Hi there! Claire here…
Arielle and I shared during our opening to the Art of Love Summit event that what’s critical for a happy, healthy, lasting, loving relationship is the following…
Key #1 is to Vision Your Soulmate Relationship.
- You feel chemistry and a soulmate connection. I love Arielle’s definition of a soulmate:
A soulmate is someone with whom you share a deep and profound connection and feel that you can completely be yourself. Someone you love unconditionally, and who loves you unconditionally, and when you look into their eyes you have the experience of being at “home.”
- You need to share the same values and want the same things out of life
These don’t need to be the same surface interests, such as you both like to drink green juice and go to yoga retreats (remember, Liz Gilbert said during the Finale that some of her worst relationships were with men who shared these interests with her!)
It’s more about you wanting the same things out of life and being able to support each other to fulfill your aspirations and potentials.
- They have the qualities that are essential in a good life-partner.
These are some of the highlights of what you should expect from someone you’re considering getting into a long-term relationship with:
You count on them to keep you physically and emotionally safe
When you are stressed out, hurt, or ill, they provide concern and assistance
When you share your thoughts, feelings and worries. they listen and respond with compassion, empathy and care
You trust them and you count on them to keep their word
They want to spend time with you and they make future plans with you
They celebrate your wins in life and hold your hands in the down times
They are financially responsible (much more important than a bank balance in any given moment)
Your happiness is as important to them as your own as is theirs to you
TIP: Being open, receptive and available for love enables you to feel and sense potential soulmate connections.
Love Power Statement: I am already connected to my soulmate and open and available right now to meet my beloved.
During our Amplify Your Love Manifesting Power kick-off session we talked about how you can open to the possibility of great love and begin your soulmate relationship now!
“This event was so magical!!! One of the shifts that I’ve experienced has sparked from connecting the golden cord from my heart to that of my soulmate.”
—Carly
AND, one other thing you MUST know about in the process of clarifying your vision for love is understanding the new science of “attachment theory”.
In his incredibly enlightening Keynote The Skills to Create Lasting Bonds, attachment expert Dr. Amir Levine explained the 3 attachment styles that develop from early childhood and how you can use this information to find your mate!
Here’s an except from Dr. Levine’s Keynote:
“If, for example, we love to be intimate and close, yet we’re very sensitive to threat in the relationship, we have what we call the Anxious Attachment Style.
If we love to be close and we’re loving and warm, yet we are not that sensitive to threat to the relationship, we don’t think something terrible is going to happen to the relationship, if we stumble, if we have a fight we don’t think it’s the end of the world, then we tend to have what we call a Secure Attachment Style.
“Then the Avoidance Attachment Style is someone who also is, as I told you, we all have this system in the brain to choose someone else from the crowd and make them special and unique, but something strange happens when once they’ve chosen and once closeness has been reached in a relationship…
They start to feel uncomfortable with too much closeness and intimacy and they find ways to keep their partners at arm’s length.”
According to Dr. Levine, many anxious women seem to reject secure men and it’s one of the key things to understand and overcome if you’re an “anxious” type looking for a loving relationship.
“It’s very, very helpful for people to understand that sometimes they’ve been conditioned in the way that’s not favorable to them. Oftentimes people, when they meet someone, especially someone anxious, when they meet someone avoidant, initially there could be this feeling of magic that happens between them and then, the unavailability of the other person.
So, they are constantly activated waiting for them to call or waiting for them to get together. Then once they get together, it’s like, “Sheeeew,” they can relax and they feel better. People mistakenly think that this is passion. They mistaken anxiety to passion. I try to show people that it has nothing to do with passion. It’s really more anxiety of someone who is intermittently unavailable or available, which kind-of sensitizes the system. That’s one thing to really, really be careful of.
Then the other things is, and it has to do more with, that our society tends to equate masculinity with avoidance. I think really, mistakenly, people think, “All men need to go into their man cave. All men can’t really express their feelings. All masculine men are quiet and reserved,” which is completely untrue when you actually look at the research.
The research shows that the vast majority of men—fifty something percent of the population—are secure. They’re very comfortable talking about their emotions. They’re very comfortable talking about being close and intimate. They don’t need to go into their man cave. There’s also a good majority of men that are anxious. I think what happens is that women tend to equate avoidance with masculinity and that’s also something that I work on with people, to see that it can be very different.”
So, one of the key question in looking for someone with the capacity to be a great life partner is learning how to sport a “secure” type man.
How do we do that? Dr Levine explains:
“From the very beginning through dating—I like to always show movie clips of secure relationships, some movies and TV shows, that really drives the message home that—things are effortless. When you go out with someone who’s secure, they are dependable, they will ask you out at the end of the first date or soon thereafter. They wear their emotions on their sleeves. It’s easy for them to say how they feel. You know that you’re seen and that your needs are important.
Especially if you learn how to use these tools that I teach, where you actually send probes out there to see if they can understand your needs and respond to them, then it’s much easier to spot the secure man or a secure woman.
The most important thing is to really trust your instincts and learn how to use this Attachment way of communicating in order to bring out the security in people and to be able to tell if someone is insecure and they would now be able to give you what you need.
With love,
Claire