“Why can't I find Love?” is a question that many of my clients continually ask themselves (and me) in one fashion or another. A perfect relationship seems to be the ever elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The missing piece of the puzzle that will fix all the problems and make the emptiness go away once and for all.
When people fall in love they change. Their faces sometimes changes. They glow. The let go of old neurotic patterns. Life seems to suddenly become beautiful and everything makes sense. Life force flows abundantly fanning the flames of sexual enthusiasm. Things click. Happiness ensues.
This experience often fades. Sometimes gradually. Sometimes dramatically. Paradise is lost. Maybe if we had done something different it wouldn't have disappeared. Now we are alone, abandoned and disappointed...again. The sting of this wound reinforces a certain hopelessness and despondence that acts as a wet blanket on Life.
The answer to the question as to why love remains so elusive is complicated and in some respects very individual. The reason why relationships continually fail to make us feel complete is because we aren't looking for just any boyfriend or girlfriend, we are looking for our soul mate; the most perfect version of our true Self.
A human being is a work in progress. There is a blueprint of us somewhere out there in the cosmos which holds the truth of what we truly are. This is your destiny. Your future. You will get there one day but at the present time we have only a vague connection to it. At best we may get occasional flashes of its magnificence but at our current point of evolution we are only distantly connected to it. But it is there, in the background, waiting for us ,and, unconsciously we know it. We thirst for our appointment with it. You could say that the entirety of the human journey is about realizing the full potential of that Self. Until that day, however, we are incomplete. Missing an essential aspect of our being. This feeling of lack is one of the driving forces behind our yearning for love.
Sometimes other people act as a mirror reflecting to us qualities of our higher self. Something inside recognizes it and immediately loves it. 'There he is! My lost half. Look how beautiful he is.'. Alas , he is not your lost half. He is another incomplete person looking for his lost half too. The problem lies in the fact that you are looking for your soul mate in the wrong place. Your soul mate is not someone else but is a light which lives in your heart. The faint spark of an ideal that needs to be patiently turned into a raging inferno.
With the right kind of personal development work (usually some kind of metaphysical or meditation based work) you can forge a relationship with aspects of this true self. Hurrying your journey towards it by allowing yourself to embody its qualities and actively participate in transforming yourself into the kind of person that is a gift to the world. Imagine your relationships after that. You become more of a full person capable of loving people as you were meant to; Unconditionally.
Looking for personal salvation in other people is doomed to failure in the long run. I'm not insinuating that people give up on romantic relationships altogether rather put them in their appropriate place. Once relationships are liberated from having to serve as a substitute for what amounts to the Divine, you will also be liberated from your tendency to feel betrayed when they fail to do so.