“What am I doing wrong?”
I looked up to see a beautiful blond woman with familiar green eyes. Her voice cracked as she held back her tears. “I thought I did everything right, but here I am again,” she said.
Her name was Jessica, and we’d originally met when she came to me for relationship coaching two years earlier. She had a frustrating and almost predictable relationship pattern. She would meet an amazing man, and the relationship would start out with wonderful promise. But when she dated, she would get crazy. Her anxiety level would increase and she would either jump into a sexual relationship where she fell in love but he didn’t, or she would pull away, finding some flaw or perceived mistrust in him. The details of each relationship were different, but eventually a glaring problem would arise. She told me the first man had lied, the second worked too much, and the third chatted with women online. Now she was here again, looking for help.
I had worked with her in the past to break her pattern of picking men that were wrong for her, but now another problem had arisen. She was picking better men, but she still couldn’t seem to find love. Her problem this time wasn’t with men but with herself and the dating process.
Love isn’t just one thing that you luckily fall into. Finding and maintaining lifelong love is a process with several stages that are biologically different from one another. Because the stages are different, you can feel different emotions during each phase. Most people, particularly women, have trouble with anxiety. As you move along the path to lifelong love, your level of anxiety fluctuates, sometimes to the point of panic. At other times, your anxiety is gone, and you feel euphoric. This euphoric phase is the one that most people associate with love.
My goal in writing this book is to explain what happens on the path to lifelong love. I’ll point out the twists and turns as well as the potholes, the places that can cause trouble and hurt you. When you understand the science of love, it will help you easily and effortlessly find nourishing and passionate, long-lasting love.