How to find love the right way?
When single men or women suddenly find themselves attending their friend’s marriages or baby showers, they often are left wondering how to find love and what keeps them single! Advice starts pouring in and they range from valid suggestions to outright crazy ideas!
Some companies add fuel to the fire for the sake of publicity. Here is one such example.
Oscar Mayer is a packaged food company in the US and they decided that bacon lovers need to connect. So they launched a Sizzl, a Tinder-style mobile app for bacon lovers!
In India, astrologers, numerologists, palmists, God-men, and a sundry other “gurus” make a living out of doling out very specific instructions to help hapless single men and women find love.
However, the real reason you are still grappling with the question of finding true love is because you are struggling to change.
According to Marnie Nir,
If you wanted a great body, you would change your eating habits and workout, right? Complaining only burns so many calories. When it comes to love, people don’t think there is any work to do. They think love should happen to them like it does in the movies. It doesn’t. Living in a fantasy world when it comes to love will only keep you from finding it.
So, we decided to ask the experts to find out how to find love the right way!
1. How to find love by loving yourself!
Astra Niedra is the author of The Perfect Relationship, The Greatest Relationship Secret, 3 Instant Relationship Fixes, Enlightenment Through Motherhood and Which Self are You?
She says, “I stopped looking for “the one” after a two-year relationship ended, which I had believed was the one. I decided to turn my attention inward—to get to know and accept myself, to heal past wounds, and to explore and develop new parts of myself. Previously, I needed to be with someone in order to feel content, to have someone love me in order to feel loved.”
In summary, loving yourself or focussing on who you are is the first step in finding the answer to the question “how to find love?”.
Now the problem here is what the hell does “loving yourself” mean?
Here is a simple explanation.
Find out one or two things that you are good at and reflect on all the great things you have done. It may be related to an awesome job you did at work, or helped your parents or made a positive difference to a stranger.
Remember, there is always someone out in the world who thinks you are a superhero. You just need to focus on that handful of supporters and build on it. When you start loving yourself as opposed to feeling inadequate or rejected, your self-confidence will grow and will make you focus more on things that you do well. When you are not too self-conscious, others will start noticing it.
2. How to find love using a positive and spiritual mindset
The “loving yourself” theory has another twist.
According to Louise Hay, author of You Can Heal Yourself, says, “The universe is listening to how you think and positive thinking and outlook towards life will eventually get you what you want.” That’s not
That’s not all. when we visualize the ideal person we want to fall in love with, our wishes eventually come true. However, this technique works only when you go beyond just physical appearances or money.
Remember King Midas who got wanted everything he touched to turn into gold? Eventually, his wife and children became metal! If only he wished for true happiness!
Check out this enlightening conversation from the Oprah Winfrey show.
3. Becoming the right person
Deepak Chopra, in his book, What are you hungry for?, talks about our choices in life and how every choice we make should be on the basis of “If I make this choice, am I loving myself.” This means how you eat, how you dress, and how you speak with others.
In summary, you should become the “right person” instead of looking for the right person!
He explains the idea of not looking for love based on what you want from them – status, dowry (in India), money, or connections and instead just look for relationships based on empathy, joy, and equanimity.
https://youtu.be/P2airR-kToQ
4. Look for broad-based compatibility
When we look at people who tried to find love and failed, they attribute their failure to find love to bad luck, no opportunity to meet anyone, blame incompatibility. In the arranged marriage
In the arranged marriage scenarios, people end up blaming online matrimony sites for taking them for a ride and not lining up “quality” matches. When we believe it is the right time to look for a match, we need to start looking for people with whom we share broad-based compatibility.
Dr Neil Warren (Founder of eHarmony) explains this concept of broad-based compatibility very well. A couple of examples for broad-based compatibility are, “both the husband and wife like hanging out with friends or enjoy hosting friends, “both of them generally like to keep everything around them tidy.”
In arranged marriage scenarios, when parents think about compatibility, they may end up looking for specific compatibility factors such as religious belief/caste, salary, skin colour, height to name a few and end up finding an incompatible match anyways!
5. Beware of pre-judging and self-handicapping!
We are prisoners of our perceptions about other around us. We instinctively look down on certain communities, religion, race, or professions and hence disregard any information or facts that contrary to our biased thinking.
That’s not all.
Sometimes, we choose to make up our mind about how difficult something we plan to do is. This will give us enough excuses for failing to do it and hence this bias is called self-handicapping.
Here is how Psychology Today explains the impact of these biases on our ability to find love.
Individuals do this a lot in dating situations by building up how “scary” or “intimidating” it is to talk to someone else. They start to create scenarios in their mind about how “unapproachable” or “unfriendly” particular other people look.
Essentially, they make excuses by biasing their perception of others as too big, bad, and threatening to date. They can go on believing that they are willing and able to get a date…just not with “that” person. The only problem is that “everyone” is eventually labeled as scary.
Aren’t we all victims of our own biases?
6. Let love find you!
One easy way to find an answer to the vexing question “how to find love?” is not to look for love or a relationship!
This might be counter-intuitive, but it is better to just focus on doing things you love doing and actively interacting with people who share your interests without any expectations.
Joining your local meetup for food lovers, your local trekking club or a photography group is a great way to find people who might have the potential to become your love interest. The key to making this work is to have zero expectations.
Here is an example of one such couple.
7. Look for somebody like you
When people choose partners, they end up choosing someone with similar social status, family background, values, and wealth.
Here is an extract from Psychology Today that supports this theory.
In one study, subjects were shown pictures of strangers which were preceded by a short glimpse of either their own opposite-sex parent or a stranger. Subjects exposed to a short glimpse of their parent before being exposed to the target picture were more likely to assign higher ratings of attractiveness to the person in the target picture.
In a second study, a picture of the stranger was morphed with a picture of themselves or a picture of another stranger. When subjects were asked to rate the portrayed people for attractiveness, they usually picked the people who were an amalgamation of a stranger and themselves.
The fact of the matter is you have a better chance of finding serious love within your extended circle of friends and connections. Married life is much easier when you are married to someone that understands why you are doing whatever you are doing!
8. How to find love by taking control of your fate!
Marilyn Monroe, who had a completely messed-up her love life, said “I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
There is a deeper issue people struggle with to find love. When they just assume that everything happens because of fate/karma, they stop paying attention to the unconscious part of their mind that plays a big role in the so-called “fate”.
In this video, Dr Robert Maldonado and Debi Berndt (Author of Let Love In) discuss how it is important to make an attempt to discover yourself through simple exercises.
9. Don’t Ignore the simple science of finding love
Researchers have done their fair share of work to answer the question “how to find love?”. A couple of
A couple of researchers came up with a tool to help you determine if you are actually in love! Called the passionate love scale, a series of questions will help you determine if you have feelings for someone! That’s not all, several
That’s not all, several inane factors determine the chances of you finding true love. Here are some factors – how symmetrical is your face, how you smell, are you holding a hot or cold object when you are meeting someone for the first time, the color of the clothes you wear, whether you smile or not, your ability to identify common interests, your ability to ask questions about feelings, beliefs, and interests when you meet someone, your ability to read body language and mimic speech patterns and the list seems to be endless.
Check out all the gory details in this video!
