How To Find The Love Of Your Life

“I keep attracting and getting into relationships with unavailable partners. Are there any available people out there?”

“Every person I meet seems to be a narcissist. Why am I attracting narcissists?”

“We connected so deeply for two months and then he (or she) disappeared. This keeps happening to me. Why?”

These are some of the more common questions I hear from my clients. Here is how I answer these questions.

“I keep attracting and getting into relationships with unavailable partners. Are there any available people out there?”

When I was dating after my divorce from my 30-year marriage, I kept attracting unavailable men and I had this same question that so many of my clients ask. I finally understood that my fears of losing myself in a relationship, as I had previously done in my marriage, resulted in me also being unavailable. I had learned to give myself up to avoid rejection, and I because didn’t want to do this again, unavailable men felt safe to me. I hadn’t yet learned to how to not take rejection personally.

If this keeps happening to you, then you need to be honest with yourself about whether you are available. Yes - there are many unavailable people in the dating arena, but if you were available you would be very aware of someone’s unavailability right away and move on. The fact that you keep getting into relationships with unavailable people indicates that you are likely also not available, and that an unavailable partner feels as safe to you as he did to me, because you don’t have to fear losing yourself or being rejected with an unavailable partner.

“Every person I meet seems to be a narcissist. Why am I attracting narcissists?”

I was raised by my narcissistic mother and it took me many years to even recognize narcissism. Because it was what I was used to, it seemed normal to me. I had become a caretaker – taking responsibility for others’ feelings while ignoring my own - as my way to have control over not being rejected, and I continued my caretaking throughout most of my long marriage. While I thought I was beyond it when I started dating after my divorce, I soon realized that I kept attracting narcissistic men. I was far from healed from my addiction to caretaking.

As with unavailable people, there are many narcissistic people on the dating scene, so it’s likely that you will meet up with them. But if you keep getting into relationships with narcissists, then you are likely a caretaker. Narcissists attract caretakers – people who try to rescue others and take responsibility for their feelings. If you consistently end up with narcissists, then you need to do the healing work of letting go of taking responsibility for others’ feelings, worth and happiness, and learn to take responsibility for your own feelings, worth and happiness.

“We connected so deeply for two months and then he (or she) disappeared. This keep happening to me. Why?”

I know this one well too. Because I was abandoning myself by not loving myself enough to take responsibility for my own feelings of worth and safety, when a new partner was loving with me – giving me what I wasn’t giving myself – I become addicted to having control over getting his love, which inevitably pushed him away. It took me quite a few years to learn to love myself enough to stop abandoning myself with others.

Invariably, when I explore what happened with a client, it turns out that he or she felt so good and so loved by the other person that they abandoned themselves and made the other person responsible for them. This triggered the other person’s fear of engulfment – of losing themselves - and they withdrew.

Finding the Love of Your Life

I finally discovered that we attract at our common level of self-abandonment or self-love. To attract a loving and available partner, you need to become the kind of person you want to attract. Needy people attract needy people. Caretakers attract takers. Victims attract perpetrators. Unavailable people attract other unavailable people.

In order to become the loving and available person you need to be to attract the love of your life, you need to learn to love yourself – which means learning how to take responsibility for your own feelings of happiness, safety and self-worth. My clients and people who take my courses, who learn to love themselves and want to be in a loving relationship, DO attract loving partners, such as Sarah, who wrote to me:

“I've…met my beloved….We became a couple on 24 December last year & on a trip to Hawaii last month he proposed to me. I've never experienced unconditional love from a partner before, it feels solid & safe. I'm so privileged to have him in my life....Thank you so much.”

Sarah did the work she needed to do to learn to love herself enough to attract her beloved.

Attraction Is About “Frequency”  

We attract at our common level of vibration or ‘frequency.’ When you are abandoning yourself in any of these four ways, your frequency is low.

• Ignoring your feelings
• Judging yourself
• Turning to various addictions to numb your feelings
• Making others responsible for your feelings of self-worth and safety

When you are loving yourself by learning how to take full responsibility for your happiness, sense of safety and self-worth, your frequency is high. Low frequency people attract other low-frequency people, while high frequency people attract other high frequency people.

I hope it is becoming obvious that in order to attract a loving and available partner, we need to learn to truly love ourselves rather than continue to abandon ourselves.

Learn how to attract the partner of your dreams! Join Dr. Margaret Paul for her 30-Day at-home Course: "Attracting your Beloved."