“Love can only be found through the act of loving.”
~ Paulo Coelho
When people ask me this question, they have already tried online dating services or they’re recovering from a breakup that left them feeling hopeless about love.
Here’s what I tell them.
1. Take a course.
Think of something you want to know more about: poetry, religion, archaeology, creative writing, or even DIY tax preparation. Read about course offerings at your local arts center, university, or community college. Find out about online courses that interest you. When you get together with people who want to learn and grow, important things happen. Love often blooms in these groups/classes.
2. Join a book club.
Ask around to find out what your friends are reading. Search online for local book clubs or start your own and let word-of-mouth do the rest. As you enrich your mind with new stories and ideas, you naturally attract people who are doing the same. The daisy-chain of readers and new friendships grows organically and leads to unexpected attractions.
3. Take an exercise class.
Try boxing or spinning or yoga or Pilates, especially if you’re new to these options. Find out where your friends and co-workers go to exercise and ask if you can join them to try out their routines. This expands your kinesthetic learning options and your potential friendship circle too.
4. Read something about the world every day.
Even if you have little time to give the newspaper, check out the main headlines of the New York Times, or follow just a few issues that spark your interest. When you engage this current material, you make yourself more able to converse with new acquaintances at parties or book club meetings or yoga class.
5. Do something that gives back.
Most importantly, find the avenue for your giving. Volunteer at a local shelter or food bank. Find out how you can travel to disaster-affected regions to provide humanitarian assistance in any form. This moves you out into spaces beyond your comfort zone, puts you in touch with new people, and forces you to evolve.
All these activities make us learn. And learning changes us.
Learning works like heat waves, stirring and changing us. And as we change, we grow and expand our sphere of mutual influence. We move in wider arcs that take us into new worlds where there are new and interesting people…..and we become more interesting too!
Dr. Deborah Cox – www.deborahlcox.com
While looking for love doesn’t really work and waiting for a partner to causally happen by feels like a powerless position to be in, there are things we can do to increase the odds of attracting a mate.
Hands down most men agree the sexiest quality about any woman is confidence.
Confidence is not acting confident but rather it is an energy that we exude. When we are truly confident, we light up like a Christmas tree and men will respond positively to that light. Rather than just waiting around, work on creating authentic self-confidence.
Men are very attracted to the feminine energy.
Men and women have a balance of both masculine and feminine energy. Since men are predominately masculine energy, they are innately attracted to our softer, nurturing, creative feminine energy. So work on being more nurturing and softer with yourself. Up your own self care routine.
Take walks in the fresh air rather than going to the gym. Join a yoga class, or some sort of other softer exercise routine. The boot camps, and high-energy fitness classes fuel masculine not feminine energy, so incorporate both into your routine when you feel you must have the higher energy classes.
Another thing you can do is to change the harsh thoughts that you think about yourself into more self-accepting, self-loving thoughts.
If you are less judgmental and harsh with yourself, you will soften. This exercise is better than Botox, your face will soften, your energy will soften and again your internal light will turn on making you more attractive to men.
Also, take up some sort of creative hobby.
Tapping into your creative self will connect you directly with your own feminine energy which men are hard wired to be attracted to. It can be any sort of creative endeavor from cooking to scrapping booking and so many things in between.
When we open our creative channels we become more feminine!
We become more intuitive, softer, more nurturing, we become the essence of who we are biologically. When we live our truth, we light up like a beacon and men far and wide will respond. So rather than waiting for love to find you, work on your own self love which will ultimately attract exactly what you have been looking for.
All of the things above will create authentic self-confidence.
Practice standing taller in your own shoes, practice holding your shoulders back (which opens your heart), practice using clear and direct language (say what you mean and mean what you say), practice openly asserting boundaries with others, and practice taking great care of your self. It will all be worth it in the end.
Cynthia Pickett, LCSW, LADC – www.cynthiapickett.com
Finding a truly authentic loving relationship can be challenging to say the least. Yet, it is most certainly possible when one decides to take a proactive stance to attract a compatible partner. The following steps can be most helpful in getting started to bring love into your life.
1. Be Your True Best Self.
Strive to be the best you can be in Mind, Body, Spirit and Emotions. You want to operate from a whole perspective. The whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. Strive to be your best intellectually. Using your mind to learn and become knowledgable gives you self-confidence and will carry you in meeting potential partners.
Work your body to it’s fullest, which includes healthy nutrition, exercise your way as there is no one right or wrong way. You may want to work out with a buddy if you don’t want to go at it alone. Find some kind of spiritually in your life. Read literature, take some yoga, meditation classes.
On an emotional level, check in with yourself and feel joy each day in your life. Find something to laugh about and seek fun. When you feel good, you put out a positive vibration that others pick up on.
2. Attract Men by Embracing Your True Self.
When you are content with your real authentic self, you exude an aura about you that is appealing to men. Men like an authenticity about a woman who knows who she is. She is not needy, rather she loves life and lives it to her fullest with or without a partner.
3. Be Open to Love While you Continue Living with Your Own Passions.
Join a ski club, take up golf, tennis, take some trips where you would like to go. When you are loving what you do and doing what you love, you are in the flow and and the positive energy is evident.
4. Realize that there is love all around, not just romantic love.
Love comes in many ways. When you are in the moment loving your family, friends, pets and making it your best life, you stand a better chance of attracting romantic love. It may sound redundant, yet love comes to you when you least expect it and you are fully embracing your life.
5. Recognize that you are already whole and complete.
When you feel complete, then you are not looking for a partner to complete you, rather see a partner as an expansion in your life. Be open to opportunities to meet new people. Don’t close yourself off to any possibilities, be a dating service, meeting people through friends, social outings etc.
When you are the best you can be and truly living your own authentic life, love will flow into your life and you will be amazed what a wonderful person you will attract.
Constance Clancy, Ed.D. – www.drconstanceclancy.com
Dating is hard for everyone.
The smorgasbord of potential partners is often biased by what the media currently describes as desirable, leaving many relationship seekers feeling that they don’t qualify. There is no lack of advertised opportunities that “guarantee” success, unfortunately often untruthfully.
The single people I am close to have tried them all, initially enthusiastically, and then, over time, with more understandable cynicism.
As each new lead fizzles, so does optimism and hope. Even doing everything they can to go to the right places, meet the right people, take advantage of every media opportunity, press on friends to expand the search, and go on Google to find former partners who might still be available, many long-time singles remain stymied as to how, or even whether, to keep searching.
How does someone access his or her personal marketability in a marketplace that is often hyped and unrealistic?
And, even when that is possible, what if it hasn’t worked? Giving up reliance on what the outside world may value, what can any one person do to enhance value in a world of rapidly shifting criteria?
Additionally, what is valuable at one stage of life may be unattainable at another or not as important, anymore.
If relationship seekers do not shift their expectations and strategies as their options change, they may find that was once very desirable may no longer be, or other factors arise that lower the value of a “sales package” that is no longer as valuable.
Knowing these parameters, what can people do that will enhance their value over time, less vulnerable to the often frustrating challenges that can be overwhelming?
Are there ways that every person, in some ways, can optimize their desirability in the dating world?
The answer is yes.
The characteristics that may initially be perceived as attractive by either gender are often not those that hold in the long run. (See my articles on Psychology Today Blogs, “Who are the Keepers,” and “The Real Secrets of a Great Relationship.”)
Though it is absolutely necessary to know how to make opportunities happen in order to practice, serious relationship seekers need to be upfront and ready to start a quality relationship from the first moment they begin knowing a new person. (See my article on Psychology Today Blogs, “10 Questions you should ask on a first date.”
So many people don’t have a picture of kind of a relationship they want, aren’t clear about what they can realistically attain in their current dating market, or haven’t reflected deeply about what they have to offer.
Being ready and comfortable to risk who you really are way as you enter a new adventure is absolutely the best way to ensure that a quality relationship could result. It also weeds out potential disappointments early on, saving you time and energy that you could be using to enter the next adventure.
So, take an honest survey of who you are at this time in your life.
Are you physically as healthy and vibrant as you could be? That means seeing your body as a sacred vessel and caring for it as such.
Have you taken the time to really understand your emotional self?
If you’ve continued to attract the wrong kind of partners, repeat patterns that haven’t worked, have traumas that are unresolved, carry cynical or pessimistic expectations, love too much or run from intimacy, sabotage your relationships if they present issues that you don’t know how to fix, or just allow your partners to define you, you are not going to be able to present yourself as an integrate, self-respecting person.
What about your ability to care for yourself under stress?
Do you have a “sky hook” to tap into spiritual reserves that keep you believing in yourself when times are hard?
Do you have good and caring friends who are there to catch you when you fall, so that you don’t expect a partner to continuously reassure you when you’re down?
People who are loved by others know better how to give love or to recognize when it’s not available.
When people are passionately involved in the world and know what they support and believe in, they are more interesting and keep discovery alive. They are interested and interesting because they are constantly transforming as they seek to know themselves and others more deeply.
- Ask yourself frequently about the self you are projecting. Would you enjoy listening to yourself if you were out on a date with you?
- How about your comfort with your own body sexually and sensually?
- If you’ve been wounded in prior relationships by rejection or embarrassment, have you resolved those past hurts or resentments?
It is crucial not to project past failures onto new relationships if you can heal them before you try again. People who feel victimized by prior relationships often unconsciously look for a new partner who will somehow, magically, heal those past heartbreaks. That process rarely succeeds.
As long as it is not martyred self-sacrifice, it is always a good bet to start off any new relationship with a genuine curiosity and excitement about getting to know someone you’ve not known before.
Everyone needs to feel important, cared for, and valued. The best way to project that is to give that gift to someone else. The early hours of a new relationship are often viewed as fraught with potential hazards when, in reality, they should be experienced as just a new adventure without any attachment to outcome.
People often have the easiest time meeting and getting to know a new person when they are in a foreign country with little to lose and timeless abandon. Those same behaviors can be transferred to any new experience and they work just as well.
Of course you’ll always want to stay in touch with what is currently valued in real time and appropriate for where you are in your life.
But, alive, vibrant, confident, life-loving, interested and interesting, resilient, self-respecting people have always been, and will always be, valuable to others. (See my Ebook, HeroicLove.com).
Dr. Randi Gunther – www.randigunther.com
Be good to yourself and work on yourself.
Be the best version of yourself that you can be. Don’t’ wait until you meet someone or rely on someone else to make you feel good about yourself. Put your best self out there every day. Smile and be yourself. Putting your best self out there increases your chances of being noticed and meeting someone. Smile and exude happiness with yourself.
Your attitude is important.
It is what makes you stand out and shine. It is also what people will notice first. Carry yourself with confidence and strength. Stand out by being self-assured. Go out with friends when you are invited.
Dress up especially when you are not feeling it. Fake it until you make it. You will find that even if you are not feeling it, if you put on your favorite outfit and go out, you might just have a good time.
Surround yourself with positive people.
Ask to be introduced to someone that catches your eye. Flirt with someone at a party or event. Let your friends know that you are interested in meeting new people and have them introduce you.
Take dance lessons or a class and mingle with others in your class. Attend local events or activities in your community. Volunteer to help an organization or sign up for a 5k walk or run. Being proactive means getting up and getting out there so that you increase your chances of meeting someone.
Stay positive and do not put energy into worry or self-doubt because that is what you will project.
Carry yourself with dignity and maybe even a little “sass”. Have fun wherever you go. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Laughter is attractive and puts others at ease. Be the kind of person others want to be around. Do this by being genuine and bringing the best version of you that you can be.
Ileana Hinojosa, MLA, LMFT – www.themindfullife.net
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