How to Attract your Perfect Partner

If you want to be lucky in love, then here’s how to create your luck with practical, surface-level action and with embodied, deeper-level awareness.

SOME SURFACE LEVEL STUFF

Here are some basic, practical tips to attract gold, rather than silver or bronze:

• Do what you love to do and wish to share with others. Go out to places where you’re more likely to meet someone who’s similar to you, such as a class, a sport, a social Meetup, or spiritual group. Somewhere where you’re likely to find kindred spirits and like-minded souls. You’re less likely to meet someone sitting at home watching TV, though you’re quite likely to meet someone in the right place online.
• Brush up, don’t tart up. Represent your authentic self, not a cheap, false, empty sales-pitch of a cover-up that you hope others will buy. Even if you pretend to buy your mask yourself, would you really want to be around anyone else who buys it? Make space for the authentic you from the outset!
• Open up, don’t cheesy chat-up. Ask genuine, open-ended questions and share yourself. Choosing cheesy might attract a game-playing whine, a pickle, or worse still – chalk!
• Offer excitement and take the lead. “Shall we explore Epping forest?” or “Fancy checking out at my favourite fringe theatre?” shares your life and pastimes. Suggest a live performance, some fantastic food, or a pastime that you both have in common. Prospective partners tend to find a suggestion more seductive than “When are you free?“, or “Where would you like to go?“, or “What would you like to do?“, or “You take the lead and ‘I’ll be your puppy’.” Letting them come up with what to do isn’t being ‘nice’, it’s handing over power and tagging along. Ideally, you’ll plan your pleasure together and enjoy better quality relationships.

Knowing and releasing old restrictions will bring love into your life, beyond old emotional wounds and dysfunctional behaviour patterns. Come from a healthy place and allow fearless flirting, empowered by the buzz of vulnerability that allows the dance of love to happen.

• If you have a ‘rescuer’ personality, then you’ll likely attract a weak, helpless, possibly self-destructive partner to ‘save’. But if you’re the one who needs to be ‘saved’, then you probably have a little work to do on yourself, on the other side of the coin.
• If you have a ‘playboy’ personality, then you’ll likely attract a shy girl who wants to share your light, or a party girl who’ll meet you safely on the surface, or a seductress who’ll want to own your light and drain your energy. Do you know how to be your own authentic man and connect beyond a boisterous front?
• If you have low self-esteem and don’t feel worthy of love, then you’ll likely attract someone who treats you with the disrespect you feel you deserve, to prove you right about yourself.

Self-aware adults attract self-aware adults, so you can connect at an authentic ‘adult-adult’ level, as well as at a playful ‘child-child’ level, a supportive ‘adult-child’ level and a supported ‘child-adult’ level. And you’ll be able to consciously shift from one to another in love and with natural flow, ‘on the level’.

SOME DEEPER LEVEL STUFF

Make a list that describes your perfect partner. Not just their physical attributes and perfect nature, but their essence. How they express themselves in the world and how you are together, down to your regular day-to-day life.

Then ask yourself:

• Am I all of these things on the list?
• Do I want someone to be all of that wonderful stuff for me?
• If I were that person on the list, would I want to be with me?
• What can I change so that I am more authentic and I’d really want to be with me?
• What needs to change in the way I present and express myself in the world?
• How am I with other people and how do I subtly ‘demand’ they are with me?
• What needs to shift inside me, so that I can live that day-to-day dream with the love of my life?

Such inner-alignment will likely attract your dream relationship, to grow together, with all that’s on your list and so much more. Otherwise, you’ll likely attract your shadow – someone to do it for you and reflect your darker, disowned lacks and fears. So don’t attract ‘a better half’, be whole and grow from 200% together.

One of my favourite blogs “From ‘am I?’ to ‘I am’” describes this well, walking you through how to turn things around and be truly free.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR RELATIONSHIP

A practical tip for improving your relationship comes from John Grey’s book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”: when your female partner is passionately debriefing their day, they probably don’t need you to solve their ‘problem’. Don’t fall into the trap of taking over the conversation and trying to ‘fix it’, or heroically save things. Simply ask: “Do you want me to help you find a solution, or would you just like me to quietly listen to you?”

Another practical tip is to express gratitude. After being in a relationship for a while you might slip into start taking each other for granted, so make a point to thank your partner for the things he or she does for you. “Thanks for taking the bins out and keeping our ship in order.” “Thanks for the care and thought you put into making our delicious dinner.” “Thanks for sharing silence with me, I love how comfortable we are together.” They’ll feel appreciated, and you’ll feel lucky to be with them.

These surface level things will definitely improve a relationship, but if there are deeper level issues, then only deeper level work will free you from them.

Find out what underlying patterns and beliefs are causing the surface level problems. Are you a good mummy’s boy, or daddy’s golden girl, busy second-guessing and avoiding criticism? Or are your insecurities driving your need to always be right? Bringing awareness to these instinctive impulses can be a total game changer.

CHOOSING ME, MYSELF, I

Some people prefer their own company and love the freedom and hassle-free lives that they lead, being blissfully single, shamelessly swinging, walking a solo (spiritual?) life-path, reconsolidating with time-out and everything in-between. If this is where you are, then there is everything right with your lifestyle.

Society can still frown upon single people and fuel any fears and inferiorities, selling them stuff and seducing them into a lifestyle that leaves them out of their own lives. If you’re happy and you know it say “I am” and live your life your way, without selling out to ‘shoulds’, or buying into other people’s fears, needs, or projections.

Some people, however, choose to be single because they have strong fears about, or deep wounds from being in relationship. Or they simply don’t quite know who they are or how to do it. If that’s the case, then it’s not really a freely chosen lifestyle because limitations reign and ‘survival mode’ rules them. I believe that healing old wounds, trauma and drama means unlearning who you needed to be in order to survive. As out-dated beliefs and behaviours are unlearned, self-awareness is gained about who you are here and now and the pain from the past can actually fuel love in the present, with the added bonus of life-experience and tools to take part in life more purposefully, passionately and powerfully. Now how irresistible is that!