While we waited for the kittens to mellow out, I assembled the reflector. As I set up the shot, Wendy went to a window that looked out over the Baixa, the area of Lisbon where for centuries poets, painters, and writers had gathered in coffeehouses. “I love the Baixa,” I said in her direction, “it’s so full of energy and romance.” “Me too,” she replied. I was dissolving. “Would you give me a hand?” I asked. She turned to face me and held up her palms, “Two if you’d like.” She smiled again, and my heart melted.
There we were, kneeling on the floor, facing each other across the meter-long piece of chipboard. We began scrunching up the foil, Wendy from her end, me from mine, working our way toward the center. When we arrived there, our hands touched momentarily. It took my breath away. What happened next was surreal, yet I can remember it in minute detail. A rush of energy bigger and wider than anything I’d ever felt swept from my feet up through my body and out over my head straight at her. I looked directly into her eyes and I heard this voice—I know it was my own, but I didn’t hear it from the inside like you normally do, I heard it from the outside—and it said, “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever said, but I love you.” The orchestra inside my head had been going like crazy, but suddenly it stopped. Wendy was looking straight at me. “Oh my God,” she said. “What are we going to do now?” I knew she felt the same way. I had found my matched opposite and Wendy had found hers.
What we did do, after I completed the assignment and Cecilia took the kittens home for the night, was spend hours and hours and hours talking. We had so much to say. We shared our hopes and dreams, our opinions and experiences. We laughed at the same things, felt passionately about the same things. It was like a deep friendship set to music.
Wendy and I had much in common. She was a Brit, just like me. We were both expatriates in Portugal. She had a mischievous twinkle in her eye, just like me, and she was dressed in a stylish but low-key sort of way, which was how I fancied my own look to be. Most important, we were in similar businesses and shared a strong spirit of adventure.
But there were also aspects of her that I sensed were not like me. She had patience and a mind for detail. She was strong, solid, and private. She was reserved, and I was outgoing. The way she looked and listened and paid attention made me feel like I was the only person in the world who mattered.
When I got up that morning, I had no idea that just a few hours later my world would be changed forever. Wendy made me understand things in ways I’d never thought of before, and I told her about places and people I’d discovered but about which she knew nothing. I felt proud and important and invincible as we laughed and shared together. She felt safe talking with me as I cherished and respected and valued her ideas. I had never been able to talk to anyone that way before; it was almost as if we’d been chasing each other around the cosmos for lifetimes and had finally come together. It was bliss. We spent the next few weeks meeting whenever we could, talking and laughing, sharing and dreaming, and just being close.
We’ve been together ever since. We’ve raised five children into adulthood and we are still nuts about each other. The way we met has stayed fresh in both our minds, and the sheer romance of it all has had a strong binding effect. Yes, we’ve had our tough and difficult days, but the idea of ending the relationship—of saying goodbye to the person who makes us feel complete—has never even been an option. It would be like tearing our hearts in half.
I guess it’s pretty obvious to most people that Wendy and I have a strong and happy marriage. People are always asking us for our secret. In the beginning, I brushed this question off, thinking that the answer was obvious—mutual respect, common interests, attraction, etc. But as the years passed and the question kept coming over and over again, I began to realize that there might be more to it than meets the eye. So, using my NLP training, I decided to try to identify the common threads in all successful relationships, from dating through mating, and lay them out in a simple, practical, concrete way. I also wanted to show people how to make the most of their time and avoid depressing pitfalls, and help them learn from others’ mistakes. How often have we heard people say, “If only I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have got myself into this mess”?
Specifically, I set out to
• find couples who have fallen deeply in love and stayed energized and amused with each other for a long time;
• determine what all these couples have in common and what resources they draw upon; and
• break the lessons they can teach us about meeting, connecting, and uniting with our matched opposite into a series of easy steps that anyone can follow.
The Search for the Pattern
I interviewed happy, long-term couples and others whose relationships were in various stages of disarray. I reviewed research, read books and articles on the subject, and eventually realized that almost no one was addressing something fundamental: The most successful couples embody a very delicate balance of two maxims—like attracts like and opposites attract.
There are hundreds of books about dating, flirting, playing hard to get, getting him to propose, getting her to say yes, and the like. But I was amazed at how they all seemed to miss the obvious. In the most vibrant, rewarding relationships, the people involved are matched opposites. That’s what every single person hoping to find love should be seeking—a person who makes you feel whole, someone you really click with. There’s more than one matched opposite out there for you; there are lots of them and they’re all over the place. Nevertheless, most people you meet won’t be your matched opposite. You’ll meet plenty of people who are charming or exciting, but they may not be right for you. So if you meet someone you like a lot but it’s not working the way you’d hoped and you don’t feel a clear sense that it’s right, let the relationship go. It’s not your fault, and it’s not personal; it’s just that you are not matched opposites.
Since my first two books were published, I’ve appeared on scores of television and radio talk shows and been interviewed by dozens of magazines. As a consequence, I get loads of e-mail asking for help in relationships. This book is the response to all those people who’ve asked me, “How do I go about finding a loving, long-term relationship?” They seem to wish someone would take their hand and guide them through the confusion to their goal. This book is for everyone who’s ever felt that way. It’s got proven techniques for connecting and making a terrific first impression. It will guide you out of your nervous uncertainties and into a loving, lasting relationship. At the same time, it will demand that you be yourself and do what comes naturally. It is written from the heart and, like my other books, it’s tested and it works.
So, don’t sit back and relax. Instead, make up your mind to act upon what you’re about to read.
part 1
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The first steps toward falling in love are knowing yourself and finding the person who will complete you.
1
what is love?
The Inuit people of the Arctic have dozens of words for snow, because snow in all its forms—light, heavy, powdery, drifting, and so on—is central to their day-to-day life and survival. In our culture, judging from songs, books, and movies, love is essential to our lives, and yet we have only one word for a phenomenon that’s infinitely complex and varied. Love takes so many forms. There’s the love we feel for our parents, our siblings, and our friends, but even setting aside this kind of familial and platonic love and focusing on romantic love—the subject of this book—there are still so many variations. Everyone has an opinion on love, but is this universal and capricious emotion capable of definition?
People have been trying to understand and explain love for millennia. For me, one of the best observations about it came from the ancient Greeks. Nearly two and a half thousand years ago the philosopher Plato spoke of love in terms of completeness. In his dialogue the Symposium he suggested that we all search for our other half in hopes of becoming whole. He called this human
desire for completeness the search for love. In the same dialogue, Plato’s mentor Socrates said, “In our lover we seek and desire that which we do not have.”
Every religion has its opinions on love, as love is central to our spiritual beliefs. Attend a Christian wedding and you’re likely to hear what Saint Paul said to the Corinthians: “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude.”
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”
—The Dalai Lama
Judaism affirms that a husband and wife complete each other. According to Rabbi Harold Kushner, the Talmud teaches that a man is not complete without a wife; a woman is not complete without a husband. The Koran also espouses the notion of love creating wholeness, saying “God made man and woman to complete each other, as the night completes the day and the day completes the night.”
Buddhism compares love and marriage to the intermingling of emptiness and bliss. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, says, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”
Social scientists take a more analytical approach to understanding love. For example, Richard Rapson and Elaine Hatfield, researchers at the University of Hawaii, break love into two main types they call passionate love and companionate love. They define passionate love as a state of intense continuous longing for union with another person that involves warm sexual feelings and powerful emotional reactions. Companionate love is not as fired up. It’s having tender, trusting feelings for someone. You feel deeply attached and want to commit yourself to him or her.
Robert Sternberg, a professor of psychology and education at Yale University, espouses a triangular theory of love, believing that it’s made up of passion, intimacy, and commitment. Passion is the physical part—it makes you feel aroused and daring, and sometimes leads to bad decisions. Intimacy is the enjoyment you feel from being close and connected to someone, and commitment is your mutual agreement to make the relationship work. According to Sternberg, different combinations of these three components yield different kinds of love, and when you get all three points of the triangle working together, you get everlasting love.
A More Personal View
Novelists, poets, and writers cast a different kind of light on this elusive emotion. D. H. Lawrence wrote, “Let yourself fall in love. If you haven’t done so already you are wasting your life.” The French novelist and romantic Marcel Proust, who is regarded as one of the great writers in the field of love, said, “Love is subjective. We do not love real people, only those whom we have created in our mind.” And Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, tells us, “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
No one had more to say on the subject of love than the great bard William Shakespeare. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he wrote, “The course of true love never did run smooth,” and in The Two Gentlemen of Verona he said, “Hope is a lover’s staff,” whereas in As You Like It he refers to love as madness.
You don’t have to be an artist or thinker to have insight into love. When I ask the question “What is love?” at my workshops, everyone has a different response. Twenty-one-year-old Carol says, “It’s butterflies in the belly and smiles all the time.” Thirty-two-year-old Ryan tells us, “It’s passion, strength, fear, excitement, and confusion.” Forty-something Kristy says softly, “Love is knowing what the other person wants without even asking.” Her friend Maggie says, “It’s like a river flowing between two hearts.”
Some of my favorite definitions of love come from children. When asked “What does love mean?” eight-year-old Rebecca said: “When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love.” Billy, aged four, was more poetic: “When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.” Passionate little eight-year-old Chris really didn’t waste words on the flowery stuff: “Love is when mommy sees daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford.”
The Stages of Love
The reason it’s so hard to define love is that love isn’t a thing you have or get like a big feather bed. Nor is it a deep warm pool that you fall into. Love is a process. It’s something you do or that happens to you, and it’s the emotions and physical stirrings that go along with that. The actual process of falling in love unfolds with a natural progression through four stages: attraction, connection, intimacy, and commitment. The first stage is mainly about physical attraction and is triggered by nonverbal signals we give through a combination of attitude, physique, and clothing—our overall appearance. The next three stages are mainly about mental or emotional attraction, about developing intimacy and sharing confidences. And guess what? More often than not, it all begins with a look and smile.
The first step in creating any new relationship is attraction. Without attraction, nothing happens. We humans spend our lives sizing each other up—especially when meeting strangers. It’s in our nature to do so. The instant assessment we make when we first meet someone is called the fight or flight response, but that’s a little misleading: It’s really the fight, flight, or attraction response. Every new encounter represents a threat or an opportunity. We make snap judgments: Is this person a friend or an enemy, an opportunity or a threat, attractive or repellant? We each have our own ideals and preferences, many of which have been influenced by society, the media, our parents, and our peers. Some people make us feel threatened; others confused; and still others, immediately attracted. As a general rule, though, we are drawn to people we believe match our own preferences and ideals.
If two people meet and are mutually attracted, great. The way is paved for the second step toward love: connecting. Send the wrong signals or use the wrong words and the whole thing can fall apart as fast as it began, even if the potential is there. Send the right signals, say the right things, and the connection is easy and comfortable. Then it’s time to move on to the next step—to create some kind of intimacy. This is where you get the person talking and keep them talking.
Send the wrong signals or use the wrong words and the whole thing can fall apart as fast as it began, even if the potential is there.
There are two types of intimacy, emotional and sexual. This book is primarily concerned with emotional intimacy. Other than teaching you some sexually charged flirting techniques, we’ll leave your sex life to you. Emotional intimacy is achieved through both nonverbal signals, such as prolonged eye contact and incidental touching, and through a style of conversation called self-disclosure, in which you share your true self with another. As you both reveal more, you’ll identify small but crucial aspects of yourselves in each other that can lead you to feelings of unity and oneness. From here the shift into commitment with your matched opposite is as natural as self-preservation itself. Indeed, it’s almost the same thing. At this moment you’ll know that you are no longer alone—you are complete, committed, and very much alive.
Nobody Wants to Be Lonely
Why is having someone special so important to us human beings? Not just for companionship, for safety, or for convenience, but because we have a need to express ourselves emotionally and intellectually, we all need someone we can trust to talk to, share our experiences, and bounce our ideas off. We want someone with whom we can share life’s pleasures and, most important, someone to give us feedback—to respond to what we say and let us know how we’re doing. We need someone to witness us, validate us, make us feel complete.
When two people communicate openly and regularly, expressing their feelings and emotions, they give each other reassurance and hope and a connection to the future. We find all of this and more when we express ourselves in love. Scientists have proof that the emotional
feedback shared between two people in love balances, regulates, and influences their vital body rhythms and keeps them healthy. Heart rate, blood pressure, hormone balance, and blood sugar absorption all are improved when two people become emotionally united in love. In other words, that old expression “They’ve got real chemistry” isn’t merely a metaphor. People in love don’t just come alive, they tend to stay alive and live richer, healthier, more exciting, and longer lives.
Looking for Love
So if love is essential to our health and well-being, why is it sometimes so hard to find? For starters, much of what Hollywood has been feeding us about the perfect partner is perfect baloney. The media, in general, have given us poor guidance when it comes to finding a person who can complete us. If you look at glossy magazines or watch TV or movies, it’s easy to believe that we ought to look a certain way, smell a certain way, talk about certain things, and aspire to certain narrow financial and career objectives if we want to be in the running for a mate.
The people you see on TV and in the magazines are really just like you and me. I know, I used to photograph them. They’re just regular folks except they’ve been coiffed, made-up, and soft-focused. They speak words written by other people, wear clothes other people choose for them, spend half their lives on diets, and sometimes undergo painful surgery. Their glamour is all part of an illusion that we’ve allowed to be foisted upon us. The ironic thing is, when you lift the curtain you find that all the styling, toning, and tanning doesn’t add two hoots to these folks’ self-esteem. Inside, they’re just like everyone else.
How to Make Someone Fall in Love With You in 90 Minutes or Less Page 2
