Recently, a friend of mine confided in me, that she had decided she was unloveable. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, she said, but I just can’t seem to make a relationship work.
She is beautiful: with big green eyes and long auburn hair and a slim pixie-like figure. She is accomplished: an actress, singer, artist and musician. She is delightful: filled with humour, generosity, kindness, compassion and love.
She told me about all the dating fails she had, and how attracting or even keeping a man seemed near impossible. I’m basically unlovable! she whispered with tears in her eyes.
When I was a little girl I filled my heart with love stories from the books that I was given. I knew that there was an essential formula: there is one special someone for everyone, the girl will undergo some horrible experience, and the boy would risk his life and fortune to rescue her.
Actuality revealed itself as I grew up. There is usually not a single special someone for everyone and no compulsory formula. For some of us there are many loves. For others there are few. We all have to overcome difficulties, challenges and obstacles as they form us into the humans we are destined to be. And there is no-one (really) who will risk their life and fortune for you. The only person who can rescue you, is you.
The more I experienced the world the more I saw that love is the only true thing in life. Love is mother nature kissing our eyes with her spectacular nature. Love is the random stall holder running over to give you a paper bag filled with hot, mini cinnamon donuts. Love is paying our bills with gratitude. Love is sweating and moving our bodies until they are wrung out. Love is holding hands with a child. Love is the barista who knows exactly how you like your coffee. Love is technology that makes people’s lives easier and better.
Love is all around us. We have cornered it into such a specific concept of how we think it should be that it has lost its visibility. I decided the only way to recognise love is to see it as something instinctive, emotional and individual that cannot be formed into a concept.
I thought about my friend: beautiful, accomplished, delightful, and unloveable. I knew it couldn’t be true. I wanted to help.
I started to do some soul-searching and talking to friends about why it was that some people felt stuck when it comes to love. More importantly, what needed to change so they could meet the need they have to share their lives with a loving partner. I know the simple answer is you are not unloveable. The more complex answer is you still have work to do.
I remember a few months before I met Julien, I decided that I was ready to step out of my 2-year man-sabbatical that I had taken, only to discover a man-drought. All the good ones are gone! I heard women moan. I knew it could not be true. While I had taken 2 years out of the relationship realm to do my own inner work, I had completed neglected to do the work in relation to others.
This is what helped.
Stop blaming yourself. There is nothing wrong with you, and you are not unloveable. Women need to let go of the idea of a being in a relationship as a reflection of self-worth. You are better off without him, as long as you still believe that having him makes you better, whole and happier. It doesn’t and he won’t. We attract what we are. And as long as we don’t hold ourselves at the esteem that we wish to be held, the man you so desire cannot do it either. You are all the things you wish to be. Now you have to begin embodying them. The next point is about how we embody what we want.
You date yourself. I teach an entire week of how to manifest love in my 8 week course Manifest More. One of the tasks I set is to write a list of all the feelings you want to feel when you meet the romantic love that you are calling in. Often we write the things that we don’t have, or are in contrast to what we once had.
We want someone we can trust after having our hearts broken when our last lover cheated. We want someone who is financially responsible after our ex frittered away his and your money. We want someone who shows us how much he loves is every single day. We want all those things, because we don’t have them, and we think someone else is supposed to give them to us.
Here’s a different approach. Do you trust yourself? Are you responsible with your money? Do you show yourself how much you love yourself, every single day? Take your “ideal man” list and see what things you do, for you, and which ones you don’t. That list is your work. You have to fill all those requirements in your life, first. Then he will show up.
You haven’t done all the work yet. Often women come to me saying I’ve done everything (!!!) and the man I want to manifest is still not here! It’s a sign that there’s still more work to be done. When I thought I had done all the work, and the men still weren’t there, I go on my knees and journaled. Help me please see what is still unresolved. Here’s a few things that helped me.
— Forgive all the past relationships including those with your father for any form of trespassing you felt they did towards you. When you hold resentment towards one man, you are holding resentment towards all men.
— Forgive yourself for the part you played in all the relationships you were in that didn’t work out, including the one with your father. It’s not your fault. It’s just part of your learning. You did the best you could.
— Cut the energetic cords and break your love contracts. I teach how here.
— Reflect on the beliefs and ideas you hold around men and relationships. If they do not support the experiences you want to have, review them, release them and replace them. (I’ll write about how to do this process in the coming weeks.)
Let go and trust. So many women have very fixed ideas of how love should look and how it should come and what should happen. That’s waaaaay too many shoulds in one sentence. Carrying around so many expectations and projecting them on another person, a human with a free will, is terrifying and repellent.
I love telling the story about how Julien and I met. He definitely wasn’t my “type” and didn’t have any of the things that I thought I was looking for. He lit his fart alight on our 3rd day together! Not really what I imagined was my ideal match.
Women can be so attached to the outcome, that they miss being present with what is actually happening around them. We want everything immediately. We want it delivered just the way that we think it should be. We think we know what our ideal partner should look or behave like. And if, what is delivered to us, does not exactly match that criteria, we believe it was the “wrong” delivery. And so we end up feeling stuck.
Our expectations will always be fulfilled. I used to think that real, passionate, exciting love meant I had to go for men who did drugs, didn’t keep their word, and didn’t respect me in the way I wanted to be respected. Over and over and over again I’d end up in relationships with men that were passionate and exciting, but also unhealthy, unsupportive and destructive. I believed anything less was boring. Until one day a man I loved, high on coke, pulled a gun on me, and told me to be careful.
It was enough to shake me from my lucid dreams of living in my fantasy-land of what I thought I a relationship looked like. I realized I never wanted to have that experience again, and started to seek passion and excitement from within myself instead of from the relationships I invited into my life. My expectations changed and so did the men I attracted.
Choose you. There is this tendency to seek for that sense of external validation. The ego needs proof that it is worthy over and over and over again. There is no end to this demand. The only way we can resolve the cycle is to stop looking outward for the confirmation that we are: attractive enough, worthy enough, loveable enough, smart enough, desirable enough, fun enough.
We have to choose the answers to that ourselves. And when we connect to the innocent truth of loving ourselves wholly, fully and in entirety, we learn that the answer is yes: you are enough. The step to take then, is to devote ourselves to loving ourselves in the ways that we want to be loved. You are not unloveable. I want you to prove it to yourself.
If this topic hits close to your heart, there’s a beautiful conversation around it happening right now on Facebook that I’d like to invite you to join.
