Maybe the question you should be asking is: “do I even love me?”
I’m assuming if you’re here, it’s because you are feeling the only kind of insecure that leads you to believe such a question can be answered by a stranger. Or maybe you’re just curious as to what kind of relationship consolidation an Internet article could possibly offer you. This isn’t a ‘10 signs he’s into you’ type of story though. This is, in fact, a refresher course on love itself.
Fortunately for some of us, we are taught how to love by our families and friends. And often unknowingly, we are teaching them how to love us too. Mind Stylist, Reiki practitioner and PSYCH-K facilitator Chala Guzel says that when our needs for love are not met as children, we can begin to develop a disconnect from our emotions, causing us to struggle with communicating our needs and wants in general.
If you’re Googling “does my boyfriend/girlfriend even love me?” I’m questioning, what is it you love about the person you’re referring to? Are they a positive influence on your mental health? Do they support your growth? Are they stabilising for your mood and energy? If you responded “no” to any of these, the answer isn’t to dump them (…yet.) First, you need to address how good you are at allowing someone to love you properly. How easy it is for you to be in your state of flow around them, unworried about how you look or if you’ve said too much.
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Maybe your partner has been trying to love you in the only way they know how – with the space you’ve given them. If you’re keeping someone confined to the front steps of your home, you can’t get mad at them for not being able to help you keep the kitchen clean. Put simply: if you want to give someone the ability to change something, like the fact that certain behaviours of theirs trigger your deepest insecurities, the only way to empower them to do so is by telling them how you’re feeling. It may come out clumsily at first or feel uncomfortably emotional, but allowing people to love us properly means opening our heart to them in this way.
Chala says there are many signs your heart is energetically closing. Here are some of them:
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Getting triggered by past relationship trauma
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Holding onto grudges
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Experiencing trust issues
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Feeling closed off and not wanting to be open
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Isolating yourself and not wanting to be social
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Overthinking
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Tolerating too much from others to the point where you don’t have solid boundaries.
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Accepting poor behaviour
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Bottling up your emotions
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Feeling anxious and stressed
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Losing your sense of identity
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Lack of poor boundaries
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Pushing others away
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Lashing out and becoming mean, attacking without no remorse
When you’re in this space, Chala says it’s important to be intentional rather than reactive: “Check in with yourself to see whether you feel seen and loved. Is your heart hurt? How does your body respond? Focus on dropping into your intuition which will guide you.”
Once you’ve identified how you’re feeling, you need to be careful about how best to communicate this. It’s not fair to expect your partner to have all the answers or to see things the same way as you do all the time. But love is about raising the questions and issues so that you both have access to the solutions.
Chala confirms that of course you have a right to ask for things you need in any relationship, but you have to be clear about your needs first. Asking yourself and others to identify needs is a game-changer as it eliminates assumptions whilst promoting authentic connection. It also gives us a chance to describe the situation from our point of view, which when delivered with the right intention and execution, can actually benefit you AND the other person. Below is an example of how you can communicate your needs effectively.
“I notice that when I start to talk to you, you just stare at the phone.”
This is you stating that you see this behaviour. Then, let the other person know how this makes you feel.
“When you stare at the phone while I’m talking to you it makes me feel unimportant.”
This is not you blaming and attacking, but rather, you’re showing observation. Next, spell out exactly what behaviour you’d like to see from your partner in the future.
“When I feel unimportant, I need eye contact or a head nod that acknowledges that you hear me and are paying attention to me.”
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Keeping your heart energetically open is so important because we often wrongly assume that love requires minimal work. This kind of love tends to occur in friendships and family relationships. Although it can seem like these platonic loves don’t require as much as romantic love does, there’s a Buddhist proverb that says: “how you do one thing, is how you do everything.” In the loving relationships, we naturally inhabit the most, showing up to love responsibly as a devoted practice is how we become exceptional romantic partners.
Being able to tell people what you need, though this initially seems selfish, is actually vital to loving well – but it’s often the crucial part of the puzzle we don’t bother to look for. We confuse ourselves by thinking the relationship itself is magically filling a need just by existing. That we are somehow going to become complete and whole by inserting another person (with their own set of needs) into our world. Sometimes we like the drama and purpose that comes from tending to someone else’s needs. And if we are unhealthily codependent, we give ourselves a gold star for guessing the needs of others ‘empathetically.’ We like to think we are good at our jobs as lovers/carers/unpaid life assistants. But we need to come to terms with the fact that there is something extremely toxic about putting someone else in front of our needs in this way. And by toxic, I mean literally weakening our life force at the roots.
Sometimes I put my fiddle fig outside by itself so the trunk is strengthened by the stress of the wind. I know this because my friend Grace has a two-metre fiddle leaf fig she shakes for a few minutes each week (arguably the reason for its towering existence.) I’ve tried to stake my indoor plants before, not realising that the resilience they needed to stand tall on their own would only come from a level of stress. Stress being the thing I thought I needed to protect them from, even though they were clearly the opposite of thriving in the states I’d been keeping them in. It’s funny how oblivious we can become to the decay of the things we love when they are right before our eyes. Like a frog in a hot kettle, not able to register the gradual increase of temperature until it’s too late.
In relationships, we have to know how we are separate and unique from one another in order to truly thrive together. We have to know when it is time to be outside in the wind, and when it is time to come inside for nurture and to be appreciated. When you reclaim your power over your needs by identifying them and communicating them in this way, it means that you are saying you care about the relationship’s ability to flourish. You can be more than just needed, you can be the kind of love you want to be.
We learn the value of loving ourselves by loving other people, and we learn the value of loving other people when we learn to truly love ourselves.
Chala says that the simplest way to keep your heart open to yourself and others is to spend time outdoors and connect with nature: “Not only does it have the power to ground and centre your spirit but it’s also easy and free; a winning combination.”
Here are some of her other recommendations:
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Organise regular check-ins with yourself: create time and space to have open conversations with the closest people to you.
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Meditation
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Energy healing focusing on the heart will help even out the flow of energy through it
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Practise self-love
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Become aware of your posture
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Show compassion to yourself and others. They say if you need love in your life, give more of it out.
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Be diligent with your daily morning and evening rituals
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Affirm your values
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Become gentle with yourself
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Prioritise self-kindness instead of self-judgement
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Write down all the good qualities and bad qualities of yourself, pick one good and one bad quality you want to improve and work through them.
When it comes to nurturing our sore hearts, it’s important to surround yourself with things that make you feel happy, and take the time to slow down and generally do less. Chala also recommends stillness for all of its difficulty as a potent tool in facing hurt.
“Breathwork is another incredibly powerful and free tool that we don’t utilise enough,” she says. “If you do a simple Google search there are many publications and even self-help apps that provide step-by-step exercises that assist in conscious control and influencing a person’s mental, emotional or physical state.”
If you’re the kind of person who stops working on yourself when things start to feel better, Chala says it’s time to invest in maintaining the up-keep. “The more you work on yourself, the more you unpack who you are,” she explains. “You start to unlearn things that don’t align with your core values and beliefs and build on what is important.”
When it comes to wondering if your boyfriend or girlfriend really loves you, there’s nothing to be ashamed of in realising that we have settled for a love that is not in alignment with what we really want or need. Once we get over the ego-break (different to but sometimes accompanied by heartache) of communicating this and identifying this to our significant other, our personal trunk and root systems become a little bit stronger. Maybe it isn’t the end, after all, maybe it’s the beginning of a new type of relationship, that’s more fulfilling for everyone.
And most importantly, you can start loving yourself at any time. Maybe that time is now. Maybe the question you’re really asking is: “Do I even love me?”
Love is a feeling first and foremost, but it is also a choice. Love is not running from you and it is in fact everywhere, threading our society together. Some people choose to ignore it, but once you decide you are going to be open to love, watch it flood in. You are so loved.
What do you need to fill your heart back up? Who needs to know this information?
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