Sense2Love

An academic study dishes up food for thought.

“The salad leaves are meant to say, ‘I’m pretty; I’m attractive; I take care of myself’,”

Brain food?

Just as someone who has never really experienced true happiness does not know where to look, someone who has never known love does not know where to find it. So, if you’re looking for love it’s hard when people try to reconcile you by saying, ‘oh it will happen some day, ’you just haven’t found the one yet’ without offering guidelines or a recipe of how to get there.

I fell in love for the first time at 31. It came leftfield as these things often do, a man I never even considered l had anything in common with. I used to have a mental tick box of what fitted my idea of a compatible match. This man ticked none of those boxes and barely even caught my eye when we first met. Familiar sounding story?

So, how did I get there…to that illustrious moment of knowing I was in love? For a year I had been in a mediocre relationship with someone who seemed a ‘paper perfect’ match, but in reality we made a very unconvincing pair. We split…and here’s the trick…I spent months trying to get to know myself better and work out what I did and didn’t like about myself, the impression I was giving out to others and the response I was getting in return. Living alone helped because I could read and think without distraction. When I finally got my confidence back, a man showed up in my life. We met at a party and he pursued me until one day I turned around to find a silent revolution had taken place inside me, barriers from my past broken down and the derelict space refilled with laughter and music. He was interested in me and I was interested in him and we were interested in what we both had to offer each other. The tick box was in the bin and I was truly open to the feelings I was experiencing. The affair lasted a few months until he had to return to his home country. It broke our hearts to say goodbye, but we built our hearts up again knowing that we had both enriched each other’s lives forever.

So, my perspective on making love work for you is very simply, ‘be interested in you’. Make discovering YOU a lifelong commitment and do this with feeling and compassion, not mental calculations or lists rating other people’s qualities. Trust your intuition by reinforcing it with knowledge of yourself – walk the full distance of what makes up your own parameters -create an internal tick box of the things that make you ‘feel’ good and not so good, in love and elsewhere. Demarcate a line around what is acceptable and what is not. Uncover the things that excite you and push you away.

It’s not that you must wait for love, but love is a symptom of the way you feel about yourself and that shows to other people even if you cannot see it yourself. What feeds love is interest, period. And being interested and interesting leads to attraction which glues a deeper and sustainable connection. Love is there and it is plentiful and it’s ready for the picking if you are!