What do you vet for in the dating process?

What are you attracted to? What gives someone a place in your romantic orbit?

This is often something I will ask a client early on in our process when I’m coaching someone around love.

They may say things like: 

Physical attraction. Chemistry. Sense of humour. Extroverted personality. Outgoing. Positive energy. Ambitious. Successful.

Those things are great but those qualities are how you vet someone for a really hot fucking fling. It’s like, yeah, it all looks on paper but how does this translate to great love?

I mean, if you want more of a surface level connection with a partner, then fine. Those are all great qualities to sustain a surface level relationship. 

Surface level characteristics can make for an exciting and novelty filled beginning but they don’t stand the test of time, relationally.

If you want a soul bonded connection, you need to claim that level of connection to yourself. 

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One of the most common things I hear out in the dating space is, “I’m running out of time,” “I don’t have time,” “The clock is ticking!!”

The usual dating pattern in response to this is to go VERY QUICKLY and try to decide in the first month whether or not this is your person or the person you’re going to marry.

It all comes from this place of trying to create certainty IMMEDIATELY.

I wanna know and I wanna know quickly!!

The result is a lot of anxiety, massive over-analysis and coming into the dating place from a space of fear and scarcity.

What usually ends up happening are a lot of repetitive short-lived relationships that don’t work out.

That’s because we're showing up from this space of rushing and needing to know immediately.

We don’t think we have time, so we waste even more time by not actually vetting the human being.

You know we chase these ideas of “infatuation” and “you should just...

The most common thing people associate with happiness in their love lives: finding a soulmate.

Everyone wants to find a soulmate — their ‘one true love’.

"Truth be told: there are billions of people in this world. That means by sheer population numbers, there are potentially thousands of people who we could meet in our lifetime, fall in love with and label as our "soulmate"."

For true believers in soulmates, that’s not something they want to hear. Particularly for those who feel they’ve found their soulmate: they don’t want to believe that there could ever be someone else out there.

I’ve always thought soulmates in love are what religion is in life. It’s a system in place to instill more control and purpose to our lives. Without it, we feel out of control, with no real sense of purpose.

Just like under religion’s terms: the purpose of life is to live in a such a way that when we die we get to go to heaven.

Without it,...