I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while as the book the material is taken from is one of my favourites of all time, and it became a favourite completely by accident. I palmed it off when my sis gave me a copy a few years ago but it is an invaluable reference for navigating the minefield of the heart.

Friends and regular readers will know that i was incredibly happy at the beginning of the year, but unfortunately that relationship imploded when Kel and i stopped seeing each other face to face because of money and ex worries. I got frustrated and split with her, realised i’d fucked up and had to change loads of things, and by then she was too hurt and numb to go forward. I can report that my usual catalogue of mistakes were made of course, including some spectacular new ones. The elephant in the room was about her being emotionally available and my rather righteous fury sent her flying back to her ex.

It’s ironic as i just finished recording the demos for “Break Your Heart Back” and “You Hang Up First” which really aren’t too positive when it comes to the subject of l’amor. My mum has just called me drunk as she decided to get lashed before going on stage in Guildford and reading out her poetry in public. Kel drunk-dialled me last week which was great, but being drunk-dialled by your mum is quite an experience. There are days when i wonder if someone put something in the water.

Love itself surprisingly difficult to define. M. Scott Peck puts it this way:

“I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

We can therefore identify and recognise love and healthy situations by the fact that it nurtures yours and/or the other person’s spiritual growth. If you will grow or are growing because of someone, it’s where you need to be.

He also goes on to say that that true love is not “falling in love”. That type of love is cathexis, it is a feeling. Instead “true” love is about the extending of one’s ego boundaries to include another, and about the spiritual nurturing of another, in short, love is effort. Love cannot be sustained by mutual dependence; rather, love between two parties is made stronger when they are completely independent of one another. It is not a feeling. It consists of what you do for another person - whoever you make the effort and go through hell for, you love. As Peck says in The Road Less Traveled, “Love is as love does.” It is about giving the other person what they need to grow. It is about truly knowing and understanding them.

The 5 deadly myths about love
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1. True love conquers all

• a) You avoid facing your relationship problems, or seeking solutions to those problems, by telling yourself “if we love each other enough, none of these conflicts or personality differences will matter.”
• You stay in unloving and unfulfilling relationships even when they are not working by telling yourself “If i just love them enough, they will change.”
• You beat yourself up emotionally when a relationship doesn’t wor, telling yourself “If i had only loved him/her more, i know i could have saved it.”

Love is not enough to make a relationship work - it needs compatibility and it needs commitment.

2. When it’s really true love, you will know it the moment you meet the other person

• You dwell on the intense connection or chemistry and avoid examining the rest of the relationship.
• You get addicted to flashy beginnings and miss opportunities for real, lasting love.

“Love at first sight” junkies often look for all the wrong qualities in a mate and overlook all the right qualities.
It takes just a moment to experience infatuation, but true love takes time.

3. There is only true love in the world who is right for you

• You compare your partner to the luxury picture of “the one” and miss out on appreciating their uniqueness.
• It prevents you from being open to a new relationship after one has ended.

It is possible to experience true love with more than one person - there are many potential partners you could be happy with.

4. The perfect partner will fulfil you completely in every way

• You fail to recognise a good relationship because your partner isn’t fulfilling the needs you should be fulfilling yourself.
• You resent your partner  for not giving you what you should be finding elsewhere.

If you feel emotionally empty before you start a relationship, you will feel just as empty once you are in a relationship. The right partner will fulfill many of your needs but not all of them.

5. When you experience powerful sexual chemistry with someone, it must be love.

• You get involved with people you are not compatible with.
• You stay in relationships longer than you should, and have a hard time letting go of partners who are not right for you.

Good sex has nothing to do with true love, but making love does.

Why we choose the people we love
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• To find out what kind of person you’ve been seeking, look at the kind of partners you’ve ended up with. You get what you ask for.
• Locating the persistent, negative patterns in your relationships is the first step toward eliminating these patterns.
• When you understand why you’ve made the love choices you have, you will then be free to make new and better love choices.
• Life experience -> decisions -> emotional programming -> love choices
• Your unconcious emotional programming is responsible for much of the pain you experience in your love life.
• Once you become aware of your unconcious decisions about love, you can make new, healthy decisions.
• We often seek out emotional situations that are similar to those we experienced in childhood, regardless of whether those experiences were positive or negative.
• Your mind will equate whatever associations you have about “home” with what love is supposed to feel like.
• Your unconcious mind will seek to complete its unfinished emotional business from childhood by getting you to “choose” people who will help you re-create your childhood traumas.
• If you are still angry at one of your parents for hurting you, you might attract partners whom you hurt.
• It is not intimacy we fear. It is the consequences of intimacy.
• If you were told or concluded that you were not lovable as a child, you may have a difficult time attracting love.
• If you’ve done something you haven’t forgiven yourself for, or feel in some way responsible for someone else’s pain, your emotional programming might have concluded that you don’t deserve to be loved.

The 8 WRONG reasons to be in a relationship
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1. Pressure (age, family, friends etc)

Whether the pressure comes from from your family, or from your friends, or from your own sense of urgency, the result is the same: you may compromise your standards for an acceptable partner just to have a relationship with someone. When you make a decision to be with someone because of the pressure you feel, rather than because the person seems right for you, you are giving your power away and ensuring an unhappy end to your love story.

2. Loneliness and desperation

When you are feeling lonely and desperate, you are much more likely to make poor love choices and end up in unfulfilling relationships. You are a valuable, lovable human being who deserves to have the kind fo relationship you want, not just the one you think you can get.

3. Sexual hunger

A sexual hunger limit (SHL) is a period of time beyond which you feel “something is wrong” because you haven’t been sexually active. You might need to put it in your calendar as the time approaches, so you can be careful of not getting involved with someone due to “lust blindness”.

4. Distraction from your own life

Some people have relationships because they are bored with the lack of passion and purpose in their lives, and rather than looking within to find out why they feel that way, they get involved in a love affair and make that their purpose.

5.  Nostalgia

It is normla and natural to miss the person you have ended a relationship with as the bond you shared created an intimate connection between you as well as a strong companionship that may be long-lasting. Some men and women confuse this shared bond as true love, and reminisce from loneliness in a way that persuades them to continue on a relationship that has already ended peacefully and where the natural passage of time has meant that both parties have moved on with their lives out of synchronisation with each other. If you re-enter an already-concluded relationship, you risk destroying the friendship that has been created because it will almost always fail.

6. To avoid growing up

All really good relationships have an element of healing within their dynamics, but some people get into relationships not because they are ready to share the fullness of their own life with someone but because they want to be taken care of. They are not about learning and growing together, but about dependence.

7. Guilt

You remain in romantic situations not because you want to stay, but because you are afraid of what might happen if you left. When you decide to be someone out of guilt and not love, you are ripping them and yourself off.

8. To fill up your emotional or spiritual emptiness

If you have deep places of emptiness within you, no partner, regardless of how much they love you, will be able to fill that emptiness. It is fullness that makes a relationship work, not emptiness. If you are not prepared for the intensity of the powerful learning experience love provides,  you will resist your relationship and resent your partner. You will become angry at the mirror for the reflection it is showing you.

The 6 biggest mistakes we make in a relationship
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1. We don’t ask enough questions

Many of us ask less questions before we start a relationship than we do when we buy a pair of shoes. We’re too busy looking for reasons why we should love someone to take the time to look for reasons why we shouldn’t.

What you don’t know will hurt you. The more information you have about someone, the better you’ll be able to judge whether or not this person will make a good mate. The less information you have about someone, the more likely you’ll end up angry, disappointed, or heartbroken.

2. We ignore warning signs of potential problems

Relationships don’t just fall apart overnight. It takes months and years of deterioration before the love is finally destroyed. We minimise the importance of problems (avoiding talking, secrecy, ex-partners, family issues, alcohol/drugs, insecurity, attention/flirting, anger, financial irresponsibility, control freakery etc.), make excuses for the other person, rationalise them and deny them.

3. We make premature compomises (people-pleasing)

Changing or editing your own values, behaviours and habits in hopes that you and your new partner will appear to get along more harmoniously. The danger in premature compromise is that you lose your sense of self early in the relationship and create a false sense of harmony between you and your mate. When you make compromises out of a desire to avoid conflict, you are compromising for the wrong reasons.

4. We give in to lust blindness

If you dress as a sex object, you will attract others who want to use and control a sex object, and be treated as a sex object. When you learn to feel people with your heart and not just see them with your eyes, you will attract much more compatible partners into your life.

5. We give in to material seduction

When you choose a partner based on what they can offer you materially rather than what they can offer you emotionally, you will end up in the wrong relationship.

6. We put commitment before compatibility

Many men and women become seriously involved in relationships before giving much thought to whether the the person was really right for them or not.

The 10 types of relationship that WON’T work
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1. You care more about your partner than they do about you

A relationship is not healthy where one person is the emotional pursuer most or all of the time as it is out of balance. You may be repeating a childhood pattern, be punishing yourself or acting out one of your parents’ role with the other, and will end up feeling controlled, hungry for love, angry, cheated and miserable.

2. Your partner cares more about you than you do about them

Deep in your heart, you know you aren’t loving your partner as much as he or she loves you. As with no1, you are in a relationship that is out of balance and will not work.  You may be protecting yourself emotionally, be punishing one or more of your parents, need to be in control or acting out the role of one your parents with the other. When you are in a relationship like this, you will never be truly satisfied, since you are not giving your heart completely. It will be impossible to change it to give more, since the past has already happened. Don’t delude yourself into believing that your partner would rather have a little of your love than none at all, and use it as an excuse to stay in a relationship you do not belong in.

3. You are in love with your partner’s potential

You aren’t in love with who they actually are, you are in love with what you hope they could become. Having a healthy relationship with a person means loving them for who they are now, not loving they in spite of who they are today, or in hopes of what they will become tomorrow. If you keep hoping to change your partner so that you’ll be happy with them, you aren’t loving, you’re gambling.

4. You are on a rescue mission

Rescueholics manage to get into relationships with partners whom they feel compelled to help, rather than with partners with whom they are compatible. People who go on emotional rescue missions often mistake sympathy for love. You should feel respect as well as love for your partner and be proud of who they are.

5. You look up to your partner as a role model

You are putting your partner on a pedestal, and it is difficult to have a normal relationship. The only way your relationship can work is if you love and respect them as much you love and admite them, and your partner is willing to relinquish their role as your mentor.

6. You are infatuated with your partner for external reasons

For example their eyes, that they play the guitar, sexy hair, a wonderful night of dancing, a sexual fantasy erc. If you find yourself infatuated with one element of a partner’s personality, ask yourself whether you would still want to be with them if they didn’t have X or wasn’t X.

7. You have partial compatibility

You can simply mistake a powerful bond found in a common interest (e.g. club, work project, holiday romance etc) for love. The danger, however, is in becoming so infatuated with that partial compatibility that you don’t pay attention to the rest of the relationship. This sets you up to get involved with people you normall wouldn’t end up with at all, only to feel let down and disappointed when the relationship doesn’t work out.

8. You choose a partner in order to be rebellious

Some people choose partners based not on who is right for them, but on who is wrong for their family. If you have a pattern of choosing partners who not only don’t fulfill you but also upset your family, you are probably acting out of rebellion and declaring your autonomy unconciously,

9. You choose a partner as a reaction to your previous partner

You end a relationship with someone and, for your next partner, you don’t just choose someone different, but someone who is the complete opposite of your previous partner. The mistake you make is looking only for those missing qualities, rather than making them as an important but incomplete part an entire wish list of characteristics you want in a mate.

10. Your partner is unavailable

The first requirement you should have for partner is that they are *available*. Stay away from people who are married or in other relationships. When you get involved with someone who is in a relationship with another person, you are accepting that peron’s leftovers.

Available: Free to be in a relationship with you, not involved with anyone else, not married, not engaged, not going steady, not sleeping with another person, alone, single, all yours.

The following are NOT definitions of available:

• With someone, but promises to leave soon
• With someone, but he/she doesn’t love them
• With someone, but they’re not having sex anymore
• With someone, but says they are just staying for the kids
• With someone, but she knows about you and it’s all right
• With someone and isn’t leaving, but wants you to stick around anyway
• Just left someone, but might be going back

Forget the excuses and circumstances, the result will always be the same. You are going to get your heart broken.

The 9 fatal flaws
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If someone you love  has one or more of these traits, it does not necessarily mean they are incapable of having a relationship. It means they will cause massive problems.

1. Addictions

When you love someone with an addiction, you are in a love triangle - you, your partner, and whatever they are addicted to.. You are loving someone who is not a free person. The regular use of an addictive substance robs a person of their ability to feel fully. Do not get involved with someone who is still addicted, or freshly into recovery.

2. Anger

When you love someone who has outbursts of rage, you feel controlled by their anger. Anger is a terrorist - it holds the people it comes into contact with hostage. The kind fo anger that is a fatal flaw is anger that is out of the ordinary and inappropriate. Silence is a form of anger. Repressed grief from childhood gets acted out as rage in adults.

3. Victim coonciousness

This is an attitude some men and women adopt towards events in their life where they blame others for their problems. Watch out: you will be the next person whose fault everything is. Victims spend their lives complaining about what’s wrong rather than doing something to change it, expressing their anger covertly. They make statements that don’t sound angry or hostile, but indirectly communicate their hostility whilst still allowing them to maintain the appearance that they’re not angry.

4. Control freak

A control freak must make all the decisions themselves, never ask for help, tells you what to do and will do anything to avoid feeling out of control. Partners who as children felt controlled by adults or by circumstances that rendered them powerless may make an unconcious decision that, when they grow up, they’ll never be out of control.

5. Sexual dysfunction

For example, sexual addiction/obsession, lack of sexual integrity and sexual performance problems.  If you don’t face the truth about your partner’s sexual addictions, you’ll destroy your relationship. What starts out as a partner who flirts and ogles may very well end up as a partner who cheats. Sexual problems don’t have to be fatal to your relationship, but they will be if you avoid dealing with them.

6. Hasn’t grown up

The men and woimen with this fatal flaw have an adult side that refuses to behave in  a responsible,mature manner, forcing you, the partner, to take on the role of parent. Warning signs to look out for are financial irresponsibility, being undependable and unmotivated. Children who are angry at their controlling parents often grow up into adults who rebel against all authority figures, rules, protocol, legal systems etc.

7. Emotionally unavailable

Stay away from partners who are emotionally shut down or blocked. There is no such thing as someone who “just isn’t an emotional person”. If you are married to someone who won’t communicate with you about emotions, you aren’t in a relationship, you have a living arrangement. When it comes to having a lasting relationship, good intentions don’t count for much - you need to find someone willing to do what it takes to knock down their own protective walls.

8. Hasn’t recovered from past relationships

We all carry emotional baggage from our past relationships into each new one. The more anger toward the past you carry in your heart, the less capable ytou are of loving in the present. If your partner is feeling guilty or sorry for their ex-mate, it will interfere with their ability to surrender to the new relationship, so give them your phone number and tell them to call you when they have resolved their feelings about their ex. If someone is damamged, give them time to heal themselves.. If you always seem to find partners who haven’t let go of their past, get some help in looking at your own fear of commitment.

9. Emotional damage from childhood

Your partner’s willingness to face their emotional programming and take action to heal it will greatly diminish the effect any fatal flaws might have on your relationship. Don’t forget to answer uestions about yourself to gain insight into your own personality. Damage is inflicted by sexual abuse/trauma, physical/verbal abuse, parental abandonment, divorce, death, adoption, suicide, emotional distance, eating disorders and religious fanaticism.

The 7 compatibility time bombs
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Unlike fatal flaws and emotional programming, time bombs have very little to do with obstacles in your inner world, but rather are obstacles in your outer world that make a lasting relationship with a particular partner difficult.

1. Significant age difference

Age differences mean less as both partners grow older. If you are older, you can become impatient with your partner, can begin acting like a parent and treating your partner as a child, may be more financially successful, may be tempted to control your partner and may be tempted to sacrifice your interests, friends and activities to appear more compatible. If you are younger, you may put your partner on a pedestal, set them up to be a parent or be tempted to sacrifice the same to appear more compatible. The more you have in common and the more committed you are to working on the relationship, the better your chances of survival.

2. Different religious background

If you discover that your belief systems are too dissimilar and those conflicts in customs and attitude interfere with your happiness together, you have to end the relationship. Don’t let this time bomb blow up in your face - confront this issue before you become seriously involved with someone.

3. Different social, ethnic, or educational background

Trying to accept something you aren’t comfortable with in your partner will only hurt the person more in the end, when your true feelings emerge. Couples who share similar values have a greater chance of creating a happy, harmonious and lasting relationship. When your values and your partner’s are very different, you’ll experience tremendous tension in the relationship on a continual basis.

4. Toxic in-laws

If your partner has taken a stand with his parent or parents, communicated their feelings and set clear boundaries as to what behaviour they will accept, you will not have a problem regardless of how toxic your in-laws may try to be. Sons and daughters who tolerate hurtful and harmful behaviour towards themselves and their partner are children who’ve never grown up and taken their power back from their parents. They’re still being controlled by their need for approval from Mum or Dad.

5. Toxic ex-partner

If your partner has taken a stand with his ex-partner, communicated their feelings, and set clear boundaries as to what behaviour they’ll accept, you won’t have a problem regardless of how toxic their ex-partner may try to be. If you’re in love with someone who has a toxic ex-partner, it is normal to feel angry that you are not no1, angry when you are accused of being jealous, frightened that the problem won’t get better with time, impatient with their excuses, suspicious that the ex is being used to avoid being intimate with you and resentful that you are not priority when they “don’t want upset” the ex-partner.

6. Toxic stepchildren

When a parent feels guilty about divorcing, they may have a tendency tooverlook a problem with their children, hoping it will go away, or be too lenient in dealing with a problem, frightened that setting boundaries for the children will traumatise them even further.

7. Long-distance relationships

A long-distance romance makes it easy for you to think the relationship is much better than it is because you don’t spend consistent quality time together. The goal of two lovers in a “normal” relationship should be to become more loving and intimate with one another. The goal of two long-distance lovers becomes to see one another again. You don’t get to see what your partner is really like; you avoid dealing with problem areas; you have an unrealistic view of your compatibility. If you do not move into the same town, you are likely to experience an increase in arguments and disagreements, a decrease in sexual activity and discovery of things about them that annoy you. While you’re apart, the most successful long-distance relationships are those in which  teh coupel treats the the relationship liek it is a full-time romance - by not tryin to make each moment special but doing normal things together, mot trying to hide parts of their personalities and being themselves and not editing how they feel so they communicate honestly and deal with conflicts as they come up.

Knowing who’s right
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The key to choosing the right partner is to look for a person with good character, not simply a good personality. Character determines how a person will treat themselves, you, on day, your children. It is the foundatuion fo a healthy relationship.

The 6 qualities to look for in a partner are:

1. Commitment to personal growth
2. Emotional openness
3. Integrity
4. Maturity asnd responsibility
5. High self-esteem
6. Positive attitude towards life

• You and your partner need 3 things to mske your relationship work - chemistry, compatibility and commitment. If you do not have all 3 in your heart and as your intention, your relationship will fail.
• Chemistry must always be present in some form during all the relationship for it to be bona fide. It may vary in intensity but is always consistent in being present. Without it, the relationship is imbalanced and should be ended.
• Sexual chemistry needs to exist between you and your partner in some form in order to distinguish your relationship from a friendship.
• When you make a commitment to a relationship you invest your attention and energy in it more profoundly because you are now experience ownership of that relationship.
• If you are not sure, you are either hurt, or the answer is no. If you do not feel hurt but are not sure, you do not have the feelings for the person necessary for the relationship.  If you are hurt, give yourself time to heal because your reaction to that hurt may be blocking your romantic feelings.
• Making a commitment to the right person will emotionally liberate you. Making a commitment to the wrong person or the wrong relationship will emotionally imprison you.
• There is no way a relationship can work if one partner refuses to seek help when necessary.
• if your partner  can’t identify and share their feelings with you, they’re not ready to be in an intimate relationship.
• When your partner is consistently honest with you, you will naturally trust them.
• The more you love yourself, the harder it will be for you to abuse yourself physically or emotionally.
• The more you love yourself, the less you’ll allow others to mistreat you.
• Physical attraction and compatibility are not the same thing.
• When you stay in a relationship with someone you aren’ attracted to, you’re setting yourself up for eventually cheating on that person.
• If you haven’t felt sexually attracted to your partner from the beginning of your relationship, or it has faded or been concluded, you’ll be extremely unlikely to develop those feelings over time.
• The closer your sexual style is to that of your partner, the more sexually compatible you’ll be, conversely, the further part your sexual styles, the less sexually compatible you’ll be.
• No matter how much you love someone, you’ll have a very difficult time transcending the pain that person’s sexual dysfunction causes you.
• The areas in which you and your partner experience the greatest conflict in your relationship will be your greatest teachers.

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Adapted from “Are You The One For Me? Knowing Who’s Right and Avoiding Who’s Wrong” by Barbara De Angelis