Finding True and Lasting Love

There are so many people feeling lonely and looking for love, desperate for a partner, and understandably so! It is a built-in mechanism in our minds, our bodies, as well as our souls and unfortunately our media can cash in on this fact. There are so many markets based on this weakness that so many of us can succumb to, and so many advertising schemes based on exploiting it for profit.

People are often lured in by promises that they will be more attractive using some products than others and there are countless dating programs online and off promising to make it easier to find the love of your life, your soul mate, your beau ideal. They certainly can be helpful resources, but more often than not people can become disappointed in them or even become hopeless when such programs don’t deliver the results that they claim. I don’t think that this situation in general can be remedied, because I don’t feel it’s the plan that fails. Any one of those dating sites, books and programs can work if only you begin them with the right mindset and reasonable expectations.

However, I think you must understand, you are the most important person that will ever care about you. How you feel about and treat yourself has so much more impact than the feelings of those around you. The better you feel about yourself and the more you love and value yourself, the less effect anyone else can have on your personal outlook or your own self-image. The more you value and care for yourself, the less you will need to seek the affection of others.

Of course, you will still want to experience true love and a healthy, long-lasting relationship, you will continue to look for it and be open to it. But when we are more desperate to find someone else who will love us, the more likely we may be to accept affection from others without truly understanding what their motives are. When we rely on receiving affection from others to feel better about ourselves, to feel validated, to feel attractive and self-confident, we will accept attention from less than savory admirers.

So many of us get into relationships with the wrong people, simply because they made us feel good about ourselves in the beginning, only to become disillusioned later in the relationship and learn that the source of that attention that made us feel so good is not who we believed they were, they had other motives, they are unfaithful, they are abusive. We get hurt mentally, emotionally and at times even physically because we wanted so badly to feel beautiful.

It doesn’t necessarily have to happen this way. We are women. beautiful, remarkable creatures whose bodies do incredible things that we can hardly begin to understand. We have the amazing gift of bearing children, nourishing them within our wombs as our bodies almost magically help them to grow, our bodies can even create the sustenance that will continue to nourish them for months or years after birth if we so choose!

We each have wonderful, unique qualities that we should cherish and the person that we choose to shower with the radiant glow of our affection ought to value all of those fantastic qualities as well! But can you really expect them to see those amazing qualities within if you, the one who knows you best, fails to recognize them?

I have recommended this book “Emotional Blackmail” by Susan Forward to so many people who have come from a relationship full of manipulation and I truly believe that everyone who intends to venture into a relationship with another person should obtain and read this book. To me it is like the bible of relationships, I wish I had it before some of my previous relationships and I am not saying that I was always the angel, I was just able to see and realize the faults of both sides after reading it. Enjoy!