Do you spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the people who have hurt you?
You remember your ex, who broke up with you after months or years of stringing you along emotionally. Maybe this person even haunts your dreams at night, because deep down, you still haven’t let go.
You ruminate about the last person you dated, who said they weren’t sure what they wanted, they just knew that a relationship with you wasn’t it.
How to Want People Who are Good for You
Do you find yourself attracted to narcissists, jerks and “bad boys” or “bad girls,” and wish you could be attracted to romantic partners who are actually decent people who would love and appreciate you for who you are?
Maybe you think the decent ones are “boring” and it’s why you frequently find yourself in relationships that break your heart. In my program, Deeper Dating: The Powerful Path to Authentic Love, you’ll learn my proven, effective techniques for cultivating a natural affinity for people who are good for you. Find out more and start listening, here:
You think about that one special person you thought was so amazingly beautiful, with whom you had so much in common, who filled you with so much longing, but devastated you when they admitted they weren’t interested in you that way.
You wonder why other people seem to have no trouble finding love, and keeping love, while you are still so achingly alone.
It makes you wonder if there is something wrong with YOU.
Why can’t you find someone to love who loves you back?
What’s lacking in you that makes intimate relationships so difficult?
Perhaps you either end up with partners who are emotionally unavailable (or committed to someone else), or who are selfish, workaholic, commitment-phobic or just toxic.
If you’re asking yourself these kinds of questions, then you’ll want to keep reading the rest of this article to learn the quickest, smartest way to find lasting, true, authentic love.
The answer just may surprise you.
In Search of Love…In All the Wrong Places, With All the Wrong People
In my mid-thirties, after fevered years of clubbing, hookups, and an essentially fruitless search for love, I found that I could no longer avoid the yawning emptiness inside me. Under all the busy, what I was, was lonely.
I knew I had to find love. I had spent years searching for it with unavailable people, but I hadn’t spent enough time building it with the people who cared about me, or the people I cared about already.
The choice to spend more time enjoying those people changed everything.
It marked the beginning of a very different, and much more love-filled life for me.
It’s what led me to meeting the love of my life, getting married, and being happy together for the last 11 years.
In my work as a therapist, I’ve seen the same pattern in the lives of countless clients who came to me because they wanted more healthy love in their lives.
They’d spent too much time around people who were unavailable; too much time in their company, too much time thinking about them, too much time pondering them and wondering how to “make it work” with them.
They’d spend too much time hoping and wishing the one person who couldn’t love them would finally love them.
Too many wasted, heartbreaking years.
After years of listening to these stories from my clients (and remembering what I had gone through in my thirties and forties), I came up with a name for these types of unhealthy attractions.
I call them “attractions of deprivation.”
These are relationships that are marked by lying, cheating, selfish behavior or a lack of availability. They are attractions to people who don’t have our back, who ghost us or manipulate us.
They are attractions to an unhealthy longing, a pining for someone who can’t or won’t love you.
In other words…
Trying to Get Love from an Attraction of Deprivation is Usually an Exercise in Self-Punishment.
We think if we can only figure out how to change ourselves the right way for that person, they’d love us.
If only we could do a better job hiding the parts of us that made us feel different, odd, or undesirable, that person would see what a great match we were for them.
If only we could deny who we really are, we could finally find love.
It’s the most cruel form of self-punishment there is, and ultimately it doesn’t get us what we really want, which is love and acceptance from the kind of person who can make us happy.
The 2 Types of Attraction and the Quickest, Easiest Way to Lasting Love
So how do you change this propensity toward self-punishment, and become more open to wanting partners who are decent, kind, honest people who are single, available and actually WANT to have a relationship with you?
The first step is: The choice to spend time with what I call “attractions of inspiration.”
Attractions of inspiration are those in which there is an essential sense of safety and mutual appreciation.
Attractions of inspiration are defined by goodness, integrity and availability.
Of course, there are and will always be occasional annoyances.
No relationship or person is perfect!
But attractions of inspiration are powerful.
As you choose to focus more and more time on your attractions of inspiration, your world changes.
Your reservoir of love deepens and widens every day. Your life becomes richer and more enjoyable. You’re less anxious and more fully yourself.
It is the smartest, and quickest way to real love.
And even though it really is that simple to find soulful love, for people who are used to those attractions of deprivation, it’s hard to do. Why?
Because there’s no drama! When you’re used to the incredible highs and low lows of attractions of deprivation, a steady, reliable attraction to a decent person can seem “boring” at first.
So you default back to pining away for people who can’t/won’t/don’t love you, because you keep hoping one day, it’ll all change (but it doesn’t).
What I see again and again in my private practice, though, is that when we make it a choice to focus ONLY on our attractions of inspiration, everything changes.
And it’s just a matter of time before we find that a relationship we can treasure and celebrate.
How to Change What Seems Impossible to Change: Our Attractions to People Who Are NOT Good For Us
Most people would say that they can’t help who they’re attracted to.
That you can’t “force” sexual attraction.
I would agree. You CAN’T force your sexual attractions.
But you CAN expand and grow that spark of physical or emotional attraction into full-blown passion for someone wonderful.
You can learn to be naturally more attractive to—and attracted by—people who are good for you.
And you can also lose your taste for the kind of relationships that keep you in a prison of self-punishment and fruitless longing, with those who don’t see or appreciate you or your gifts.
That’s what my program, Deeper Dating: The Powerful Path to Authentic Love, will help you do.
Deeper Dating: The Powerful Path to Authentic Love will teach you how to first and foremost uncover and appreciate the truth of who you really are, because the key to real love is learning to recognize and honor your Core Gifts—the most beautiful parts of you that you feel most vulnerable exposing.
Next, you’ll learn how to lead with your Core Gifts in order to magnetically draw only the kinds of people into your life that will appreciate and honor who you are—in other words, people with whom you feel an attraction of inspiration.
You’ll learn how to cultivate those attractions of inspiration, how to fall deeper in love with someone for whom you feel a spark of attraction, using proven techniques—the same techniques I teach my clients to help them develop healthier relationships.
You’ll naturally start to lose your taste for people who aren’t right for you, so when you meet someone who you sense can’t or won’t love you the way you want to be loved, you won’t waste time pining away for that person. You’ll just feel “bored” with them the same way you used to be bored with decent, loving people.
This program teaches you a way to honor the tender, authentic you underneath the armor while still being strong and discriminating.
When you go through the Deeper Dating: The Powerful Path to Authentic Love program:
- You’ll no longer fear rejection like you did before
- You’ll feel more relaxed
- You won’t hide, diminish, or deny who you are
- You’ll attract people who will appreciate your Core Gifts, and be a better match
- You’ll lose your taste for wrong partners or unhealthy relationships
- You’ll understand why past relationships didn’t work
- You’ll have a sense of connection to your life mission
- You’ll heal your attachment wounds by dating in this way
- You’ll discover your sexual and romantic Core Gifts and that will change your life.
It’s all right here:
The process you’ll learn in Deeper Dating: The Powerful Path to Authentic Love is the quickest and easiest way to true, lasting, healthy love because you’re no longer wasting time in unhealthy relationships or attracting unavailable partners.
I can’t wait to guide you on this important journey. The search for an intimate, life-long relationship is probably the most important undertaking of your life!
Warmly,
Deeper Dating: The Powerful Path to Authentic Love
Attract The Partner Who Will Appreciate & Honor The REAL You
✶ The surprising secret to finding deeper, more meaningful love
✶ Quickly identify partners who will fully love and support you
✶ Cultivate a lasting connection and soulful love
✶ Be your authentic self… and be truly cherished for it
About Ken Page
Psychotherapist, author and host of the podcast Deeper Dating
Ken is a leading voice of hope and wisdom for everyone seeking to find and cultivate healthy, lasting love.
