The kind of love we all want.

Real love.

You already know that you want to have a life filled with love — receiving it, giving it, feeling it, surrounded by it. But you also know that the “love” you’ve found so far isn’t quite as satisfying as you’d like.

It doesn’t fill you up.

It doesn’t make you whole or give you genuine and lasting happiness.

Maybe you’re confused about what real love looks like, but you want to find it, fill up with it, and give it to others.

Almost no one asks that question.

Instead, we usually ask, “what is love?”

And that’s a brain-fryer because the word “love” is an impossible mess. I mean, you can ask a hundred people for a definition of love and get just as many different answers. So it can be confusing and unclear.

When we ask, “what is real love?” — it simplifies the question to elicit a disentangled answer — Real love is unconditional love.

 That, my friend, is the kind of “love” we all want. 

There is little disappointment, impatience, irritation, or anger involved in real love — it isn’t temporary or conditional. With genuine love, people are not disappointed or angry when we make foolish mistakes. They don’t sigh and roll their eyes when we don’t do what they want or even when we inconvenience them.

Sound different?

Well, it is.

Most people have never truly felt and experienced the energy of real love.

I’m talking about the sentiment imprinted in your soul. The uniqueness of you — the real you connected to universal love, and the gift only you alone can bring to the world and those lives you touch along the way.

In other words, the sacred kind of love you know and feel deep inside that you yearn to share with another.

The idea of real love may sound something right out of a romantic movie, particularly if you have struggled to maintain a strong emotional connection in your relationships.

You might even wonder if it exists at all.

You might have concluded that that kind of love belongs in fictional worlds and heart-tugging flicks like The Notebook.

Sigh.

I think just about every woman who saw that movie would have chosen to be Allie for a day. The way Noah loved her was utterly breathtaking, soul-stirring, and as rare as a wild Tasmanian Tiger.

You know, extinct.

Real love is not easy to find. It isn’t always easy to hold onto, either.

That’s because real love is about soul love, and soul love is, well, real — like an intense experience that activates in the heart and soul to radiate through every cell in your body — and awakening of sorts.

We’re talking about real love.

Authentic love dances to a different beat than the ordinary.

Remember how Noah and Allie couldn’t forget their connection even after years of separation? How the flame still burned intensely in each of them despite that coming back together seemed impossible?

That’s real love.

We, too, can experience that kind of love in our lives, but we have to be open to it.
An article published by Cambridge Community said:

It can be challenging to pinpoint a solid definition of real love because each couple will not look the same. For instance, love existed in my first marriage. However, a part of me was aware that the love between us only scratched the surface of real love.

I knew there existed a deeper kind of love in my heart and that it eluded me within that relationship.

Intimacy expert Joanna Shakti gives a great explanation when she says: “It means that you embrace, express, and embody — all of who you are. It’s self-love at its finest.

It means that you are who you are — warts and all, perfections and imperfections, strengths and weaknesses, and you willingly let another see you in all of that.”

When my second husband arrived on the scene, I knew that I was ready to invite more profound love into my life — I needed more from a partner. I craved to be seen, accepted, and understood by a mate; I needed more profound love and connection — emotional closeness and a soul-deep bond.

This MBG Relationships article nails the feeling:

These qualities were lacking in my first marriage, but they are everything that I need to thrive with a life partner.

 Real love makes romance come alive. 

When you think about it, to know someone is in love with you is to know their soul. It is to know without a shadow of a doubt that they love you without always needing to hear the words “I love you.”

So, what is real love?

Here are a few fundamental qualities to look for:

You cannot fake real love because it demands high-level authenticity. Being emotionally intimate and honest with a partner means that you can talk to them about your innermost thoughts and trust them with your deepest secrets.

Emotional honesty in a connection is a feeling of alignment and intimacy between two people beyond surface-level conversations, physical attraction, or even intellectual similarities. Instead, it feels as if you’re connecting on a deeper soul level — and most importantly, you feel secure connecting that deeply.

 You cannot build healthy relationships on lies.  So, when you love someone deeply, you don’t want to break their trust.

Instead, you’ll want to treasure it.

In the initial “love bubble” stage, everything your partner says and does is perfect until we float back down to earth with the stark reminder of their humanity.

In other words — their flaws.

Real love will love them regardless, if not more, for their beautiful imperfections and, at times, annoying nuances.

For example, my husband sometimes compares me to who I was during our earlier years to the woman I am today. He is right that I have changed. I might even drive him a little nutty with my ways and our differing opinions, though he doesn’t love me any less for it. On the contrary, his love for me has deepened over time.

Because that’s a hallmark of real love, it matures and strengthens as we change and grow and will always love you just the way you are.

Charity, graciousness, and tenderness accompany the patterns of real love. When your beloved hurts, you hurt too. But, when their spirits soar, yours will take to the skies and follow suit. That is because real love is pure in its intention and fierce in its support.

It has no hidden agendas, self-interested or self-invested angles.

It is an easy flow of naturally wanting what is best for your mate. Their happiness is important to you. Even when it directly opposes your wants and desires.

Real love doesn’t cling, spy or distrust.

Example: From the very beginning, my husband always said that it would tear him apart if I ever chose to leave him, but that he would never stop me if that’s what I wanted to do.

Why?

Because he is aware enough to understand that love doesn’t mean ownership and that we have no right to control someone else’s life — married or not.

We all have our unique paths to follow, regardless of who we love or have loved. It’s a mindset that I have always admired about my husband.

Real love does not claim or dictate conditions. It just is.

The most magical part of a unique connection has to be in the ability to “just be” together. You don’t care what you’re doing with the other person just so long as you’re spending time with them.

On the flip side, you honor each other’s need for personal space and don’t feel threatened or jealous when the other person isn’t always within reach or available to catch an episode of Big Brother.

Truly loving someone isn’t about demanding all of their time.
It’s more about recognizing that it’s beneficial to give each other the time you both need to decompress and organize thoughts and feelings away from the world.

I crave my alone time.

Solitude plays a crucial part in my life. Without it, I’d lose my mind for sure. During my privacy time, I can process and sort through stuff like relationships, mounting obstacles or issues, the current world crisis, or unexpected interactions with others to gain peace of mind.

My extroverted partner respects that part of me and thankfully doesn’t feel the need to be in my pocket every other minute or keep an eagle eye on me and what I am doing at all times, as was the case with my first extremely possessive husband.

A beautiful face will get you everywhere. Almost.

Beauty isn’t all that. We’re so conditioned by the “Halo Effect” that we are fast to assume that beautiful people are happier or that they’ve got it easier because of their above-average looks. How did we wind up so hyper-focused on youth and exterior beauty, anyway? As if being or possessing beauty makes the secret sauce for all of life’s pleasures.

Maybe it isn’t fair that some of us come into the world with an advantage like perfect symmetrical features or a multi-million-dollar inheritance. I mean, outer beauty and money are alike in that everyone wants a piece of the action despite that owning either of them alone is not nearly enough to bring us true happiness.

Least of all, physical beauty.

But if we are going to talk about beautiful women, then we need to be very clear about what it means to be physically beautiful. Feminine beauty is recognized by all mankind. Yet, globally, it has no absolutes in fixed standards in that some cultures where food is scarce, (like countries in Africa and the South Pacific Islands) often define obesity as a sign of beauty. Whereas, the opposite is vastly true in western cultures, where food is more abundant.

 Beauty does really lie in the eye of the perceiver. 

In reality, the culture makes no difference. The fact is that Male sexuality is far more visually-driven than female sexuality, and, from the get-go, women everywhere are socialized into the concept of beauty for the benefit of men — being a beautiful woman means being sexually appealing to men.

That’s it in a nutshell.

There’s no avoiding the truth about the beauty-biased nature of our society, or how many women want to be and remain desirable to men.

Once a woman reaches a certain age and spots the appearance of wrinkles and crow’s feet, and gravity begins to do its thing, the thought of beauty-expiry is all too real. Hence, the booming sales in every department store cosmetic counter and the lucrative cosmetic surgery business.

Lunch-time lip-filler, anyone? How about getting both sets of lips done while you’re there?

Men prefer pouty vagina lips over shrivelled gills. Let’s all blow up our lady gardens to be even more beautiful for them.

Heh.

Personally, I can’t help but feel that so many of today’s women are putting way too much pressure on, and poison in themselves so that they can uphold society’s image of what constitutes beauty. We so easily buy into the image presented by the media and risk major health complications in the name of achieving the body-beautiful.

Just about everyone is a slave to the beauty gene in one way or another, and really, its one big crock of shit.

It feels icky to say this now, but I was one of those young women born blessed with the beauty gene. Thanks to my heritage and for better or worse, I had to live with that fact.

It might sound strange to hear someone speak about beauty as if it has a downside. But natural beauty is like any other prerequisite human trait in that it comes with its own set of internal warfare, life-lessons and personal challenges, and not every beautiful woman can get comfortable with what it means to be outwardly beautiful.

To truly discover what it means to be a beautiful woman, we must first understand the impact her appearance has on others and how it influences her life experiences.

The negative side effects of beautiful women can often:

Beauty blinds us to the point of unrealistic expectations. We all tend to naturally form an opinion of someone within minutes of meeting them. Though, beautiful people are more likely to generate first impressions not unlike superficial, skin-deep fantasies.

For instance, a beautiful woman is seen and treated in a certain way by society at large. In an article published by Psyblog, Jeremy Dean says that: “People generally assume that if you’re an attractive person it also means you possess better social skills, an interesting and outgoing personality, more elegance, intelligence, kindness and friendliness.”

It’s the beauty bubble fantasy.

Men are particularly good at creating the illusory fantasy around a beautiful woman, creating an image in his head where she’s a perfect, fragile creature who can hardly think for herself and needs protecting from the world.

The thing about it is that beautiful women are as human as the next person — she is no better or worse. Which means that her less-than-perfect characteristics will eventually shatter mans self-created “angelic” illusion of her.

Researcher Catherine Eckel confirms:

“People have very high expectations of the level of trust of beautiful people. When beautiful people fail to live up to those expectations, they’re punished more harshly than people who are not beautiful.”

The fall from grace can be that much harder.

Then there are those who feel instantly threatened when confronted by natural beauty. This usually reveals itself in the form of envy, jealousy or insecurities and can lead to social rejection by members of the same sex.

A study published by PubMed found that although attractive people are generally socially popular, there is also evidence that very attractive people can experience social rejection from members of their own sex (D Krebs, A A Adinolfi, 1978).

My younger days experienced social rejection when my closet girlfriends outed me because of the way I looked. They avoided me like the plague when they had a new man in their lives, telling me outright that they were reluctant to have me around him.

Somehow, my presence made them feel insecure when around the opposite sex and they didn’t want to deal with how their men might react to me.

So, I was regularly left out of social get-togethers because of my appearance, and regardless of the person they knew I was (and still am) on the inside.

A definite negative side effect right there.

Assumptions fly, yes.

The inescapable thing about being a beautiful young woman is that random men often believe that she’s an open ticket at a “hit-on-me” buffet. They assume that because she is out in the world doing her thing, it means she wants to be approached with flirty, unwanted pick-up lines.

No. Just no.

I can’t begin to tell you how many times a strange man stopped me in public or pulled over in a car after spotting me, attempting to lure me into conversation and get my number. It happened whether I was in the city working or just wandering around on the weekend.

Sometimes it got scary and it definitely became an invasion of privacy — to the point that there was a time when I came to dread the prospect of leaving the house because I didn’t want to have to deal with men in my normal, everyday life.

I’m not the only woman to have felt this way:

“The negative side effect: creepy old men follow me or try to talk to me in public. They enter my personal space and I am scared.” — From the UK Independent.

Another negative side effect of beauty is that there is no such thing as being “one of the guys” with a group of heterosexual men, at least not for an extended period of time and especially not after a few beers work into the mix.

The sex part always gets in the way and that gets awkward.

Really awkward.

Negative side effects aside, it’s obvious that “beauty magic” does have its perks. Beautiful people often experience an advantage in the form of opportunities, favors, extra attention and choice of romantic partners that might make the discussion above seem inadmissible to some.

Regardless of how life works out for her, a beautiful woman is always going to be in real danger of her beauty festering into vanity and conceit, or even eventual depression if she continues to buy into our culture’s definition of beauty and hinge her self-worth on her outer qualities and male attention — and that fact has the potential of becoming the ultimate negative side effect of a beautiful woman.

Me? Nowadays, I am nowhere near the youthful beauty that I used to be, but I have never felt more beautiful in my own (un-filled) skin or more comfortable with who I am on the inside. And I couldn’t have got here without experiencing both the negative and positive side effects of beauty, and how those elements impact my unique life journey.

Exterior beauty showed me the value in focusing inward rather than outward.

In a world obsessed with either owning, exploiting or elevating beautiful women to the unrealistic, she, the beautiful one, above all other creatures must find a way to see beauty for what it truly is:

Maybe beauty is all that after all.