love.jpg

Unlike falling over, there is a moment of choice when falling in love. We might like to deny it, as it doesn’t fit into the romantic uncontrollable notion, that these emotions just come upon us and you can’t help who your fall in love with. But if you’re honest you might have experience that there is a moment when you know you could stop yourself, but you choose not to. Therefore I believe you choose to fall in love.
If I’m right than it also stands to reason that you can choose when to stop fixating on love.

For the first three months of a new relationship, love is a rush of oxytocin. Oxytocin is a hormone that gives you those giddy falling in love feelings. It a clever hormone as it turns off if after several times of having sex (which takes roughly three months) if the woman doesn’t get pregnant. Speaking as a woman, oxytocin can hit us hard, we tell our friends ‘I’ve never felt like this about anyone before’ and they kindly remind us we say that every time! Then suddenly from out of nowhere, it’s gone. He gets a haircut, says something dumb and we are so over it. When you’re in the flow of an oxytocin rush its addictive. It makes you want to be in each other’s company all the time. If you can’t see the person you have the connection with, the loss can feel heart breaking. You really are letting go of an addiction that is base in procreation.

So doesn’t this contradict my pervious statement, that you choose when you fall in love? Let me explain, the oxytocin doesn’t choose for you, it flows after your choice.

Many of my clients find they have problems moving on when a relationship breaks down, or from the impossibly love of someone else’s partner, or someone who doesn’t share your sexuality.  In basic terms getting over it, boils down to two things: Self-esteem and self-discipline.

You can choose to be in a romantic notion of ‘unrequited’ or ‘impossible’ love because sometimes the pain of it, feels… nice! If it didn’t feel nice why would there be so many songs and films created on the subject? It isn’t gifted to you by a shitty world, it’s a welcome distraction from your own life, or being in a real love relationship, it can be a yearning for healing, to get the love from someone else we perceive we lacked from our partners.

Yet you can change your mind, use a bit of discipline and move on, but it takes self-esteem. You have to love yourself enough to not be willing to hurt yourself over and over. A remarkable thing happens when you have self-love, you can love everyone you want to. When you love yourself if they can’t love you it doesn’t matter, you don’t need it. Your own needs are fulfilled by yourself, so you don’t need that validation kiss at the end of an e-mail/text or the ‘I love you too’. Of course it’s wonderful not to be alone and to have someone in your life that’s got your back. But we need to change from ‘wanting’ to ‘desire’ to have a pure form of love. Wanting is needy and manipulative, desire is when you love being in someone’s company without the need for ownership.

Most of the time real love term love comes from loving how someone makes us feel in their company. We love who we are when we are around them. We shine and like ourselves the most when we are with them. Of course we can love them, love how they think, what they say, the quirky little mannerisms. But what makes love last is that we love who we are when we are around them.  For my book ‘Intuitive lovers I asked people ‘what makes you love your partner?’ Very rarely did anyone give a list of attributes of the other person; they gave a list of emotions and benefits they were getting by being with them. It’s true when they say love someone in a way you would want to be loved. In a perfect world, that would have to be without ownership or conditions.