Why A Roadmap?

Hi there, I'm Ruth Schwartz. I am the director of the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, which is the leading global resource helping lesbians and queer women, women who love women like me, date and love in the ways that are deeply fulfilling to us, have the relationships of our dreams. And I am the author of this book, Conscious Lesbian Dating and Love: A Roadmap finding the right partner and creating the relationship of your dreams. I have been out since 1982. I've had quite a few relationships. Some of them have been beautiful. Some of them have been incredibly difficult and painful. And at a certain point in my own journey, I decided to devote my life to really cracking this code and then to helping other women crack this code because I see so much pain in our community. And as women who love women, Love is really important to us. Certainly is to me, and yet sometimes it can feel so difficult and so confusing and so mysterious. And that's why I developed a 12-week roadmap to conscious lesbian dating and lasting love. This is a course that I have been offering since 2015. Women from 25 countries around the world have taken this. class and had their lives changed. And so I wanted to ask you today, would you benefit from a roadmap to lasting lesbian love? Is that something that you want in your life? You might be thinking, well, yeah, but you don't have the power to give that to me. And, and it's certainly true, I don't have the power to give it to you, but you have the power to change your relationship destiny. If you choose. You know, one thing I like to say is lesbian love is not rocket science, it's neuroscience. And there are particular patterns that tend to play out between women. Let me just talk to you about a few of them, see if you relate. You know, one thing is that dating tends to be hard for us. A lot of times with 2 women, you know, it's like How do I know she's interested in women? Are we just friends? Is there a possibility of something more? Both people can feel really hesitant to even introduce that possibility because you don't want to risk the friendship. You don't want awkward moments. You don't want her to feel rejected. You don't want to feel rejected. So oftentimes nobody says anything, which of course is a recipe for frustration. But then let's say somebody says something or it becomes clear. What often happens when, when there's mutual interest between 2 women is that very quickly we will zoom in— not, not Zoom like, like the video chat platform, but zoom like go really fast— into a state called limerence. Limerence is a brain state. It's a biochemical high that for the first few months of a relationship makes everything feel Perfect. Have you been there? I sure have many, many times. And it is an amazing state. It is a gift. It is beautiful. It is blissful. It's compelling. It makes everything feel magical. It makes you know that you have found the one. Everything is going to work out with her, even though that didn't happen in the past. This one is going to be different. So you and she together will be in this magical brain chemistry state called limerence for several months. And then usually right around the 3-month mark, it wears off. Some people get a little less, some people get a little more, but it doesn't last. And so when the limerence wears off, a couple things tend to happen. One is that you get more reality about who this person is. She gets more reality about who you are, and you may start to notice you're actually not that compatible in some key ways. That can be so confusing and painful because by this time you've bonded with what I call lesbian super glue. So it can be so hard to part, so hard to deal with this reality that you really want different things in your lives. So that's one thing that can happen. But another thing that can happen is even if you are compatible, or you might be, let's say you actually do have similar visions. Maybe you both want to live on a farm, or you both want to adopt kids, or you both want to travel around the world, or, you know, whatever it is. Because as women, we tend to dive into relationships so fast, you may not have really dated and tried on the connection for a period of months. You may have You know, become an item really fast and, and been in this limerent state of bliss. So then when it wears off, the triggers can be really intense because you don't actually have a deep, solid foundation of knowing each other. And then all of a sudden you've both made big emotional commitments to each other. Maybe you've even made logistical commitments like moving in together. Or getting engaged or even getting married. Sometimes we do that even within the first few months. But let's say you didn't do the U-Haul thing, but you, you know, you started to say to each other, like, I want to love you for the rest of my life. You know, you're the one for me. You know, I'm going to stick around with you here. These are such beautiful things to say. And to feel. But when the limerent state wears off, probably your brain and hers will start remembering all the triggers you carry from childhood, you know, earlier in your adult life, times when relationships didn't go well, places of fear. You might be afraid of being abandoned. You might be afraid of being smothered or suffocated. You know, you might kind of overshare your feelings sometimes, or you might kind of clam up with your feelings. Either way, it can be hard on your partner. So all of this stuff starts just surfacing, and it can create a really hard-to-navigate situation. And frankly, many couples, even who might have had great potential, never make it through this stage. So if this has happened to you once or more than once, maybe even several times, maybe even more than that, you have understandably probably gotten gun-shy. And you know, you might be feeling like, I'm scared of women. This relationship romance thing just doesn't work out for me. If I'm attracted to her, she's going to be bad news. And this is because there have been so many times when you have felt this magical in love. I know it's going to work out feeling only to have it fall apart. So no wonder you don't trust. I mean, it's natural. It'd be crazy to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, right? So I see so many women who try just giving up on love. It's just like, okay, being single is better than, you know, this high, high, and then this shattering low. You know, but that doesn't work too well either because your heart is yearning for love. I know mine always does. You know, even after I go through a breakup and lick my wounds for a while, like I want that thing. I want a partner. I want a beautiful lasting love. I want sustained intimacy. I want joy and trust and. Physical affection and, you know, mutual listening and presence and great sex and all the learning and joy that can come from sexual exploration, growing together, you know, having spiritual practice together, just navigating life together. I want that. And I bet you probably want that too. That's why you're watching this video. So I'm here to tell you that wish is beautiful. That longing is honorable. We are wired as human beings, and especially as women, we are wired to need and crave intimate connection, and that longing is holy. So to me, the thing is, when you know that that longing is holy, but how you have embodied it in the past led to pain, It's like, okay, one option is, you know, throw that baby out with the bathwater, just throw the longing out or attempt to. It'll just sneak up and, you know, at some point it'll like pull your strings from underneath and get you involved in another relationship that, that you didn't take time and care to enter. And then you get your heart broken again. And, you know, that cycle will repeat. But the really sane alternative that I would like to propose to you Is that instead of that, instead of signing up for repeated heartbreak over and over, or trying to just swear off of love altogether, door number 3 is get yourself a roadmap. Get yourself a roadmap to what actually works so you can understand your patterns, your needs, what compatibility really is, so you can look for someone else who shares not only your vision, but who has the skills to implement that shared vision that you both hold dear. You can learn how to date. You can learn how to cultivate the resilience so that the dating won't, you know, rock you in harmful ways. You can learn the self-confidence and the clarity to get to know women and, you know, check them out without diving in so fast. You can learn how to really navigate the kinds of communication issues that come up between 2 women. As I like to say, lesbians can have the best relationships on the planet because we can go so deep, we can bond so intensely, we can have so much rich intimacy, but it also means our triggers are more intense, so it takes more skill to have a good lesbian relationship. It's just true. You can develop that skill, and I would like to invite you to join the 12-week roadmap class to conscious lesbian dating and lasting love. It will make a world of difference in your life, and in fact, I am so sure that it will make a world of difference that I offer a money-back guarantee. So check out the class, consciousgirlfriendacademy.com. I would love to have you join us because I know I've gotten hundreds of emails from women who've taken this class. It changes lives. It will help you take charge of your relationship destiny and finally create the love you have been wanting, needing, craving, the love you actually deserve. It'll help you know yourself, navigate the dating world, navigate the trials and tribulations with love on a much more even keel. And then it will help you find the one you want and really know how to build the love you want. So check out the Conscious Girlfriend Roadmap class. I would love to support you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being queer.