Getting and maintaining love gets confusing for many women.  We think we have to figure out our partners.  We think we have to change ourselves.  We believe the advertisers that promise sex appeal and love through making us feel bad about ourselves so we’ll buy their products.  In last week’s blog I write about how to use your relationships to indicate how you feel about yourself because your self-image affects and influences others to act in certain ways towards you.  This is never more evident than when you’re in love.

As an adult woman you may think that if you don’t express yourself, you’ll get more love.  But just the opposite is true.  You’ll get contempt perhaps, resentment most definitely.  Your nonverbal cues will be sending off messages that your voice is too timid to tell.  These mixed signals will attract dissatisfaction and unhappiness. 

The foundation for your love relationship starts when you’re young.  You more than likely cut off from your honest expression when, as a child, you adapted away from body awareness and speaking your truth to get the love and safety you needed.  If you’re like too many women, further secrecy surrounding your body escalated during adolescence when you wanted to fit in and be liked.  Mine did.  I adapted right out of knowing how my body felt to me and instead saw it as a vehicle to get attention and that thing I craved—love.  This misguided perception coupled with adolescent hormones further alienated me from my inherent body wisdom and truth for much of my adult life.  In my memoir, From Sex Appeal to Self Appeal, I write about the circumstances that caused me to leave my body and diminish not only it’s value but also the value of my sexuality.  

There are so many people making so much money on helping other people find love that it boggles the mind.  But getting love is not hard. You don’t have to figure it or anyone else out. You simply have to be love to get love.  When you feel you deserve to have it and strive to give it honestly, you get it.  Perhaps this is where the difficulty lies.

Many women lust after the partner who seems elusive.  This isn’t love. This is challenge.  Some of us love challenge.  Perhaps we’d be better suited to love the challenge of embracing every part of us and becoming honest with and really knowing ourselves.  Then we brighten, and the partner of our dreams has the opportunity to find us because we're beacons.

You have more power than you know in relationships but it doesn't start with fixing your outsides.  It starts with being courageously honest.  Honestly honest—with yourself.  Honest.