Lonely in Vancouver

Hi. Hello. This is Steve Barnes back again with today's segment on life Writing Live again. If you enjoy these, be sure to not just like them, but share them. Shares is how we know which subjects work the best. What is it that you want? You can also post requests, because everything we're talking about is how to balance all the aspects of your life, not just for success and health and happiness, but also personal evolution. That's my goal for the planet. This is Valentine's month, so I wanted to talk a little bit about love, relationships. I mean, I don't think it's a secret to anybody that I absolutely adore my wife. I feel incredibly lucky to have found her. It's not all luck. We've talked about this a lot. I'm not one of these people who does the oh, God, my wife's too good for me routine. Oh, my God. No, no. I think that people are where they've earned in their relationships, which is cruel in one way, but it also says that the power is in your hands and you can change things. If you're not happy with what you've got, if you've got something that you're happy, all you have to do is stay in the courting phase, stay doing the things that you did when you first met, and you'll be able to keep that relationship going. But to be frank, I mean, while there are things in my life that don't work perfectly in general, God, I'm so happy with where I am and what's going on. And my love for Tananarive and my sense of connection to her has been so important in that it's been such a blessing in so many different ways. But I didn't. There was no straight line to this. I mean, I was operating on some faulty premises. I mean, I was raised by a single mother. She'd been divorced, and she never remarried. So I never got to see a healthy relationship up close. I did the best I could in my early relationships, but I was, you know, thrashing and experimenting, as we all do if we don't have really good role models. And my first marriage, you know, went the way of the dodo. I'd moved up to the. Up to the Northwest to be with my family, to raise my daughter and to be with my wife, because my wife at the time had said that she wanted to get away from California. This was after the LA earthquake. So I moved up there. And when I got up there, I realized belatedly that there had been damages in my marriage, that I had not been aware of that. I had not been as conscious, I had not been as awake or adult as I should have been. And my wife was no longer really interested in being with me. And it was incredibly painful. And I ended up living alone. I mean, all my stuff had been moved up from California. I didn't have any business connections. I was totally alone. And I remember sitting in my apartment in Vancouver, Washington. It was bare except for a bed, a television set, my dog and a gun. And I realized this was not a good combination. I was a thousand miles away from any of the people that I loved, with the exception of the wife who no longer wanted to be with me and the daughter who I adored enough to give up everything in my life to be with. And I'm always happy about that decision. But I was in bad shape and I was very, very unhappy. And I knew that I had to make a change. I mean, I was not ready to go off the falls, but. But I could hear them roar. I knew for the first time in my life I understood how someone could want to kill themselves. And pulling myself back from that precipice was the beginning of becoming the person that I am today. In many ways. I mean, I had to hit rock bottom. And one of the things I had to do was to develop a completely new way of looking at the question of relationships. I knew I wanted a relationship. I wasn't going to lie about that. But I also knew that everything I was doing to try to create a healthy relationship was failing. That meant to me there was something wrong with the basic way I looked at the question. During February, we will revisit this. I don't know how often we revisit it because there are so many things I want to share with you and so many things I want to give to you. But I want to ask you a question today. Maybe I'll experiment with asking a question every day. And for those of you who are not in relationships, this is a critical question. And that question is, would you be attracted to you, even the straight across equivalency, someone with your level of financial stability, your level of physicality and physical energy, and your level of emotional health? Would you? Because if the answer is no, you have work to do. It's as simple as that. The problem is not that there are no good men or no good women out there. The problem is that your standards for what you want are above what you are presenting to the world. If you look at yourself in the mirror and you like what you see and you would be attracted to you. Great. You will have no problem being attracted to someone who is attracted to you. And in general, in life, we are attracted to people at our level of personal integration and above, and we are attractive to people at our level of personal integration and below. So if you're not attracted to the kinds of people who are attracted to you, you have work to do. It's as simple as that. And that was one of the core realizations I had. Now There were probably 10 core realizations, and although it would take a lot of time, I could teach a weekend workshop very easily in all of them. But we also created the 10 commandments of finding your soulmate PDF that you can get for free by going to www.soulmateprocess.com soulmate process.com so that's all I wanted to say today. Would you be attracted to you? If not, why not? What would you have to change such that you would be attracted to you? If you liked today's message, then all I ask you to do is to share it so that we know that you liked it. That's how we count the votes. And aside from that, have a wonderful day. If you're going to watch the super bowl, root for the team that you love and I'll talk with you again tomorrow. Take care.