S1 EP38 – How to Know if You’re With the Right Partner

Transcript

Hi everyone, Dr. Margaret Paul here with the inner bonding podcast. And I want to talk about how to know if you’re with the right person. I often hear this question in my counseling practice. How, how will I know when I’m with the right partner? And the answer is, is, is fairly complex. It’s not just a simple answer. So there’s, there’s two different reasons that people have for wanting to get married. And one is to get love, to get validation, to get security and safety.

And the other one is to share love with a partner and to grow emotionally and spiritually within the relationship. If you feel insecure and alone, you’re likely to look for someone who’s going to fill the inner emptiness and give you the love that you’re seeking. You may want to find someone who you hope will complete you and make you feel adequate and worthy, but no one can do this for you. It is something that you need to learn to do for yourself. Since we’re always attracted to people who are at our common level of woundedness or our common level of health or some combination of that, which actually means our common level of self-abandonment or our common level of self-love a person looking to get love is going to attract a person who is also looking to get love.

Each person hopes to get filled from the other, not realizing that each feels empty and really has nothing to give. Therefore, no one is the right person when the intent of getting married or the intent of getting into a relationship is to get love and security rather than to share love and learning. So instead of asking the question, is this the right person for me? Why not ask, am I being the right person? Am I being a person who comes to a relationship filled up with love to share, or am I needy and hoping to get love and get validation?

The main reason that many relationships don’t work is because each person is disappointed in not getting what they expected to get from the other person. But when individuals who don’t know how to love and validate themselves, and they create and, and create an inner sense of safety and security for themselves, they certainly can’t do this for another person yet. This is exactly what each person may be expecting of the other. It’s fairly easy to know if this is the right person for you.

When your intent in being in a relationship is to learn together and to share love a person who comes from a full place within finds it easy to discern when someone is empty inside. And actually won’t be attracted to the empty person. People who are really open to learning about themselves, open to growing emotionally and spiritually open to taking responsibility for their own feelings of safety and security and of worth and of lovability. Won’t be attracted to a person who’s closed or controlling, or just wants to get love.

But knowing all this about a person does not happen instantly. Not usually. Sometimes it takes months to discover whether or not a person is who they say they are or who they appear to be. If you’re very tuned into your feelings and to your higher guidance and you trust your intuition, there is much you can know instantly, but you can’t really know who a person is until you have some conflict and find out what this person does in conflict. Some people can appear to be very open and loving until a conflict comes up and then they get angry.

They withdraw, they resist or comply all forms of control rather than stay open to learning about themselves and about you. So an important Question is how does this person deal with conflict? And how long does it take them to open up if they do close down or get angry in the face of a company? Excellent. Now of course, None of us enter relationships fully healed. So it’s very important to know if your partner is willing to explore conflict, rather than just protect against it with the various forms of controlling behavior, conflict occurs in all relationships.

And if both people are not open to learning about themselves and about each other within the conflict, the unresolved conflicts will eventually destroy the relationship. If you’re A person who’s open to learning and wants a relationship in order to share love, there are three essential ingredients you need to be present for, for the person to be that that, that need, that need to be present. You need to be present for, and that also need to be present with the other person in order for the person to be the right person for you. One is that there needs to be a basic spark of attraction.

If you don’t feel physically attracted to this person within the first few months of the relationship, the chances are that this attraction isn’t going to develop. And if, if you want a relationship that has some passion in it, that attraction that chemistry, that kind of mysterious aspect of chemistry needs to be there. The other ingredient, the second ingredient is that each of you needs to be capable of caring and compassion of empathy and of acceptance for who you are. If a person isn’t capable of empathy, this may indicate narcissism. And The third ingredient is that both of you need to be open to learning in conflict rather than focused on winning or on being right.

So other ingredients such as common interest and values are also important, but without these three basic ingredients, those other important ingredients like interests and values, won’t sustain the relationship. Now, dating can be challenging and it’s helpful to be aware of the signs of a promising relationship as well as of the red flags. So my, my client’s Celine was just starting to date again, after a difficult breakup, she was feeling anxious because she didn’t want to go through another unhappy relationship, but she didn’t trust herself at this point to make good choices.

She sought my help in learning how to discern a promising relationship from one that’s bound to fail in Selene’s last relationship she had been pulled in by Gary’s ardent pursuit of her. She had wanted to go slower, but she didn’t listen to herself. Instead. She gave herself up to Gary’s attention and complements Selena. I said, my experience with men who come on strong right away is that they’re often controlling and needy. Is this what happened with Gary? Yes. She said he seemed so loving and open at the beginning, but once we were in a committed relationship, he started to pull on me for time and attention.

He became critical and angry and petulant. When I didn’t give him what he wanted. How could I have known all this at the beginning of the relationship? What should I look for now that I’m dating again? Celine had gone on one date with a man named Mark. After this first date, Mark emailed her saying he wanted to spend a lot of time with her and go on a trip with her shades of Garry. She said, this is a red flag, right? So Selena and I explored some of the red flags as well as some of the, of a promising relationship. So here’s, here’s a partial list. It’s not complete of red flags.

Someone who comes on strong at the beginning of a relationship, someone who becomes angry and critical and withdrawn. If you say no, someone who becomes logical and tries to talk you out of your feelings or out of your experience, who tries to make you feel that you’re wrong for your feelings or for the position that you’re taking, someone who talks on and on about himself or herself. And doesn’t ask you much about you or isn’t interested when you do talk about yourself. Someone who’s an older man or woman who’s never been married and has been in a series of broken relationships.

Someone who’s had numerous broken marriages, someone who has an abusive background and is not dealt with this in therapy has not done the healing work. They need to do someone who, who has abandoned his or her children, someone who isn’t open to learning in conflict. Someone who participates in addictions that are unacceptable to you, such as smoking or drinking or drugs or addictive eating or gambling or television and so on, or, or video games, things like that. Someone who’s financially irresponsible, and may even ask you for a loan.

Someone who’s not honest, who’s not truthful. Someone you’ve caught in lies. Someone who doesn’t have friends or has very few friends, someone who’s judgmental of themselves and of others who talks about themselves and others in disparaging ways, someone who’s possessive and jealous who gets upset when you do your own thing, someone who has totally different views from yours regarding religion or spirituality and someone who doesn’t have many interests or hobbies. So Selena and I discussed the fact that you get what you see.

A lot of people just don’t want to accept that. It’s not that people can’t change. I said to her, but you can’t make them change. If he isn’t okay with you the way he is right now, then don’t pursue the relationship. If you were an on-time person and he’s always late, don’t expect this to change. That’s not okay if that’s not okay with you, then don’t pursue the relationship. Same thing with issues like weight or alcohol or drugs, or being neat or messy, being a free spender or being frugal. These issues can become huge problems in relationships because people expect them to change.

And then they get very upset when they don’t. So then we talked about some of the signs of a promising relationship. Someone who shows respect for respect, for your feelings and needs, even when they’re different from his or her feelings or needs someone who’s able to be empathic and compassionate, someone who’s interested in what you have to say. And then learning about you. Someone who’s accepting of themselves and others of a fairly non-judgemental person, all of us have some judgment. And it’s one of the things we all need to work on. But somebody who’s, who’s not basically a very judgmental person.

Someone who’s open to exploring conflict and exploring differences of opinion, someone who does what they say, they’re gonna do someone who cares about being responsible for children from a broken marriage, someone who hasn’t abandoned his or her children, someone who takes responsibility for his or her own feelings for their health, for their wellbeing, and does not make you responsible for their feelings. Someone who’s financially responsible, who doesn’t expect you to take care of them financially. And someone, if they’re divorced, takes responsibility for their part of the difficulties in their marriage, they don’t blame their ex a person who wasn’t a loving relationship and lost their mate to death.

People who have been in loving relationships, generally know how to have a loving relationship. Someone who has friends, that you like someone who talks about others and caring and supportive ways. Someone who has interests and hobbies that are fulfilling to him or her, someone who has similar religious and spiritual paths, someone who’s similar to you in your path. They don’t have to have the same path, but there’s some similarities. Someone who’s supportive of you doing what brings you joy, who feels joy for your joy and pain for your pain.

Someone who can laugh at mistakes, who has a good sense of humor. Someone who has a good balance between work and play, who knows how to work hard and who knows how to have fun. As I said before, you can find the right person. You need to become the right person, doing your own inner bonding work so that you can fit the descriptions above for a promising relationship is the first step in finding and sustaining a loving relationship. Now, as challenging as dating, maybe it also provides many opportunities to learn and grow.

One of the challenges is something that many people experience, which is called ghosting. People are often mystified. When someone who seemed available suddenly disappears, I’m going to clients often ask me about this. Such as when Franklin asked, I’ve fallen in love with a woman after only three months of dating, but she’s disengaging by being incommunicado. I’m mystified since things were going so well. And then suddenly she’s not available. What should I do? So as hard as it is to accept, there’s actually nothing you can do.

When this happens to you, you need to be very compassionate towards your own heartbreak. Generally, people do this when they get scared of intimacy. And there’s two major reasons that get scared. They have a fear Of, engulfment a fear of losing themselves. So when the relationship gets closer, they run away. This has nothing to do with you, but the second reason might have to do with you. It might be because you’re needy. You, might’ve made the other person responsible for your sense of worth your happiness, your safety, and they might’ve felt pulled on by you to caretake you.

This is the case. Then the person might be disengaging rather than dealing with this in either case. The fact that someone is not communicating may indicate that they’re unwilling to hang in through difficulties and learn from them. This was important information about them, as hard as it is to let go. You need to accept that you can’t create a relationship with someone who doesn’t communicate and who instead runs away. Anyone who’s dating needs to accept the kind of situation that Marjorie told me about. She said, I’ve had several occasions in a row where I’d been in the early stages of dating someone or communicating online with the view to arranging a date and things have gone the same way.

Each time the guys have seemed nice, open and interested in me. They’ve paid me compliments and seemed an, and they seem genuine. Then the communication trails off the text messages become less frequent and less frequent. And then they stop. I don’t chase her, become needy. When this happens a few times, I’ve waited a while and then sent him a message asking if they’d lost interest and saying, it’s okay if they have, but I just like to know they’ve responded, sounding all interested again, but then it trails off again. I’m already doing work on myself and my own feelings around relationships. So why am I currently attracting this behavior in men?

So you Need to accept it in the dating world. This is very common. It’s best to not take it personally, take it as information about the person and move on. You’re not necessarily attracting this. It’s just that there are many people in the dating scene that are like this. So there’s a lot to learn in dating. If you can learn not to take other’s rejection personally, that’s huge learning. If you can learn that your help is over others choices and that their choices are informational. That’s another huge learning, learning about whether or not you’re making others responsible for your sense of worth and learning to take responsibility for your own feelings is another major learning.

Okay? So now I want to talk about soul connections. Many of us have had the experience of feeling more connected with some people than with others. Sometimes we even feel an instant connection with someone we just met. How do we account for this? Various writers have conducted thousands of hypnosis sessions with individuals who during the hypnosis sessions recall their, between life state over and over. People recall being in soul groups with the same souls through eternity, and are often with these same souls in their current life. According to this research, when you feel an instant or particularly deep connection with someone it’s because this person is in your soul group, you know this person in ways that you don’t know people who are not in your soul group in a Skype session with Eve, she confessed that she was feeling guilty because she felt so much more connected with her newborn son, Joshua than she had ever felt with her three-year-old daughter.

Samantha, of course I love Samantha. She said, but my connection with Joshua is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I just never want to put him down. It’s not that he’s such a good baby. Actually. He’s harder than Samantha was because he’s not a good sleeper. And he wants to nurse all the time. I thought I could never love any child as much as I love Samantha. I can’t explain the feeling I have for Joshua. I just never thought I would feel this way about a second child Eve. I said, sounds like you have a soul connection with Joshua. Yes, that’s it. She said, that’s what it feels like.

I’ve always envied Matthew. Who’s her husband, his connection with Samantha. I thought that was something wrong with me for not being as connected with her as he is. I guess he has a soul connection with Samantha and I have one with Joshua. So it’s not something I need to feel guilty about. Of course not. I said, soul connections are wonderful, but you can’t make them happen. They’re either there or they’re not. And they don’t mean that things will be easy. Sometimes people who are so connected have many challenges, Eve was very relieved to hear that it’s okay to feel more connected with Joshua than with Samantha doesn’t mean that she loves Joshua more than Samantha.

It just means on a soul level, there’s a deeper sense of recognition, but soul connections are often challenging. One of the important things about soul condition about soul connections is to not think that just because someone seems to be your quote soulmate, that this relationship is made in heaven, often soul connection is great, huge challenges in our lives. It may even be that these deeper connections more often trigger our control issues because deeper connections, more easily activate our fears of rejection and fears of engulfment.

We may have more fear because we feel we have more to lose. So for example, one of my clients, Sally met her husband Dawn on a blind date. It was love at first sight for both of them. And they married within six months of, of meeting. They both knew they were so amazed with what, but within a few months of getting married, they were both on Skype with me questioning whether or not they should even be together. They were fighting almost every day and their passionate lovemaking was gone because they were so connected. They were constantly triggering each other’s fears.

Fortunately, they were both interested in learning to take responsibility for their own feelings, their own fears. And they devoted themselves to learning and practicing and her bonding and through their hard work and dedication to their own healing, they were eventually able to get back to their original in-love feelings. So while soul connections can be gifts in our, in our lives, the true gift might be the challenges they bring, which motivates us to learn and grow well. A soul connection can be powerful. It’s true, certainly not necessary to create a loving relationship.

It’s more important to remember the three and the three essential ingredients open to learning, especially in conflict, capable of empathy and sexual attraction. Sure. I encourage all of you then or dating or in a relationship to take my 30 day course. My relationship cores wildly, deeply joyously in love. And if you’re wanting to become the right partner, really encourage you to take my love yourself course, which is coming up next week, January 13th, which you can also do on your own.

You can do it with my help or you can do it anytime on your own. I always encourage you to, to come to the inner bonding website, inner bonnie.com, join inner bonding village. Read my current books. There’s so many ways of learning inner bonding. And if you haven’t taken our free inner bonding course, be sure to take that. I am sending all of you love and blessings for your health, your happiness and your wellbeing.