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July 20, 2022

Romantic Love: Why we Choose the Partners we Do.

 

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Yesterday, I started to wonder about this, maybe to a deeper degree than usual.

I was witnessing a lovely moment between two friends of mine. They have known each other maybe for 20 years. They get along so well; they agree on many things about life including the most important values, hobbies, and interests—what counts. With time, I have noticed that they protect each other in front of others, and are always supportive of one another. I also noticed that neither of them has ever been in a relationship that lasted. There is this beautiful, soft, gentle, and flowing energy between them. They have deep talks too. They appreciate and value each other.

Yet, they have never been together as a couple.

And so, I witnessed this simple yet so harmonious, and unexpected moment—it was a movie-type one—when they were out in the garden during a party, making space to be only the two of them, laughing. This aroused my curiosity. I was intrigued and started to reflect on love, and who we tend to “pick” to be our romantic partner.

And suddenly, I felt this major question finding its way into my head.

Are we truly, I mean us as humans and generally, in romantic relationships with the people who are the “best” for us? With the ones who are the most aligned?

I feel that often, we actually opt for people to heal with. We do unconsciously choose the ones who will help us—in easy or uneasy ways—deal with our inner wounds. Those which are sometimes repressed beforehand, often times originated in childhood. We choose the ones who cause through their own actions, behavior, and words the resurfacing of our own pain, for the worst and the best. We do select those who we will learn from in order to heal to a deeper degree, I believe oftentimes unconsciously.

I kept wondering: do we always pick the people we can be the happiest with?

You know what, I answered: I’m not sure.

There are several reasons why we may not choose the easiest, the happiest, and the healthiest love for our lives. Firstly, and again, for all those on a spiritual journey, life and the Universe have us start relationships with the souls that will help heal and permanently shed our own karma. We start deep bonds with the ones who will make us evolve, and we do the same for them, reflecting back to them as mirrors their most important areas of growth. In fact, one never sees themselves so deep, but within the container of a romantic relationship.

But also, and perhaps, that’s even the biggest reason.

Love, deep, fulfilling, and “good”—utterly scares many of us.

There is something there, in the fluidity, easiness, and peace of true lovethat many are not used to.

For many of us, I must say, love wasn’t learned in that way in our childhood households. This type of flowing energy wasn’t what we sawwhat set the tone when it comes to our vision of love. Maybe, as we were kids, we saw love as changing, sometimes irritable, sometimes unstable, sometimes angry for nothing. Our caregivers may have enmeshed their own emotions with our ownoftentimes placing the burden of their own unresolved pain onto our young, fragile shoulders. For many of us as kids, love had this crazy, fiery, unsteady energy. Love could be mad at us fast. Love, maybe, wasn’t that supportive. Love, perhaps, wasn’t able to give us this serene, peaceful, grounded confidence in life and in ourselves that it should have provided.

Sometimes love would reproach us with things we didn’t do. Sometimes we had to apologize for coming back dirty with mud—whilst that was our right to be alive as a kid, to make mistakes, to have fun. Sometimes, the love we received wasn’t unconditional. Maybe some weren’t loved for what they were in truth—but they were expected to become a specific version of the good boy or the good girl, of the successful one of the family, actually fitting with their parents’ expectations.

In other words, and for several reasons, maybe the love that we learned as kids weren’t healthy.

As a result, many of us learned that in some way, love has to be earned.

Love isn’t something you receive just like that—just because you are you, breathing, alive, and beautiful as you are.

Love is something you must win if you do achieve what’s expected of you.

Yes, many of us learned love as a conditional energy. This also means that love wasn’t exactly flowing, fluid, natural—organic.

Maybe, we started to see “true love” as impossible, or a mere chance. Maybe, we learned that love is “hard”—that love may not flow, that it may hurt.

And now that I remember this scene that I observed within my group of friends, I have to acknowledge that maybe, sometimes, we as humans, don’t truly allow love in. Perhaps, love is already around us and we don’t even notice it. Perhaps, love isn’t that hard to get, to water, to keep.

We may believe somewhere deep in our psyches that this kind of harmonious, serene flow of laughter and love that I witnessed between these two, is “too good to be true.”

What if we were wrong?

What about this—does healthy love, as an energy, push us away oftentimes, simply because we aren’t used to it?

Do we reject what’s best for ourselves because it’s unfamiliar, hence unknown, maybe scary?

And, what if we were looking for love in the wrong places sometimes?

What if we set our brains differently, accepting that love can be flowing, fluid harmonious, and serene?

If we were doing this, what would we receive?

~

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