How to Find Love That Lasts this Valentine's Day

Most of us crave deep intimacy and connection and Valentine’s Day tends to be a time when we’re reminded of our longing for true love.

Whether we are in partnership or not, and even in the healthiest of relationships, we can experience a sense of something lacking, a feeling that there’s something deeper, truer or even someone better “out there.” Our minds can convince us that there is an ideal partner, and yet our experience shows us that even the “perfect” person begins to lose the luster of the “honeymoon stage”.

Shortly thereafter, a background hum of dissatisfaction comes back and we find ourselves once again in a familiar and incessant search for the “right” one, the one that will put an end to our seeking.

I’m not saying that there aren’t people out there that are a better fit for us, but focusing our attention on them keeps us just far enough away from what we’re really after, what we’ve been longing for all along.

At some point in our lives, we’ve all experienced a feeling of wholeness, when everything else seemed to lose significance and we lost ourselves in the intimacy of the moment. Maybe this happened with a lover, a friend, a grandparent, a child, a pet or even a sunset.

I invite you to try something with me now, a simple exercise:

Take a moment to recall one of those memories where you felt so completely loved, seen, accepted and at peace with the world. Sit for a moment and let those old feelings emerge again, imagining as if you were right then and there. Take your time…can you feel them?

Notice how these feelings can resurface and are available right now, even when whatever or whomever you attributed those feelings to are not currently with you. It is so easy to buy into the misconception that the love you experienced in a particular situation was because of what was happening or whom you were with. Yet if you slow things down to investigate and trace where the origins of these feelings came from, you will see that they have always come from within YOU.

A situation or a person can certainly evoke these feelings, and while that’s beautiful, it is not something they gave you; it was awakened within you and reflected in them.

For a moment, we temporarily suspended the world of duality as our ego gave way for this love to take center stage and we experienced the radiance of our true nature.

The sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction arises out of the misunderstanding that this love resides outside of ourselves and it sets us off in this chase to find completeness “out there.”

Of course some people are more compatible for us to be with and will better support us in connecting with our natural state, but they have never been and never will be the ones who complete us.

Once this longing for love is pointed inward, we are able to realize and embody it more consciously within ourselves and connect with the wholeness that is already present.

We then enter into relationships from a space that is that is unconditional, that overflows, is generous and allows everyone to be as they are.

We know someone didn’t give this love to us and therefore it cannot be taken away.

This is one of the most liberating realizations we can experience in relationships, because it unshackles us from clinging to or seeking love in another.

It enables us to love wholeheartedly and sets the stage for us to freely discover true love in each other.

I used to be a couples therapist and want to share with you a Free Love Quiz that takes 15 minutes and will change the way you view relationships from now on! It can save you years of unnecessary relationship struggle.

May you discover the deepest love this Valentines Day – that which is right here in your own heart – always available, open, vast, yet intimate. May you realize that the entire world IS your valentine…and YOU ARE the expression of It’s Love.

Love,

Alyssa