3 Questions to Ask to Know If This Relationship is For You

There are a thousand opinions out there online that will help you discern if the guy you’re with is someone you want to marry. Of course there are the obvious reasons why you wouldn’t want to be with a person.

They are treating you poorly.

They don’t respect you.

They manipulate you to get what they need in the relationship.

They are unwilling to work through issues or take responsibility for their part in conflicts.

However, when you are with a good man that mostly treats you right, it can be hard to make the decision if this is the person you want to commit your life to.

You doubt whether you’re attracted enough or whether you’ll want to be around him in 20 years. You wonder if he’ll suddenly change and you’ll have made a wrong decision. You wonder if your lives line up enough to make things work over the long haul or if that’s even important!

And often the answer to these doubts is, Yes! Over the course of a marriage, people and their life goals change.

I want to give you three helpful questions to ask yourself to discern if this man is a good man that you can—-and here’s the key—-grow with!

1. Are Your life purposes aligned?

   Of course to know if your life purposes are aligned, it’s important that you’ve done your own self exploration. You probably don’t know all the details right now (who does?!)

   But have you always pictured yourself on a farm with 6 kids, while holding barn dances with your neighbors? And the guy your dating sees his next job in Dubai where he’s schmoozing with start up business owner’s at parties every weekend. Then your life pictures are not likely to be aligned over the long haul if they are super different or something you can’t fathom doing now.

   However, if you find that you want to be the director of a foster care non-profit organization and your partner is happy to make the bulk of the money while you follow your dream to get things off the ground. He supports your cause for connecting foster care families, but he doesn’t see himself being directly involved.

   Your purposes are still aligned because he’s happy to support you and vicariously supports caring for foster care families. While you might not go into business together, you can see yourselves willingly supporting the other person’s mission, whether now or in the future, separately or together.

2. How Does Your Body Feel When You’re With Him?-

   I’m not referring to the sexual chemistry that you feel with him, but rather, what do you notice about how your body feels in his presence—-do you feel calm? Is your nervous system activated with anxiety or do you feel free to share things with him easily? Do you notice a lot of tension in your stomach or shoulders? Or do you notice that you’re able to take a nap very quickly when he’s around, whereas with others you’re too on edge?

   Our bodies somatically know if a person is a good match for us and our other values lining up confirm it.

3. Do they show regular evidence of caring about your needs?

   Does he notice that you always get your hair cut every month and a half and you’ve gone over that time, so he offers to take you on your day off? Does he have a game plan for his life that he is taking steps on and he includes you as the beneficiary of his plan? Does he want to know what is hard for you to hear in an argument so that next time he can speak in a way that doesn’t trigger you? This is a man caring for your needs in actions, not just in words.

Each of these questions will lead you towards clarity as to whether this man is a good partner for you. No list of questions will compute the exact answer for you. As women, we are highly intuitive and if you are willing to see the truth about how you are feeling with a man based on these things, your gut will often already know if you line up in the important areas for long-term potential.

However, if you struggle to hold a relationship open handed because the pull towards a specific man is very strong,

or you have doubts in your own judgement because your decisions have led you down painful roads in the past, then talking it through with a trusted person is important to clarify what is true, so that you can make a good choice that honors yourself and creates the best foundation for long-term love.

If you’d like support getting through a relationship decision, find a time on my calendar here to experience how I can support you towards healing and experience satisfying, long-lasting love.

Won't Our Soulmate Just Find Us?

From the time we’re able to understand a bedtime story, we learn that one day “our prince will come”. He will find us and climb mountains to reach us and rescue us from all that might harm us. While this story is called a fairy tale for a reason, I believe there is something deep inside the female psyche that longs for love to find her.

Not only with Fairy Tales, but also, if you’re a spiritual woman who believes the Creator of the universe brings partners together, then it can be easy to settle into the mentality that my soulmate will just find me because it’s “meant to be”.

All the while in the year 2019, we woman are discovering and being challenged to go out and make things happen like never before!

So when it comes to our dating lives - which is better? - to take massive action to find and get a man or to recline in our modern castle tower waiting for our prince to make his ascent?

Well, let’s talk more about these ideas.

If we let our fairy tale mentality bleed into our dating lives, it can start to look like a lack of taking risks. We can play it safe and surround ourselves with good women friends, watch chick flicks, babysit our nieces, do our jobs well, meanwhile giving ourselves that one slim opportunity that the Amazon delivery guy is “Mr. HeavenSent”.

We may pride ourselves on how patient we’ve been in waiting for the right man to come, but blame the lack of results on the fact that there aren’t any good men out there. With this mentality we can have the subconscious belief that we’re somehow adding to the cinematic climax of our love story by not taking much action, so that the grand ending will be that much more amazing when our prince comes to save us. This mentality however, can actually be a subtle cover up for the real fear that lies underneath our inaction - often fears that prevent us from opening ourselves up to love and be loved by a man.

On the other hand, if we use the same approach as what’s led us to be successful women at work and take focused action to make a relationship happen, then the results can start to feel shaky. We may find ourselves acting out of insecurity, jealousies, or uncertainties. We can start to take on manipulative strategies. We may start to be more concerned with an outcome, like getting a ring on it, rather than feeling truly cherished and feeling respect for the man we are choosing. Doubt may start to creep in about whether a man truly loves us if we’re making all the moves and securing all the plans and he is just going along for the ride because we’re an easy catch.

I’m talking about both of these mentalities as extremes, but is there a healthy balance in the middle?

There is a fine balance, between taking action in our dating lives and trusting in an element of mystery when it comes to success in romance. What does it look like to trust in a divine process that’s actively working in our favor and all the while not give ourselves over to living passively comfortable lives?

To approach this process with balance, let’s consider for a moment the common dating advice you’ve probably heard before from your married, well-intended friends:

“The moment you stop looking for your husband, he will appear.”

While it may not feel like the most helpful advice, because the moment I ask you to stop thinking about the color orange, right now the color orange is flooding your conscious. However, there is evidence to support why people share this advice. I have seen this concept play out over and over again in my own friend’s and client’s lives. It does commonly happen, that when a woman decides to go travel the world or foster her own children or wait until she’s 50 to get married, that a good man for her shows up proposing she let him join her.

If we stop focusing on finding a relationship, then we may stop taking certain dating actions to make things happen. Or maybe we date, solely for the enjoyment of meeting new people and having fun experiences. Either way, in letting go of outcomes for a relationship, we feel freer to actively create fulfilling lives.

I believe that when we start to focus on our own pursuits, it releases all kinds of pressures and expectations—So that any man who shows up feels that sense of freedom to choose us because he wants to add to the fullness of life a woman’s already experiencing.

We find balance because we are actively making things happen in our own lives—practicing risk, vulnerability and self-love—all the while we are better prepared when love shows up, even if it looks nothing like what we expected. Surprisingly that “boy next door” type who was always nothing more than a friend suddenly becomes hotter than you ever thought. His interest in you is more consistent, sacrificial, and cherishing than you’ve ever experienced before.

So how can we be more active in making our lives better and open to being surprised by love?

1. Actively Pursue Dreams - Not for the purposes of attracting a man, but for the purposes of living your best life. If you take some time to get really quiet this week and give yourself permission to tune inside to that one thing you’ve been avoiding doing because it’s too scary—-listen and then take one small step to start towards that dream!

2. Clear Out Any Blocks - Explore if there could be past hurts, fears and feelings of unworthiness in your life. Do you lack of confidence, have a tendency to hide who you are and not open up, or keep a hard exterior because you’ve been hurt before? For your own mental and physical health, find a safe person or group to explore these blocks so you can create better connection in all of your relationships.

3. Hang Out an “Open Sign” - Are you open to people you are meeting in the world? Not just for small talk, but do you regularly open up in appropriately vulnerable ways? The key to being open is trusting yourself to create connections with people who are good for you and being able to walk away from those who aren’t. You are honoring your desire for connection without letting it rule you. Actively work through emotions or habits that cause you to show up as “closed” so instead you can start to display your “Open Sign”.

Attracting a partner is by no means a hard science. There is a je ne sais quoi element to every romance story that no one can give us the step by step directions for. Whether we are stuck in our own excessive waiting mindset or we are using all hands on deck to carry out “operation relationship”, I encourage you to take action to create your best life—whether that means doing personal growth work, opening a school for orphans in Africa or cleaning out that bedroom to make an office. Then stay open to various social connections, resting fully in your own womanly worthiness, knowing that mysteriously your action will prepare you to attract a surprisingly good relationship.

If you’d like support to explore how to create your best life or open yourself up in places where you know you’ve closed down. Schedule a time for us to talk here.