How to Connect With What You Truly Want In Love

Image: Ba Tik

When I was in my mid-20s and desperately chasing external validation, I stumbled upon a blog that shifted my perspective about dating and relationships. The blog spoke to women who wanted a healthy romantic relationship yet kept attracting emotionally unavailable men (so, most of us at some point in time!)

The creator of this blog had a caring yet no-nonsense approach. Her message was that to attract and cultivate a loving, committed and healthy relationship we needed to raise our self-esteem, establish better boundaries and stop justifying bad behaviour. This meant being aware of, and guarding against, dating red flags such as love bombing and breadcreaming (concepts which hadn’t yet been popularised by Instagram!)

I felt like this woman was articulating things which I intuitively knew on some level, yet didn’t have a full, embodied understanding of at the time. My love life at that time was underwhelming to say the least: I deeply desired a relationship yet I wasn’t meeting anyone I even halfway liked. This would occasionally be punctured by short-lived situations where I would mistake love bombing for intimacy, which would be quickly followed by disappointment when it became clear that the situation was leading nowhere.

In short, I was operating from a place of lack and low self-worth.

In effort to change this, I spent a few months devouring the contents of the blog, reading every single post and the comments too. I’m grateful for this blog as it opened my eyes in many ways. Helping me to become more emotionally intelligent when it came to dating, to not get caught up in fantasy projection and to set stronger boundaries (I didn’t even know what the word boundaries meant before then). 

But here’s the thing: at some point I noticed that it wasn’t enough. Yes, it was helpful to learn what authentic love and partnership wasn’t. But, what was it? 

You can hear things like “honest communication” and “mutual respect” but if you haven’t grown up seeing these things modelled by your parents/caregivers or reflected back to you in popular culture it can feel pretty abstract. I didn’t need a checklist of what a true partnership looked like, I needed to connect with my heart space and understand what that looked like for me.

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I can pinpoint two distinct experiences that helped me to connect with what I authentically wanted in a partnership.

The first one was a holiday romance. While the romance was short-lived and ultimately another example of the emotionally unavailable pattern that I needed to heal (which I discovered I was attracting through my own emotional unavailability), it was expansive to me in a very specific way. It was the first time I met someone I was attracted to and where the dynamic was light, playful and FUN. This wasn’t a dynamic/energy I had personally experienced before with a guy and it wasn’t one I had grown up seeing either. 

In my mind, committed relationships were serious and kind of boring. But this experience showed me that what my soul actually wanted a relationship where there was lots of playfulness and laughter (Gemini sun over here!)

The second experience that expanded me was coming across a romance novel series. Romance novels might not seem like the best place to look if you’re wanting to nurture a more healthy view of love given that their purpose is fantasy. But again, I took something specific away from these novels, in particular from the romantic lead.

The qualities of the romantic lead which resonated with me were his devotion, honour (true to his word) and capacity for deep love and intimacy (emotionally available). These qualities were in sharp contrast to the guys that I was attracting and going on dates with at the time. So seeing these qualities depicted - albeit in a fictional character - signalled to me another important piece of what my soul was wanting.

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During this time I also started doing the inner work to heal the old imprinting which made me feel it wasn’t safe or possible for me to have what I truly wanted. This helped me to unlock more self-love and confidence. When I met my partner the following year, it was obvious right away that we had that fun and playful dynamic that I wanted. And after allowing for some time, I saw that he also had the substance, emotional depth and availability that was so important to me too. 

Here is what I believe to be true: we all have a perfect inner knowing of what is right for us. It just lies beneath all the conditioning, limiting beliefs and suppressed emotions that we have accumulated on our path. 

Even those of us who were lucky enough to grow up with parents who had a loving and healthy relationship can pick up unhelpful imprinting because 1) we are still absorbing limiting cultural and societal messaging about love and relationships; and 2) the dynamic of our parent’s relationship may not be one that we want for ourselves (because we have a different soul blueprint).

When a few years ago, I intuitively started writing about the framework of the 7 love archetypes I wasn’t entirely sure what I was meant to do with it. But once I began sharing it with friends it became clear that this was meant to help others uncover and and tap into the energy that they were authentically wanting in a partnership, and to move past the internal barriers that stood in the way of that. 

You can think of the 7 love archetypes as each representing a different expression and dimension of romantic partnerships. Learning about the archetypes not only gives us a sense of clarity of what we want and need, it also connects us back to our own power. We understand how we can fill up our own cup and cultivate the energy that we seek. It’s what I wish I had when I was dating and outsourcing all my power to others in an effort to ‘get’ love.

If this is an area where you feel the pull to radically change things, I invite you to delve into this further in our free 6-page guide which outlines the love archetypes (and the corresponding blocks) and in our online workshop, The Energetics of Love + Partnerships. You can find both here. Sending you so much love!

—Kat