FINDING LOVE
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 18.
Hello, my friends. Today, I want to talk about love. I would venture to say that I don't think you'll find many people who would say they don't want love in their life.
There are a million different forms of love and types of relationships that you can have that involve love, of course, so we may not all agree on what the love we want looks like. But I think you would be hard-pressed to find someone who didn't want any form of love in their life. Obviously, we love our children.
We may love our parents, whether they're still with us or not. We have friends that we love. And then there's romantic love.
And that's the love I want to focus on today. Now, before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that not all romantic love involves romance, but I'm using the phrase romantic love to distinguish that particular love that involves sexual attraction. But even more, it could also be considered synonymous with attachment, affection, care, concern, loyalty, or devotion.
So whether you're looking for romantic love in the sense of building a lifelong partnership or just having hot sec, whatever it is, this one's for you. And whether you're already in a relationship, wondering whether you should stay in a relationship or looking for love, this one's also for you. How do you find love? And particularly, how do you find love in this stage of our lives when so much is already in transition? Our kids may be leaving home.
We may be reevaluating what makes us happy, whether our current relationship makes us happy, or maybe we're ready to go out and find a new relationship after a divorce, or to find our first meaningful relationship now that the kids are out of the house and we have more time to devote ourselves to a potential partner. So whether you find yourself in this moment married or single, in whatever flavor that looks like for you, what I find is so interesting is that it's actually rare for anyone to be 100% satisfied with where they are in their relationship status. And I don't even necessarily mean that we're thinking, Oh God, I wish I wasn't single, or I wish I wasn't married.
People may generally be happy with their relationship status. But what I find is that their general perspective on that status can sometimes be somewhat negative. Here's the thing about love.
We're frequently looking for somebody else to create the feeling of love for us. Think about it. Is this true for you? Whether you're single and looking for love in any form, or if you're married and seeking love in that relationship.
I think the way that we've tended to always think about love, and I know this is the way I thought about it for the majority of my life, is that somebody else is responsible for whether or not I feel loved. Let's dig into this for a minute. If somebody else is responsible for how I feel, that's a pretty helpless and powerless place to be.
And I think that's why love can be so painful so much of the time. Because if we don't receive love in the way we want to or if somebody does things that don't align with what we would interpret as loving, then we don't get to feel any love. There are a lot of things that we could look for in a romantic relationship, obviously.
But I imagine for most of us, some form of love is towards the top of the list. Even if that love is of the one night stand variety. Because look, if we didn't want to feel something in a romantic relationship, why even bother? Why bother having any relationships at all? In fact, when we enter into a relationship with anybody in our life, it's because we want to feel something in return.
I know this may sound uncomfortable, because we don't go around thinking about what we're going to get out of relationships. But ultimately, and really think about this for yourself, if we didn't have the motivation to feel something for ourselves, when we engage in a relationship, we wouldn't bother. We just wouldn't.
It goes back to that motivational hierarchy I talked about in an earlier podcast. After we get our basic needs of food, shelter, and safety taken care of, we're then motivated to seek out connection. As humans, one of our basic needs is to form connections with other people so that we can feel something love, support, nurtured.
So it's perfectly natural that in life we seek out relationships. And the goal of these relationships for us, whether we intentionally think about it or not, the goal is for us to feel something. So let's just agree for argument's sake that the goal of a romantic relationship is to feel love.
And if love isn't the emotion you care most about feeling in a romantic relationship, please feel free to think about this in the context of the right emotion for you. But again, for the sake of this discussion, I'm going to focus on love. What does it mean to feel love? What does it really mean to you? How do you know if you are feeling love? This is really interesting stuff, right? Because we have these little phrases we associate with how love happens, love at first sight, falling in love, growing to love someone.
But how do you know? And look, I'm not trying to have this existential conversation about love. What I really want you to think about for you is what does it feel like in your body to feel love? Get really tangible about it. What does it feel like in your body to feel love? Some might say it feels warm, maybe tingling or throbbing.
You could feel a little dizzy, particularly in the early stages of love. If you were to describe it as a color, you might say it was red. The feeling could fill your chest, maybe even extend to your limbs.
It could feel like movement. If you're thinking about a love that has existed for you for a really long time, maybe it feels steady, less throbbing and tingling and maybe more substantial, comfortable, safe, like a warm blanket. In contrast, if you're in a relationship that's bringing you pain, you may experience your love for that person in the context of a negative physical sensation.
Alongside the love, you may feel physical pain as an expression of the negative emotion connected to your relationship. And the point is we experience emotion as a physical sensation in our body. And so in an immediate sense, when we're looking to love, we're seeking the positive physical sensations that we associate with the type of love we want.
But we also want to feel love because of what we think it will create for us in our life. We connect the concept of love with so many other positive feelings and experiences, namely feeling connection, companionship, safety, partnership, sexual attraction, caring, loyalty, happiness, joy, laughter, parenthood, pride, appreciation, financial security. The list could go on and on.
In fact, over time, some of these other feelings and desires could actually become more important to us in maintaining a relationship than even the concept of loving that person. So we talk about emotions motivating us to take action when you love someone. And again, I'm specifically talking about romantic or sexual love.
When you love someone, how do you act towards that person? The feeling of love not only creates this physical sensation in our body, but it also causes us to act in a certain way. What is that for you? How do you show up with the other person? Are you particularly caring? Do you do kind things for them to show up in a certain way that demonstrates your love? When you show up that way, more often than not, your own love is reinforced. I feel love and I demonstrate my love.
And the result for me is I get to experience the joy of giving love. When you love someone romantically and you demonstrate that love, that feeling of love that you have and the actions you take from that love actually creates more abundance in your own love. Now, I want to point out that this whole time I've been talking about love, I actually haven't talked about the other person at all.
That's because the feeling of love that you have is a sensation in your body that actually has nothing to do with the other person. Hear me out. The other person can't feel the sensation of love that you experience in your own body.
They can't feel your love. Remember, we've talked about the physical sensations that you experience as love. Those are yours.
Other people can't possibly feel those sensations. But then when you feel love, you take action. You demonstrate your love and the actions you take with the other person and the words that you say.
The result for you is that you're more abundant in your love. None of that has anything to do with the other person. I know it's trippy and totally counter to the way we typically think about love, but stick with me.
Your love creates sensations in your body and spurs you to take action to demonstrate your love. And the result for you is that you get to experience your own love for the other person more deeply. Now let's talk about the other person.
They cannot feel your love, the sensation of love in your body. But what they do experience is their observation of the specific actions and words that you take and express from your own feeling of love. So for example, they experience you kissing them.
Maybe they read a text from you. Maybe eat a dinner you cook for them. They could hear you say, I love you or I missed you.
So here you are expressing your love by kissing your partner, sending them a loving text, cooking them dinner, telling them you love them. Now here's your partner. They observe these things.
On the same day, they observe other things. These circumstances could include a deal at work falling through, a text from his or her boss, a long list of tasks left undone. They come home, they observe your expressions of love.
But all of these circumstances, both your actions and the specific things that have happened at work, might collide to lead your to think, I've had a really long day and I don't have anything left to give. This thinking leaves them feeling emotionally exhausted. And then this feeling causes them to act ambivalently.
They don't respond to your text. They kiss you briefly when they get home. They don't eat much of the dinner you cooked.
And they also don't say thank you. They go back up to the office to work or they go to bed early. They don't talk much.
Their result, they don't give anything to you or themselves. They're just done. But notice what has just happened.
You give your love. You give it selflessly and abundantly. You give it because you get to experience the fullness and joy of giving love.
But then you experience their reactions and not even reactions directly to your actions of love, although it feels like it. You experience your partner, not eating the dinner, not thanking you, not telling you they missed you too. And your thought, let's call the Jason.
Jason's blowing me off. I worked so hard to make a nice dinner and I got nothing in return. He's not showing up for me in the way I'm showing up for him.
Now, instead of love, you feel angry, frustrated. And now from these feelings, you blow your partner off. You stop going out of your way to show him love, at least for that night.
And you think about all of the ways, even going back weeks and months, you think about all of the ways Jason hasn't done enough to your love. In the meantime, in the same way, your original expression of love had nothing to do with Jason because you felt love and took action from that love. That was all you.
Then he felt emotionally exhausted and took action from that exhausted feeling, which had actually nothing to do with you. And believe it or not, you observing your partner, not eating your dinner and going to bed early. That's not the reason you felt angry.
Your anger, even that feeling was not caused by your partner. How is any of this possible? Here's what I want you to understand. Your partner or a partner in the running, someone who you meet or go on a date with, whoever this other person is, that other person is not the reason you feel love.
The reason you feel love, the reason you feel anything is because of a sentence in your mind, just a sentence. Let's go back to the example. Why in this example, do you think you would feel love for someone and then take the action of making them dinner and telling them you love and miss them? Why would you go to this trouble? I would imagine it might look something like this.
If it were me, I might be thinking I've missed Jason and I can't wait for him to come home. This statement would make me feel love and motivate me to express that love. Then Jason comes home and he's thinking I've had a really long day and I don't have anything left to give.
He removes himself from that feeling of exhaustion. And I think after observing his actions, he's blowing me off. He's not showing up for me in the way I'm showing up for him.
Three sentences that cause three different emotions, love, exhaustion, anger. We've grown up assuming that the circumstances of our life create our emotions. It's so natural for us to think we feel love because of this other person, or we feel exhausted because of the pile of work we have on our desk, or we feel anger because the other person wasn't appreciative of what we did.
All of that sounds right, doesn't it? But the circumstance of the person themselves, who they are or what they say or do, between that, those facts and the emotion you feel while interacting with a person, in between there is a sentence. And that sentence is your interpretation of the circumstances. First, the circumstance is just your partner.
You think about them and you think I've missed them. I can't wait for them to come home. You feel love.
You show your love. Your result is this abundance of love. But the thought I've missed him and I can't wait for him to come home, that thought is optional.
On a different day, you might think, crap, he's coming home and he's going to expect that I've figured out what we're doing for dinner or darn, I wish he was working late tonight because I wanted to go out with girlfriends. These other sentences could cause you to feel annoyed or frustrated. But meanwhile, the person hasn't changed.
He's still him, but you have all sorts of feelings about him depending on what you think. In fact, later that night, Jason comes home. You observe how he acts and you think a different thought.
He's not reciprocating my love. And now you're angry. Again, same Jason, but we interpret the circumstances of our lives on a minute by minute basis.
And these interpretations, these sentences in our brain, these are what create our emotional experience at any given time. And here's another thing to consider about these sentences. They aren't true.
They aren't facts. They might feel true to you. You might be able to provide a long list of reasons that justify your anger and frustration.
Here's an example. Matthew works until 9 PM, Monday through Friday. And Susan thinks he's always working late.
He never spends time with me. She could probably come up with a long list of dates when Matthew has worked late and she thinks he never spends time with me. She feels ignored.
The statement, he's always working late. He never spends time with me. It feels true to Susan.
But what's actually true is that Matthew works until 9 PM, Monday through Friday. That's what we could prove to be true. Susan's interpretation of that fact is that he's always working late.
He never spends time with me. And then she feels ignored. But what if Susan thought instead, Matthew works so hard to take care of me and the family.
Same facts. Matthew's still working until 9 PM, but now instead of feeling ignored, Susan feels supported and taken care of. Same facts, different interpretation.
Matthew works so hard to take care of me and the family. Different feeling. What I want to demonstrate is that the way we feel as it relates to our romantic partners, the way we feel is a result of a sentence in our brain, an interpretation of circumstances.
Here's why this is really good news. Because if our feelings really are directly caused by some other person's words, deeds, and general attributes, if that were really true, we would have absolutely no control over our emotional life. And honestly, this is how it feels sometimes.
But if you can stop to see that it's not the person who creates the feeling, it's the sentence in your mind that creates the feeling. Now you can start to create the emotional life that you want. You actually can observe and begin to manage your mind and the way that you interpret the circumstance of your life.
Let's even go to the basics. Why do you feel love for someone in the first place? If we can build on this and explore for a moment, the concept that it's not the person, but our interpretation of that person, let's try it. So anyone you meet can have any one of a trillion different attributes, male, female, height, weight, hair color, age, where they live, what they do for a living, whether or not they have kids.
These are all facts we can prove, right? We can observe, or the person could tell us, I'm male. I'm straight. I weigh 190 pounds.
I live in California. I work at a bank. I have one child.
And in addition to these attributes, there are things that the person can do that we interpret in a certain kind of way. They say something, we might perceive that it's funny. We observe them professionally or in the way that they spend money and we might think that they are responsible or not.
We could see how they interact with their child and think they're a good father. All of these attributes are simply interpretations of the other person based on what you observe. And this is actually really good news because if you and all of your girlfriends all observed and responded to the exact same things in every single potential partner, you'd probably all be going after the exact same person.
And luckily that's not the case. Here's another way to think about it. We could all write up a wishlist of the attributes we would want to have in another person in order to truly have the love that we wanted with that person.
The list could be a mix of physical attributes, but also a list of actions, words, personality types, a whole picture of who this ideal lover would be. Now, imagine we had written up this list, no names attached, and we were in a room of a hundred people all with their own description of their ideal lover. So what if we all mixed up our lists and eventually each one of us ended up with someone else's wishlist and there are no names attached.
So you don't know whose wishlist you're holding. And you don't know if the wishlist is actually describing someone real or someone the other person wishes they could meet. If you read the list and imagine that you had this person in your life who fit all of these dream attributes, would you feel love imagining that person? Keep in mind, this is someone else's wishlist.
Would you feel love imagining someone else's dream lover? The answer is no. Now you might be thinking, of course, this is just a piece of paper with a list of attributes. You're not getting to know a real person.
We are all individuals. We each have in our minds, in our belief system, an underlying, maybe even unrecognized series of values we look for in a romantic partner. Beyond even the basics of what physical characteristics you're looking for, you're also looking for someone who acts in a certain way, who says things in a certain kind of way.
So here's the supercomputer of your brain taking all of these characteristics, actions, and words of this other person into account and adding it all up and creating an interpretation of who that other person is based on what you're looking for, what your values are. You might've dated someone or met someone and had the thought they're too young or too boring, not affectionate enough, not interesting enough. Then it's like your brain spits them out.
That one's a no. But it's actually not that there's anything inherently wrong with person. It's just that that person's attributes, words, and deeds didn't add up to what you were looking for.
It just wasn't a match. Each one of us could be described in a list of attributes, but it's only when someone experiences these attributes and interprets these characteristics, actions, and words in a way that creates love in their own mind. It's only when they observe all of these facts, actions, and words that come together, and then they can think, this is the one.
This is the person I can't live without. I invite you to think about how this methodology applies to any relationship you have, whether it's someone you first meet, whether you're dating someone you've divorced or been married to for a really long time. We're constantly taking in observations of this other person and creating real-time assessments of how that person stacks up to what we expect from them.
Here they are just doing and saying what they're doing. And we can also assume that they're doing and saying things based on some intention on their part. But here we are observing and judging and feeling a certain way about them because of how we interpret them in our minds.
This is amazing news, my friends. We're so convinced the way our lover shows up is the reason we feel loved or unloved, appreciated or unappreciated. We're certain that the reason why we're unhappy or unhappy in our relationship is because of what the other person does or doesn't do.
I can't tell you how many times I'll be talking to a friend or a client and they'll tell me a long list of things they wish were different about their lover or the things they want in a lover. The implication is that if we could just fix the other person, design the other person, get them to do exactly what we want all of the time or most of the time, if we could just change them, we could feel loved, appreciated, happier. We have a manual for the people we let into our lives.
We want them to show up in a certain kind of way. We want them to demonstrate their love for us in a certain way. Even when we love someone, we can feel let down and disappointed in our relationships.
We'll often say, I love him, but, and following the but there's this unfulfilled wish, a sentence in our minds that implies that what our lover is doing isn't quite good enough. Even when we love, it can feel like it's not enough. It's not everything we thought it should be.
We enter into these romantic relationships because we want to feel love, but we have an idea of what that should look like. And throughout the course of any relationship, the other person is only going to meet your expectations. Some of the time, I'm sorry to convey the news, but it's true.
In fact, it would be impossible for anyone to meet our expectations of them a hundred percent of the time, because in fact, we rarely express all of our expectations of our lovers to them. We may not even express half of our expectations. It's actually comical.
How many times have you been disappointed by a gift or some amount of effort on your lover's part? Did you even tell your lover what you wanted for your birthday? Did you tell your lover exactly what you expected of them in what quantity, in what timeframe, with what amount of enthusiasm or level of effort? More often than not, we don't communicate these expectations and yet we're still left disappointed that these expectations haven't been met. Notice that all of this, what you expect of the other person, how you want them to show up, how you want them to treat you, our expectations are simply a series of sentences in our mind. And when our expectations are not met, we make it mean something, often something painful.
What if we're wrong? What if we could take a step back and question our interpretation? And I don't mean that you don't get to set expectations, but the problem is that when we set expectations of our lover, but we don't even bother to communicate them, they're guaranteed to let us down. And on top of all of this, each person in the couple has their own uncommunicated expectations of the other person. Let's go back to our original example, this time from Jason's perspective.
He doesn't necessarily know that his partner has been thinking about him all day and that she intentionally made him dinner from the feeling of love and a desire to be with him. His circumstances involved a large stack of work, an email from his boss, and his interpretation of those circumstances was that he was just done. His circumstances also involved him coming home and seeing that his partner had made him a nice dinner.
Is it possible that he did appreciate the gesture, but simply didn't have the energy to demonstrate it? It could even be that he so appreciated the gesture of love that he took it in as comfort without even thinking that it needed to be reciprocated in that moment. Because in the end, unconditional love does imply that you give love without expectation of something in return, without expectation. Now, I don't mean to imply that we should never have expectations of our lovers.
I don't even know if that's possible. Our brains are constantly judging and evaluating the circumstances of our lives, the actions and deeds of others. And we can't help but judge and evaluate lovers and prospective romantic partners.
We can't help but judge. And we always get to decide whether or not we want to spend time with and invest time in another person. Family, you are often stuck with, but lovers, even husbands and wives, you're not.
You get to choose. You get to choose to leave. But what I want to invite you to do is recognize how your interpretation of your lover's attributes, physical characteristics, personality traits, words, and deeds.
Recognize how your thoughts about these things create positive or negative emotions for you. Because it's never the traits, never the actions or words. It's always your thoughts, your interpretation, your perspective.
That is what creates your emotional experience of the other person. You could actually create the feeling of love with any other person. You might not choose to do this, but you could always find love if you were willing to have a thought about another person that would create a feeling of love for you.
So if you're looking for love, whether you're in a relationship or not, you need to ask yourself why you're not choosing to think about the other person in a way that creates love. It's actually a choice. When you think about all of the things about your lover that make you happy, that you appreciate, I imagine you could find the feeling of love.
Then of course, when we think about all of the things that aren't quite right, incompatible, annoying about our lovers, we can find disconnection and frustration or total disinterest. And think about how you show up with the other person when you feel this way. When you feel frustrated or disinterested, you show up in a way that actually pushes the other person away.
You act in a way or say things that the other person could very likely interpret as not loving, not welcoming. Now, if you really don't care about the person, you may be fine with pushing them away. But if you want to find love, are you creating it for yourself first? Are you thinking in a way that fosters a feeling of love for yourself, for the other person? Because if you're acting from a feeling of love, true unconditional love, you are giving your love to another person.
You create an abundance of love within yourself. Stop waiting for your lover to give you love. If you want to find love, you find it in yourself first.
And it just could be that if the other person receives your love in the way you intend it, unconditional, open, giving, if you're with someone who truly receives that love, you will be creating something really special. If you want to find love, find it in yourself first. Until next time, friends.
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