From time to time, I will address specific areas of becoming successful. Given the proximity of Valentines Day, I decided it’s time to talk about Romantic Success. There are five Secrets of Romantic Success so there will be five posts on this subject. Today’s is the first.
Successful romantic relationships have the following four characteristics:
- The partners support each other in dealing with their challenges, doing so with loving and acceptance.
- The partners share their successes with each other in loving and acceptance.
- Both partners derive these and other important rewards from the relationship.
- The partners communicate with each other, deeply, openly and honestly.
This, unfortunately, is not the norm as indicated by high rates of breakups and divorces. However, you can beat these odds if you follow the five secrets of relationship success that I’ll discuss on this Blog.
Secret 1: Know Exactly What You Are Seeking – and Find It
If you don’t start with the “right” relationship partner, your odds of relationship success are very low. The idea that you can successfully change someone else into the person you want is ridiculous. If you try, you’ll trigger resentment that will eventually tear the relationship apart.
Most people are very ineffective in finding relationship partners. The problem is described by an old Sufi saying:
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
They go from a failed relationship to another version of the same because they are following the same habit patterns and, as the saying goes:
“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
On the other hand, have you ever noticed that sometimes you meet people you’ve never met before and they seem very familiar? Most people have. That certainly includes me, lots of times. Almost all of the people with whom I’ve had powerful personal and business relationships have triggered that feeling in me the first time we met.
My theory (for which I have absolutely no concrete proof but an awful lot of proof in the form of my own and others’ experiences) is that these are people with whom I’ve had powerful relationships in past lives. Of course, to believe my theory, you have to accept the existence of past lives.
Luckily, whether you do or not has absolutely no bearing on whether what I’m about to tell you works for you. Theories are theories. Results are results. I greatly prefer the latter.
In any case, within each of us we have an image of the “Perfect” Partner we are supposed to meet and relate with in this lifetime. When we see some aspect(s) of that Perfect Partner inner image reflected in someone we meet, we initially assume that we’ve met the person who matches our entire inner image.
Of course, that’s seldom the case so we find ourselves trying to change that person into “who they really are,” the Perfect Partner of our inner image.
This absolutely doesn’t work. But most everyone has had the experience of trying to change someone else into someone who’s right for them – or of a relationship partner trying to change them in similar fashion – or both.
Well, starting from the assumption that my theory is correct, I’m going to describe a way that greatly ups the odds that you will actually find your true Perfect Partner.
Does it work? Definitely yes. For example:
Carina was an extremely bright and psychic lawyer, a friend of my Perfect Partner.
Carina initially had one really self-defeating unconscious habit pattern. She was drawn to romantic partners who were handsome, great dressers and good dancers but who were so intimidated by Carina’s brightness and psychic abilities that they eventually always became hostile and abusive. This caused her no end of grief.
Knowing this, my Perfect Partner asked me to help Carina by teaching her my Perfect Partner process which involves using what I teach in my eBook system to implement what I’m about to describe to you – so I did. About a week later, Carina called, very excited. “I found him,” she said and invited us out to dinner to talk about her experiences.
“It was amazing,” she related. “I’ve known Anders for years but never paid much attention to him. I thought he was okay as a friend but as a lover? No way.”
“But the day after I set my Perfect Partner objective, he asked me out on a date. I remembered that you, Stuart, had said that I should always check a person out on my key element list before making a decision about whether they might fit. So I did. Amazingly, Anders rated high on all of the factors that I knew him well enough to rate. So I went back to him and said yes.”
“He took me out to dinner. It was magical. I found layers of him that I’d never imagined. He’s bright, witty, very caring, creative, very loving… and a great dancer, would you believe? He’s also very high achieving and entrepreneurial. He’s about to start his own law firm and has already asked me to join him.”
Well, things went from this to even better in their relationship. They did start the law firm. It was very successful. They got closer and closer to each other, finally getting married (she was a beautiful bride and he looked very handsome – we attended the wedding). At last count, they had two beautiful kids, had built a great home with their own hands and were still very much in love.
Here’s How to Get Started Finding Your Own Perfect Partner
First identify all of the people that you have ever met in any context who meet the following criteria:
- They demonstrate(d) at least one characteristic that you would really like to see in your Perfect Partner.
- That characteristic or those characteristics created an extremely strong attraction to that person, even if the rest of their characteristics weren’t attractive to you or even strongly turned you off.
Make a list of all of these people and their strongly attractive characteristic(s). Don’t shortchange yourself. Once you’ve initially made the list, read through it and more will probably pop up. If so, add them to that list.
It is key that your list builds on your own experiences, where you were strongly attracted to one or more characteristics in another person, not on someone else’s advice.
Then make a second list, headed My Perfect Partner.
Each item on this list should deal with only a single strongly attractive characteristic of someone on your first list. If two people on that list demonstrated the same characteristic, pick the one that is intuitively the most attractive example.
Your list should have four columns:
- The attractive characteristic – what attracted you in that relationship (e.g., “enthusiastic” or “great smile”).
- The name of the person you originally listed who best demonstrates or demonstrated that attractive characteristic.
- A brief summary of a specific memory of that person demonstrating that attractive characteristic.
- The fourth column should be left blank for the time being.
Each day read each item on your My Perfect Partner list and remember that person demonstrating the attractive characteristic. Then use your skill of hindsight to imagine that person demonstrating that characteristic in a way that is intuitively perfect for you.
In making your list of attractive characteristics, be aware that physical attraction fades rather quickly, emotional attraction less quickly, mental attraction still less quickly and deeply intuitive attraction least quickly. So be sure that your list deals primarily with the more enduring characteristics.
If you’d like to learn more about this subject, click below to receive my new free eBook, The Five Secrets of Romantic Success.
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