Love, is there anything finer in this world than the one feeling that captivates us with such a sense of wonder?
Whether we’re talking Agape, Eros or Philia love is one of the four currencies that makes life worth living.
Let me back up a minute and explain Agape, Eros and Philia to those who aren’t familiar with the words.
Agape is most often used in our age to refer to brotherly/sisterly love for all of humanity, but it also refers to the paternal love of God for man and man for God.
The term Eros is where we get word ‘erotic’ from and refers to the part of love that is a passionate and intense desire for something. It often includes a sexual aspect.
Finally, there is Philia, which is the fondness and appreciation we feel for friends and family as well as love of career and community.
The type of love I’m going to primarily speak about with regard to synchronicity is the Eros kind of love, as it’s the love we get most excited about.
Think about the last time you felt the growing infatuation for someone, and then think of the times it went beyond infatuation into the actual romantic love we celebrate at this time of year.
Perhaps, it’s a spouse or partner currently in your life. Perhaps you haven’t felt that way in a long time. When the love bug strikes, synchronicity has a pretty regular habit of showing up frequently. As we connect with someone and explore each other, we begin noticing romantic songs playing more frequently on our radios, we encounter number synchronicity and we of course begin to tune into the same wavelength of our endeared.
Some may say this is coincidental or that we are influencing the outcomes subconsciously, and perhaps at times this is true, but who can deny how much more vibrantly alive we become when we both adore and find ourselves adored in the midst of such a strong attraction?
There is no other issue in life that has led more clients to me than the subject of love, and I’m asked all the time if certain signs and symbols, dreams and other phenomena mean that love will happen or return.
Because of this, I thought I’d give you some useful information, both on what I see as the objective of loving relationships, the signs we get when we are immersed in them and what we can do with the power of love once we have it.
It is very uncommon in our age to marry the first person we love, and rarer even still that we stay with them for a lifetime. I’m often jealous of my grandparents, God rest them both, for having had such a deep and loving relationship for sixty years or more. It wasn’t that they never squabbled, but that in their hearts, differences or no, there was no other person they could even imagine themselves with.
When my grandmother passed away, Christmas of 1979, I had no idea what I would learn about the depth of love a man can have for a woman. It wasn’t until I was grown many years later that I spoke with a neighbor of theirs who told me after my grandmother died, my grandfather would go sit in the driveway in his car and just cry.
It was less than 90 days later that we buried my grandfather as well.
Now I’m not telling you this to sadden you, but only to illustrate how deeply my grandfather loved my grandmother, so much so that he followed her even beyond the veil. It is for me, a beautiful and inspiring love story.
I have not been so fortunate in my love life to have met someone in my youth who would consistently be with me till the end. I’ve had the ups and downs of dating, and a marriage that didn’t work out. Until recently, I’d pretty much abandoned the idea of being romantically involved at all.
After my divorce, I went into solitude romantically. I did so by choice to tend to the wounds I had and to reclaim the pieces of me that I’d hidden away from the harshness I endured in my marriage. It was time well spent, and taking two years brought a lot of the spirit and enthusiasm back into my character.
It was during this time that I reflected on the nature of relationships and what they are really about. You know most often we self-talk ourselves into loving another and we find ourselves shocked when the image we’ve held in our minds doesn’t quite reflect the real person who is standing right in front of us. Then we hit a crossroads and we have to decide if we can accept the person as they really are or we destroy the relationship trying to make them fit the mold we’ve created.
We do this because we can become so hungry for love, isn’t this true? We attract a partner and we so want them to be that perfect ideal that we never really bother to get to know the real person.
And so, our relationships are happening to teach us a few fundamental things. These are the things that prepare us for the real love we seek. First, they teach us to be honest with ourselves, and with our partners. We wake up eventually to the idea that we actually do have to get to know the person and not gloss over the things that don’t fit our expectations so that we can move on from the people we date who don’t really measure up. We learn that to be loved, we must love ourselves enough to honor our own needs and to be patient to find someone who reflects that naturally. Then we have to be strong enough to see if they find their needs met in who we are as well.
Well, we can skip a lot of the heart aches, if we simply do this work up front instead of dragging it through multiple relationships bruising our own and sometimes the other person’s heart as well. We do this by learning to take care of all of our own needs, and then learning the courage to say no to the people who would deny us those needs in lieu of waiting for someone who will. We cannot be half looking for half, but two wholes that enjoy the presence of each other. This is when the real synchronicity will occur. The deepest signs of the right relationship are not those intense, knock your socks off infatuating impulses, but a calm and steady synergy that feels like home.
In honoring ourselves to do this internal work, we learn not only how to maneuver through the dating battlefield, but how also to ask for what we need from our bosses, our friends and our family. We learn to reclaim our personal power and become the whole person we are meant to be.
Most importantly, we learn to set boundaries that we can live with and we get to see the universe change almost magically to adapt to this shift in our energy. We notice that people respect us more and that the people we draw towards us are of a higher caliber and a more resonating frequency. And we learn to balance our giving with our taking.
