Hey sexy ladies and gents,
Alright, so I’m crazy busy banging out a draft of my next book before upcoming Thanksgiving travel, and am too swamped to answer a question this week, so, basically, I’mma pull a teacher move and turn down the lights and play a video.
But don’t worry, it’s a super good, eleven-minute video featuring the best advice I’ve ever heard on relationships. Since I’ve never been in a marriage that lasted a little over 30 years like the woman in the video – (heck, that’s about how long I’ve been alive) – I decided to bring in the big guns for this week’s Q & A.
As someone who’s never seen a long-lasting and loving romantic relationship – you know, one that’s just dripping with endless adoration – modeled up close, this woman and her now-deceased husband, have served as my role model. During the decades they traveled the country teaching weekly seminars, their deep love, devotion, and respect for each other was readily observable. And in this video the woman shares their “secret sauce,” which I will now share with you, “my peeps.”
Before we get into it, I know some of you have been curious about how to even pick a mate worth doing the work necessary to live happily ever after with. In “The Care and Feeding of Sex Symbols,” I covered the “head vs heart” debate, which gives you an understanding on how to use these two inner guides to make decisions that not only fulfill your deepest desires, but feel good when you’re doing it.
And when answering some of your previous questions, (like this one), I relayed the most important criteria one should have when looking for a mate. Which is summarized best by Harville Hendrix when he asserts that the best one can hope for is to find someone you have chemistry with, AND who’s aware of their issues and willing to do the work relationships require to grow over time.
So, now that you know what to look for in a partner if you want a dynamic and long-lasting relationship, and how to use your inner guide to weed through your romantic options, let’s focus on the mental state you need to cultivate in order to decide if a person’s worth going “all in” for during the courting period.
As Iyanla Vanzant states: “We can only control our own choices, our own actions. It’s not our place to make the other person in a relationship do any particular thing. I don’t get to tell people how to love me. I get to see how they love, and then choose if I want to participate.”
So, before you start sweating over the small, (or big), stuff, take as much time to as you need to really get to know a person. Observe how they love, and what their values and principles are. And as Mama Maya Angelou said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” If you like what you see, now you can start thinking about creating a wonderful relationship, which brings me to this week’s advice via video.
It’s important to state that to fully appreciate the advice you’d have to first buy into the idea that you have the power to create your own reality (i.e. “deliberately create”). That doesn’t mean that you can control everything that happens to you, but it does mean that you can determine your emotional response, or how you experience the event. With this mentality, you don’t need anything outside of you to change to feel love towards someone; which is, ultimately, the definition of unconditional love, (a necessity ingredient for a happy and long-lasting relationship).
The advice encourages us to take responsibility for our own emotions in a relationship, and not make it another person’s job to make us feel good, or soothe our insecurities. That pretty much goes against everything we’re taught in society, from childhood up. But then again, in a society where happy, life-long relationships aren’t the norm, “If you want to have unconventional success, you can’t be guided by conventional wisdom,” as Stephen Covey says.
And, finally, we are advised to be “solution-oriented” when problems arise. This requires us to sometimes ignore the other until we’re in a place where we allow love to, once again, flow through us. A place the advice-giver calls “the vortex.”
I hope this advice helps you all as much as it has helped me in my own personal life; and I am happy to report that the questioner in the video came back years later claiming to still be as happy as ever in the relationship she originally sought advice about.
And now, without further ado, I give you Abraham Hicks’ “The Secret to a Wonderful Relationship.” Enjoy!
-Megan 🙂
P.S. If this video is ever disabled, just type “Abraham Hicks The Secret to a Wonderful Relationship” into YouTube until it is brought to my attention. Thanks, and I’ll be back next time with more answers to more of your questions!
For my story check out “The Care and Feeding of Sex Symbols” here
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Note: As this column is designed to be a judgement-free zone, only those who have been, (or know someone who has been), in a similar situation are invited to comment; especially if the question is unorthodox or hard for one to relate to. And for even more relevant insight, those seeking answers are always encouraged to go within.
The Care and Feeding of Sex Symbols 