If you’re waking up each day feeling incredibly unfulfilled with your partner (or lack thereof) whether you’re single, separated, in an unhappy relationship, divorced – you’re probably asking yourself the question
“How do I find the one for me?”
To help you right now we’ve put together 3 steps on how you can find the one partner who you can build a happy and joyful relationship with. So let’s get started.
Step One: Understand what LOVE actually is
“I wanna know what love is, I want you to show me. I want to feel what love is, I know you can show me”.
That famous Foreigner song said quite a bit!
When you’re looking for love, you can’t actually see it; you can only feel it. Your brain is wired to seek out signals and messages from a potential mate and translate that into a feeling. Maybe that feeling is not love right away, but curiosity, desire, interest. All the initial feelings that can lead to love.
Your brain is looking for signals like body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, written messages, repeated actions, behaviours and reactions that for you personally create a response. Every second your brain is filtering the information it’s receiving and asking “Do we like what we’re seeing?” It then translates that information into a feeling and you react accordingly.
It’s how we can walk down a street and greet a smile and wink from a stranger with either a sneer and an eye role, or a returned smile and wink. In that moment your brain has asked you a question and made a decision based on a response.
Step Two: Know your intentions, and understand your partners too!
Love can come in many forms and has many layers, but between two people in a romantic environment, it’s an interactive process that involves two unique sets of eyes, minds, bodies, sets of values, thought processes, belief systems…and herein lies a potential problem.
What if your version of what symbolizes a loving, respectful relationship is different to your partner’s version?
What if your belief systems or values are misaligned? Can you ever enjoy a fulfilling relationship in that scenario?
And we can only understand the answers to these questions if we know our intentions for the partnership.
Take our example of the couple walking down the street who smile and wink at each other. At this stage, their brains have made a decision based on aesthetics; physical attributes and behaviour.
If those two people decide to meet for a drink or dinner later that night, their brains begin to analyze the way they speak, the way they make eye contact, the stories they tell, the way they treat other people, their body language, and then come to another conclusion about whether this person is aligned with their intentions.
To get to that point – you must know what your intentions are. Are you just looking for a casual hook up? Are you looking to start long term relationship? Are you looking for a friendship that can develop over time? Once we are crystal clear on our intentions, it makes it easier for our brains to decide whether the potential partner is meeting them.
Step Three: Listen to your instincts and your inner voice
Once we are crystal clear on our intentions, it makes it easier for our brains to decide whether the potential partner is meeting them.
The intentions of your potential partner, which will start to present themselves either immediately or over several meetings is where looking for love can lead to not finding it.
If there is desperation in a person seeking love and a long-term relationship, invariably they will find a sexual relationship relatively quickly – and often after ignoring the warnings that have come from that inner voice, telling you “No this isn’t the one, keep looking.”
Your inner voice, is a collection of the all the information that your brain is collecting. Ignore your inner voice at your own peril – it’s usually on point.
Sometimes when you ignore the inner voice it’s because you’re sacrificing one of your values for another. For example, our couple that met on the street and are now on their first date.
Maybe one of them wants a long term relationship, one of them only wants a hook up and is very open about it, and the other is aware of it, and willing to sacrifice a value or an element, because having some form of acceptance (or attraction) by another is better than non at all – isn’t it?
This is where you knowing your values and your intentions really well leads your decisions to be based on whether someone else is currently meeting them and how you move forward with them.
One way that you can get clear on your values and your intentions is by taking a simple test to determine what you personally are looking for in a fulfilling relationship, the most important values to you and how they are being met. You can take The Happy Test here.
The $million question, “How do I find the one for me?”
You’ve heard it said before that you should be ready for love, to receive love. And while that’s a valid point, it’s all about knowing what love means to you and what you’re looking for in a relationship.
If you follow our 3 simple steps:
- Understand what love is for you
- Know yours and your partners intentions and
- Listen to your inner voice!
Then you’re a lot closer to finding “the one” that fulfils all the qualities of what a loving and respectful partner means to you.
What to do next?
Really think about what matters to you and what is necessary for you to enjoy in a relationship. You can take The Happy Test (link) now and discover your values, what you truly seek and how they affect your relationships.
Remember…
Love is a single word for a multitude of experiences that life and what it offers and what you create, brings. It’s a beautiful thing, and we all deserve it!
Let us know if you’ve ever sacrificed your values or your personal standards in a relationship and what the end result was, in the comments below.
