The following is an update on my second blog post, written more than one year after the first. This was not an intentional marketing strategy. ; I let a lot of different things stop me. I could have beaten myself up, I could have joined a 30-day challenge as atonement, but instead, one day I just decided it was time and asked the universe for a do-over on my start. Since I restarted, I have either posted a blog or produced a FB Live every week for three and a half years.
Why am I telling you this? Because if you want to be in a committed, monogamous love relationship and you haven’t been in one before, or you’ve stopped dating because you’ve had too many negative experiences, you need to hear this – your past does not dictate your future. Just because you haven’t yet, doesn’t mean you can’t.
Even if you’ve stopped, you get to start over – but this time you’re starting from where you are now, not who you were then. You can have the love relationship you desire!
You can start over in love, right here, right now
One of the keys to creating love is gratitude
The past year has been one of immense laughing, learning, creating and unfolding. It also was one of crying, failing, demolishing and hiding. And that’s better than just okay. Why? Because I’m here, feeling stronger and more ready to move forward toward my goals than I’ve ever felt in my life – and even through all the seeming turmoil of the previous year I achieved one of the most important goals I’d ever set – after many years of working toward it, and with a lot of help from my friends, I was a foster mama to a teeny-tiny baby girl!
I think my friends would say they didn’t do as much for me as I make it seem, but the truth is that even if they weren’t physically with me, waking up every two hours for feedings, changing mountains of diapers, soothing rivers of tears, the fact that I knew they were with me emotionally made all the difference in the world. Yes, this was my dream, and I did the work to achieve it, but it was in the moments I felt most challenged that I knew I could turn to God for a loving whisper and one of my dear friends for a raucous laugh.
One of the most beneficial things I’ve ever done for myself, and my romantic life was to understand and embrace the connection between being grateful for all the love I already had in my life and creating the one kind I didn’t have yet.
When you acknowledge all the love you receive from your family and friends and can be truly satisfied with how much you love in return, it’s like turning a key in a lock. Love is love, one kind is not better or more valid than another.
Feeling gratitude and love leads to you feeling joy, and when you feel joy everything in life is a lot more fun! And when you are having fun, you are a magnet for every good thing you can imagine, including the man who is looking for you!
Affirm your ability to create love!
What do you know about affirmations?
They’re not magic words like “abracadabra!” that you say once and suddenly there are bunnies hopping out of hats or magic phrases like “You get three wishes” and suddenly you find yourself riding a silk carpet like a sleigh through the stars.
Affirmations are statements of positive possibility! You say them in the present tense, replacing the habitual negative thoughts that whisper to you all day with intentional, fresh, new ideas that will elevate and expand how you think about yourself and affirm your right to be joyous, cherished and loved.
And while you’re at it, you can affirm your right to have exactly the kind of love relationship you desire, the one that suits your unique dreams, with the partner who is the rightest match for your unique qualities. Your right relationship may be a marriage, may include children, may involve a big geographic move, or it may not include any of these things. Your life, your love, your choice.
How do you affirm a belief in a possibility for the unknown future when you’re so used to operating from probability based on what has happened in your past? You’ve probably heard it said that life is a journey and the road trip analogy holds true. Just like getting from the mainland to an island requires a bridge, sometimes creating a change in your life requires a bridge thought.
Do you feel regret for past decisions? Do you think you made choices that led you away from love and you’ll never find a way toward it again? Your gratitude practice will help you see all there is to love about yourself. It will help you see all the love you already have in your life, which is the first step on the bridge to your experiencing more. Then you can begin to replace those negative whispers with positive shouts of joy and affirm who you truly are and why you are a magnet for your right match!
Practice feeling love
Expressing gratitude, affirming your right and ability to live a life of joy, feeling love, these are all daily practices and right now they feel like a stretch because they’re all so new, and that’s good. You’ll know you’ve done them enough when they’ve melded into one big love-building habit like brushing your teeth, because then you’ll be living love regularly, that will feel familiar, it will be your new normal.
My hope for you is that you live the rest of your days in your new normal, because days grow into weeks, that grow into years and then a lifetime. In order to move from the familiar now to growth and forward movement you need to be intentional. You’ve already created success in so many parts of your life and I’m sure it’s because in those areas you are intentional. Yet when it’s come to your romantic relationships and desires for love, perhaps you’ve left it to chance? I remember thinking that love, dating, marriage, was just something I was supposed to know how to do naturally, and if it was meant to happen for me it just would. How many times did I just use the word ‘just’ in this sentence?
If you’ve done the same, here are three things you can do to start to turn the boat toward the shore you seek – an enriched romantic loving partnership with a man who loves, respects, cherishes and absolutely adores you as much as you do him!
Appreciate all the good in your life right now.
Know that with the right tools you can create anything you envision.
Make conscious choices to create the life you want, rather than just settling for the life you got. So right now, take a moment and affirm to yourself:
My conscious choices create the most fulfilling, loving relationship possible with my rightest match!
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