expect less.
Solution: Define your choices, what you really want and deserve. Learn that you have to say No to what you don’t want but to be available to say Yes.
Compatibility
Dating is good, you seem compatible and you think a committed relationship may work. Dating is about fun. Marriage is about work. Dating means going out to dinner, dressing up and doing ‘stuff’ together. Marriage means making dinner and cleaning the house (and then maybe doing stuff together).
Solution: When ready for life partnership, begin to define your requirements and don’t convert a dating relationship into commitment, unless all of your requirements are met.
Fairytale
Believing that finding your ideal partner will just magically appear. Time to wake up, frogs don’t become princes.
Solution: Take responsibility for your relationship choices, begin to create opportunities and make things happen for yourself.
Mini Marriage
Finding your partner immediately, becoming a mini married couple.
Solution: Date people and have fun without being exclusive. When ready for commitment use your requirements to sort potential partners.
Attraction
Interpreting strong feelings or infatuation as signals to proceed. Remember, unconscious choices result in repeating unproductive patterns from your past.
Solution: Balance attractions by defining your requirements and use them to recognise potential partners, don’t let your heart completely rule your head.
Love
Feeling infatuation, need, good sex, attraction, or attachment as Love.
Solution: Such Love is not enough to meet your requirements and needs.
Make your relationship choices conscious by using your requirements list.
Rescuing or being Rescued
Hoping to solve your emotional and financial difficulties by being in love, this avoids taking responsibility for your life.
Solution: Define your life and live it as a successful single person. Sort your emotional, financial and life problems out before seeking commitment. Be in a position of choice rather than need.
Co-dependency
Earning love by acquiescing, giving and helping. Needing to be needed results in attracting and choosing a relationship with a person that needs you, who later you discover cannot give you what you want.
Solution: Learn to be assertive, identify and ask for what you want and need. Identify your own boundary issues and develop the ability to say No.
Working out your own boundary issues stops you from unconsciously picking somebody who will test them for you.
Entitlement
Happiness comes without effort or changes, If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got, so if you date the people you’ve always dated, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
Solution: Take responsibility for your life, relationship and partner requirements.
Virtual Reality
Seeing what you want to see, the ‘what you see is what you get trap’ and making long-term decisions on short-term impressions.
Solution: Stay dating until you have the experience and knowledge that this is the right person for you and that they fit your requirements.
Lone Ranger
Evaluating people for their relationship potential only, not taking opportunities to make new friends. Eventually you settle for less because you don’t want to be alone, instead this approach isolates you.
Solution: Develop a large friendship (both genders) and get them to help you get what you want.
Instead maybe;
Find a boring person, not that the person ‘is boring,’ more that your first impression is that they are NOT totally absorbing, exciting, a sex god, consumed by passions and their needs. Much fun as those people are, they will either burn you or themselves out. If you are looking for long term love, look for it in those who are paced, settled, ‘sorted’ in themselves, they may appear boring but really they may have something else happening, like commitment. People with commitment to themselves weigh up those they meet; will they help or hinder my life? Are they good for me? Will their energy destroy or build? And these are the questions you need to be asking yourself…if you want to create happiness for yourself. If you don’t there’s a strong possibility that you may get pulled down by others needs and energies. Boring means too that they don’t want to hurt you, since when was the last time a boring person hurt you? If you want to carry on being hurt/being alone; go for the tingle of excitement, knock yourself out!
What boring means to you may be very different than for me, I can remember meeting a woman who made me tingle, tingle in my head, my heart, my gut and sexually. We spent some two years together, fighting, fucking and fleeing from each other. It was a whirl with the ups being incredibly high and the downs being in the deepest depths. I had to let her go to save my sanity. She was exciting and that was because the tingle I felt was the energy she had to hurt me. This is hard to accept I know, the movies tell us to go for excitement, the tingle, the glow, but what if you’ve become so used to searching for the tingle that you’re now addicted to it?
Next time you meet someone ‘nice’ (boring to you) why not try this experiment. Try drawing them out as to who they really are, maybe take time to draw out who you are too. Make your time together an exploration of what could be rather than what is…
Boring people may take your time to find out who they are. I’d say, rather spend a day with them then an hour with someone who may hurt you.
Its not too late to start living happily ever after;
I had a partner who would never make a decision on what to do on a date, I’d think of things, the cinema, meals, be it Chinese, Indian, Italian, the lot, walks, visiting friends, anything…and she’d turn up, object to each one, each idea and I’d end up frustrated. Frustrated because I was looking for the perfect evening. We’d have a row about my inability to ‘get it right’ her inability ‘to think for herself’ and then push off somewhere for a drink…which was her real need; to drink, but she couldn’t acknowledge that. Once I let go of my inability to get it right, my need to think of perfect nights out, I began to recognise her needs and see they were different from mine. I found that if she didn’t like some activities, it didn’t mean I shouldn’t enjoy them. Not only did I miss out on them but also I ended up resenting her. My only suggestion and it worked for me is, If the person in your life doesn’t share your interests, find friends who do.
With her I had to learn to let go of stuff, let go of my need for perfection, my need for her to do ‘things’ (other than drink) and eventually of course, to let go of her. My guide through this was that I’ve found I don’t regret the things I’ve done, I regret the things I didn’t do. Life is too short for me to be drunk all the time. But I did take the learning about how not to be perfect into my next relationship. For relationships to last I needed to aim for respect, having feelings, showing honour, expressing esteem, holding high regard and to be treating each other with deference and regard. This wasn’t that.
When young or when unsure of ourselves we can be attracted to our opposite, on an unconscious level we are trying to find the skills we lack. Hoping that if we love them that they will fill the missing parts of our personality. Unfortunately we can’t take in the skills they have taken years to develop which is why relationships between opposites either end quickly or worst linger for years to provide a hostile slow burning mess because you have little to talk about.
To find your truly compatible partner requires a journey of self-exploration, and doing this first will make it easier for you to find a person sharing your interests, ideals and expectations.
To find a person requires you to be honest with yourself to sort out those bits of your personality that are undesirable or require more work. Taking this time and energy for yourself will ensure you demand a partner who has worked on their personal development too. That person will demand the same of you and that gives you a great start in finding a loving, permanent relationship for your intimate spiritual life will grow best in the company of another.
Amongst the many potentials of a love relationship there are those that immediately stand out. The nature of the relationship: what is it for, about, how did it occur, how do you react to and with each other and who puts effort in?
Each partner’s character development, is there balance? Are both equally developed or focussed on developing? The amount of thought and effort each partner puts into the relationship and again, what is the balance of development?
Some relationships start hot and flaming, some start coolly and quietly, some are about working jointly toward goals, some about working separately toward major life experiences, again there is no right or wrong. The importance of understanding your relationship is that you know what suits you. Which of the above is your relationship: none or some?
If you have a good understanding of your relationship, its history, its political, social, sexual and other grounds, you will have a better basis of sorting ‘stuff’ out when things go awry.
Unfortunately many marriages will end in divorce, is this simply us growing bored over time? Or is it because we cannot resolve our differences? I don’t know, but I do suspect that families that stay together, stay together for similar reasons, whereas families that fall apart, fall apart for different reasons.
Marriage is a long-term commitment and the satisfied couples I meet tell me their relationships are based upon commitment and fidelity, meaning attachment to each other and their desire to maintain the relationship. Honesty, trust, commitment and fidelity are integral to marriage. People with commitment develop their honesty and trust within their relationship and intimacy cannot begin without these. With commitment can come conflict, it is through conflict that couples grow in their relationships, so marriage is not always easy but by learning to handle disagreements and conflict their relationship grows stronger.
Making marriage last is a priority, if we can touch more often and show our appreciation this begins building love. What is love? Often it’s easier to define things by what they’re not and love isn’t lust, it isn’t romanticism, it isn’t behaviour, it isn’t dependency either nor is it sex, but Love can be a powerful aphrodisiac with a mix of lust, behaviour and romance.
Love is in understanding another person, where this creates Intimacy, the emotional bond between people. A loving, intimate relationship where we feel understood, and appreciated for who we are. In intimate sexual relationships we want to be with someone who we can be naked with and feel comfortable. Someone we can trust who we feel safe revealing our true selves to and to explore the boundaries of our sexual desires. Love and intimacy are within our control and accessible to us once we learn how to identify whom we can share ourselves with.
Forming relationships as an adult isn’t always easy as the family dynamics of childhood definitely affect our adult relationships. Sometimes the connections are obvious, where inappropriate sexual conduct toward you as a child, or receiving negative messages about sex may develop a sexually inhibited adult or person with other problems with intimacy. Adults who were emotionally, physically or sexually abused as children may fear intimacy in their relationships because they may associate intimacy with danger. Having experienced my own pain in some of these ways as a child I know that these are not insurmountable. To stay in that pain forever, only allows the abusers to win and we have a right to grow past whatever badness they did to us and become all that we were destined to be from our beginnings. Work on yourself and find the person who will love you back.
In other cases, the link between a person’s family background and adult relationships may be harder to recognise.
Creating a history of your Love
For best results, partners should write their responses to the following questions alone. Then meet later and discuss their responses.
1. Whom or who do I love? In what ways?
2. By whom do I feel loved?
3. How satisfied or unsatisfied am I with my love life, in the broadest sense of the term?
4. Do I now feel a lack of love?
5. In what ways have I felt cheated? Abandoned? Not loved enough?
6. What would fill or has filled that lack, a lover, pet, child, parent, friend, or a spiritual path?
7. What style of loving was practised in my family? What was the language of love, touch, discipline, food, gifts or nurturing of talents?
8. Who was loved and who loved whom?
9. What did I learn about bodies, touch, sexuality? By the way I was touched or not touched?
10. Did I have to give up, hide or reject anything to purchase love?
11. Do I feel I was unloved, ignored, abused?
12. How is the past still controlling my present? How do I feel my family’s way of loving and not loving shaped my present life?
13. What do I feel will be the future implications of these past experiences?
You will gain health, happiness and increased energy if you are able to deal with intimacy in a healthy way in relationships and are able to maintain healthy boundaries. It is always up to you to be vigilant and maintain healthy boundaries.
These are some of the control behaviours that weaken boundaries;
1. Need to fix
You need to let go and give up the need to fix your relationship partners when you see that they are hurting or in need. If you get caught up in the compulsive need to fix, you will weaken your boundaries and become lost in trying to fix your relationship partners to the exclusion of taking care of yourself.
2. Need to be a caretaker
You need to recognise that you have a compulsion to take care of people in need because you have a severe case of need to be needed syndrome. Instead learn to recognise that the more you give to or take care of your relationship partners who you feel are needy, the more your own boundaries disappear and less of you is left.
3. Unchecked idealism
You need to recognise that you cannot control how relationships should be and can only accept how these relationships actually are. Learn to work at checking your idealism so that you do not exhaust yourself or allowing all your boundaries to collapse as you pursue fantasy idealised relationships with your partners.
4. Non-acceptance of powerlessness
You need to work at accepting your powerlessness to control and change your relationship partners as well as other people, places, things, situations and conditions. You are competing with God if you believe you can control and change your relationship partners. You will lose, be boundary‑less and defenceless from the flood of needs of your relationship partners that you believe you can change and control.
5. Lack of belief in god
God here is the God that you have chosen, meaning that God represents the higher power that you do not have.
You will not able to maintain your boundaries if you do not have a belief in God. You need a God to whom you can let go of the uncontrollable and unchangeable in your life. Without God to hand over these things to, you will be exhausted in trying to meet your relationship needs. Your boundaries will be non-existent and you will be lost in the process.
6. Order and Boundaries
Order your life with healthy boundaries in relationships, nurture your rights to have healthy boundaries. Let go of the pressure to control your relationship partners. You need to order your life and recognise that you cannot have healthy intimate relationships with your relationship partners unless you establish and maintain your boundaries in a healthy way.
It’s not a matter of if the opportunity is out there, more a matter of seeing it.
Neil Benbow
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neilbenbow.com 
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