After I separated from my second husband one of my biggest fears when getting into another relationship was getting it wrong again. I became hyper-conscious of choosing the right partner and doing everything right to create a lasting relationship because I was so scared of another relationship ending:
another relationship not working out;
another relationship failing;
me failing;
me being hurt again.
Over the past four years I have deactivated much of this fear. Some of it still lingers. It is largely stimulated by beliefs I have held about what a romantic relationship should be. This includes societal beliefs in fairy-tale happy ever after romances, and that a relationship is only truly successful if it lasts a lifetime. It also includes beliefs around finding “the One”, and concepts such as soul-mates and twin flames. I had the added layer of Christian beliefs that marriage was a vow before God and that it was a sin to break it.
It is also a fear of loss and emotional pain.
What if You Couldn’t Get it Wrong in Relationships?
We only perceive that we can get something wrong in relationships if we have limiting beliefs about what it means to get it right. Two main limiting beliefs in this context are:
- The success of a relationship is measured by how long it lasts
- There is one right person for us
In the past, due to economic and environmental conditions and the average lifespan and mortality rate of children and adults, couples and families needed to stay together to create enough security and offspring to survive. In today’s modern society our physical conditions are far different, and physically men and women have the ability to provide for themselves and live comfortably independently. The environmental and physical conditions we experience today no longer make it imperative for us to stay together as partners and families to survive. The average adult lifespan is also now almost twice as long as it was a few centuries ago.
Physically, we no longer need to stay together in one relationship for a lifetime, but emotionally, we still long for the security of that. Love and security are listed in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. As Anthony Fieldman notes in his article The Light Triad, we are social beings who are driven to feel a sense of belonging.
The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou
However, our emotions are connected to our beliefs and to how we chose to interpret our experience.
What if we redefined what a successful relationship is? What if a successful relationship was sharing a journey of appreciation and creation with another person that leads to clarity and evolution?
What if the purpose of every experience was to gain greater clarity about who you really are and what you really want?
What if the quality of a relationship lies in what is created through it?
When we perceive relationships in this way, time becomes irrelevant. This purpose can be fulfilled by one night together or a lifetime together.
It also means that no choice of partner is wrong. Whatever experience you have, you can gain clarity from it. You never leave your trail; your trail just gets clearer. There is never anything to regret.
You can’t get it wrong and you’ll never get it done.
Abraham Hicks
Overcoming the Fear of Loss
One of the reasons we want romantic relationships to last long term is because we fear loss. Whether or not we feel loss depends on how we choose to perceive and interpret an experience. If you shift your focus to appreciating all that was given and received within an experience, and to what you received in terms of understanding who you are and what you really want; and if you can see every experience as a gift complete in itself, then the fear of, and feeling of, loss, diminishes. If you choose to trust that life will always bring you more nourishing experiences, and that there are multiple pathways to happiness and fulfilment, then it is easier to move forward from what was with appreciation.
You can’t lose anything. You never lose, you always gain. You are always gaining.
Abraham Hicks
Often what we fear to lose is security. For many people, one of the key needs that a committed romantic relationship meets for them, is security. This can be both emotional and economic security. Basing our security in external things and conditions is however, not secure, because you do not have full control over them. I learned this through experience. When I was 43 my second marriage dissolved and with that went a significant source of my emotional and financial security. I hadn’t even considered the possibility of that marriage ending. I thought I had “got it right” the second time around. When it did end, I felt disoriented, like the earth beneath me had shifted and my foundation was gone; like my equilibrium was tilted. Sometimes it was the small things that highlighted the security I had lost like not knowing who to list as my contact person on forms now. Soon after the separation I went through a period where I struggled to stay afloat financially, and at times had absolutely no money.
This was a challenging experience, but one that evolved me significantly. In the stripping away of my external sources of security, I chose to base more and more of my security on my own beliefs about myself and who I was from an expanded perspective. The following saying became a mantra of mine:
A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not in the branch, but in its own wings.
Unknown
For me, finding security in myself was about learning to love myself. It was about learning to embrace myself as I was, and to feel love, compassion and forgiveness for myself. I had always had a good level of confidence in my abilities and resilience, but I was incredibly insecure about how I felt about myself emotionally and about my own worth. Building that emotional security in myself has been the key to my life evolving in the positive way that it is.
When we change our attitude towards ourselves, everything else changes as well, for our life is a reflection of the way we feel inside.
Dr Mansukh Patel
The Best Way to attract a Great Partner and Create a Fulfilling Relationship
- Make your core relationship your relationship with yourself
- Focus on appreciation
- Let go of the concept of “The One”
Make your core relationship your relationship with yourself
The best way to attract a great partner and create a fulfilling relationship is to make the core relationship in your life the relationship with your own self. This means learning to love all parts of yourself, and aligning all parts of yourself with your higher self (however you define that).
When your intention and focus is on aligning with your higher self and evolving in your physical journey, then every experience is right, and on your path, whether it last a day, a month or 70 years. It also means that your security is based on something you always have full control over – your thoughts and beliefs about who you are.
Establish a strong relationship with yourself first, and then from the security, love and support of that relationship connect with others in such a way that your relationship with your higher self is always the foundation, the constant. This allows you to interact with others with little or no attachment, and with a fluid love that flows from the source of love within you, rather than being based on the other person pleasing you in certain ways i.e. meeting certain conditions.
When you can love others in this way, the experience of a romantic relationship can become one not of love and loss, but of love and love: a coming together and also a releasing with love. Your foundation and love can remain steady because its source is inside you rather than being based on external conditions being met. That branch may break, but you will know that you can still fly.
Focus on appreciation
Focusing on what you can easily appreciate helps you align with your higher self and be what Abraham Hicks terms “wobble-free”. A wobble in Abraham terms is when you introduce cross vibrations to a single strong steady vibration and reduce the strength and clarity of it. The most common way to do this is to feel a clear desire of what you want and then start to feel the absence or scarcity of it, or wonder how you could get it. You can think of it as being like sending out mixed messages resulting in you getting what you don’t want as well as what you do want, rather than just what you want. Being wobble-free correlates with clarity.
Focus on what you want to feel and how you are already feeling that, and/or how you can already feel that, in the present moment. Let go of trying to work out the details of how your ideal partner is going to come to you. You can picture it as floating downstream with the current rather than trying to paddle upstream. You are paddling upstream when you push and try to make things happen and these actions are normally based in feelings of fear and scarcity.
Interact with life from a place of beingness and openness, and see life as a collection of experiences to be appreciated – a game to be played for enjoyment or a treasure map to follow, trusting that the energy of life is abundant and will always bring you more. Have a positive expectation that good things are coming and you don’t have to make them happen. Simply observe and explore the options and opportunities which arise, and play with following the intuitive impulses which come to you. Enjoy the journey and the evolution of the manifestation of your desires, because there can be as much juiciness and pleasure in that as there is in the having of your desired outcome. Play and have fun with it.
When you are in a romantic relationship with someone focus on what you appreciate about them.
If you put your heart into something, something may become wonderful.
Sadhguru
Let go of the concept of “The One”
Many people talk about finding their ideal partner as finding “The One”. The concept of “The One” is based in beliefs that there is one perfect person for you: the one who will complete you, the one destined for you, the one you will marry and enjoy a lifetime of happiness with. Terms such as Soul-mate and Twin-flame are similar in that they imply that there is one person who is best or divinely destined to be with you. It is a lovely romantic notion, but in reality, it can create limiting expectations and fear about whether a person is the right one for you in some ultimate sense, in other words, it causes you to wobble.
The body needs a mate, understandable, maybe psychologically also you need a mate, understandable, and emotionally you need a mate. A soul cannot need a mate, so soul doesn’t need a mate, nor was some person made perfectly for you.
Sadhguru
What if instead of focusing on finding “The One”, you opened to being with the right one for you in your current timeframe, or the right one for you to co-create an experience with that will take you forward in your evolution. Notice if any fear comes up for you at the thought of there not being one right person for you with whom you are somehow destined to create a lifetime of happiness. Ask yourself and the Universe what beliefs are underlying that fear, and are they helping or hindering you.
When you are aligned with Love/Source and seeing someone through the eyes of Love/Source you can appreciate anyone. You also don’t need to question if the person you are attracted to is the right person when you know that you will only attract who you are – you will attract into your experience people who match your vibration. In that sense whoever you are attracted to is a fit for you.
When you get practiced at appreciating and being attracted to people without wobbling, you can then get more specific and refine even further what you want. Again, when your focus is on your alignment with your own inner being and what you want to create, you do not need to worry about whether you will choose the right person for you, because you will only attract into your experience people who match your vibration, and there may be multiple options for a fit.
Let go of the idea of needing to find The One person who is your best fit. Align yourself with who you truly are and the best fit for you will be attracted into your life and you will feel guided to them.
Of course, this takes trust, and a belief in the Law of Attraction as an energy rule that works as naturally and consistently as gravity.
But we create what we believe.
And that is a very positive belief to have.
Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash
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