Love & Bonding

(image description: “Me and My Parents”, 1976, David Hockney)

Love is the most important, most invisible, and most powerful energy force for humans. All of us love in one way or another: on our sleeves, in our bedrooms, quietly, loudly, secretly, performatively, authentically, unapologetically, deeply, and so on. There is family love, romantic love, awe for nature, and general warm and fuzzy love. Sometimes we partner with someone who loves the same way, and sometimes we have vastly different ways of showing and feeling love. We humans create love languages, love smells, love movies, and love boats. It’s an essential part of feeling alive, and when it feels scarce, it can be debilitating.

Love is a friendship set to music. – Joseph Campbell

A tricky feature of love is that it is first practiced on ourselves, then we are able to connect and bond with others. If we don’t know how to love ourselves, we will not be able to feel the love of other people, places and things. So whether you are looking for love, found love in the wrong place, or don’t know how to give or receive it, let’s do an audit of the ways you like to bond with others: connection is the heart and foundation of love and we all do it differently. Once you do this exercise, you’ll have some data points on where you need to pour your energy into. If you have a goal for love in your life, you can’t get there until you know where you are sitting today – in other words know what you like and need.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up. – James Baldwin

Side note for my fellow ADHD’ers and highly anxious humans: it’s a lot harder for us to read signals and give signals in the realm of relationships, so please be patient with yourself and have faith that you do truly have a baseline for how you like to bond with others. Believe yourself when you come up with answers, and if some of those answers change over time, that’s healthy and OK. Please make sure you answer for yourself only—not based on what looks like love elsewhere (e.g., friends’ lives, movies, social media, the 234th romance novel you’ve read, and so on).

STEP ONE:

With an open heart and without judgement, imagine the way you bond with others. Take stock of these eight areas in your current relationships and where you might want to connect more on – see with which bucket your heart most wants to land:

Physical
Intellect
Interests
Values/Lifestyle
Psychological/emotional
Creativity/passion
Spirituality
Essence

STEP TWO:

Take a piece of paper or a journal and write out the following in more detail. The act of doing this with your hand and not on your phone or computer is important, trust me. No one will read this, so be bold even if it feels obvious, just create as much detail as you can:

Physical: What are the physical aspects of your ideal mate? Remember an image of “attractive” is highly processed at times and fed by the media and other manufactured sources. Take time to be imaginative with your description.
Intellect: How does your ideal mate use their intellect? Is it in service of curiosity, contemplation, discussion or is it used to serve ego and dynamics of power?
Interests: What are your interests that you would like to share with your partner? What are interests that you might be curious about learning more about that a partner might have?
Values/Lifestyle: Values and lifestyle is broad and quite important. If you have not done a full audit of your values, pleas do that first, then return to this bucket. How does your ideal partner like to eat, do they enjoy community, do they want pets, dogs, are they spiritual, do they like outdoors, etc.
Psychological/emotional: How open and honest will you partner be with their feelings both verbally and nonverbally? Are emotions important to explore with each other and how is that done?
Creativity/passion: How does your partner express creativity and passion in your relationship? Creativity can be bringing innovative and creative ways to cooking, physical connection, singing or problem solving.
Spirituality: Spirituality in relationships s about bonding together in a way that is vibrational, where we might interact with each other in a telepathic and anticipatory way. How important and what might spirituality look like with your ideal partner?
Essence: Well essence is the polar opposite of physical in that it is simply being-ness. Being is implicit connection without ego, in the moment and without past or future. Do what degree would you like this to be part of your ideal partnership and how might you cultivate this?

STEP THREE:

Create a Pinterest board with visuals of the above answers and share with your friends. JOKING!!!!!!! This is a private, heart-filled exercise full of spirit and vulnerability, please keep it tender next to your heart, and revisit it from time to time to remind yourself of how you are bonding with the world and with others. Sending you lots of love energy for a bright and inspired Spring!!

Step one above has been adopted from one of my favorite books on love, If the Buddha Had Dated: A Handbook for Finding Love on a Spiritual Path by Charlotte Kasl. This book is excellent even if you aren’t dating; it’s a thoughtful and accessible exploration of how you should navigate the finicky and profound field of love.