The answer is no. Because when we are asking that question, we don’t actually love someone, instead we are in love with them. Love is a state of oneness. By loving someone, you include them as yourself. It is a state of appreciation for someone or something. Love in fact has no need to attach to someone or something (to form a singular relationship) because it does not recognize separation. When separation is recognized, what we get is this thing we call falling in love. Falling in love is a state of intense attraction towards someone. And with attraction, we must consider that there is much more at work in the situation than love. Also, we have a conscious definition of love and a subconscious definition of love. Our subconscious definition of love is often quite sad in fact. Love on a subconscious level, is all the association we have with home, our childhood home to be exact. So, if home meant disappointment and betrayal and loneliness, then our subconscious definition of love is those things and we will meet someone who makes us feel that way and our subconscious mind goes “Ah this must be love”. To become attracted to something, just like a magnet, there must be polarity between you and that thing.

But polarity is much more complex than two things being the opposite of each other. To have polarity, we must reject an aspect of the wholeness of ourselves. This means, to come into this life as a male, I must reject the aspect of me that is female and to come into this life female, I must reject the aspect of me that is male. This becomes my “missing self”. And so, in order to become whole again, I must reunite with my missing self. Now, the shadow side of my being is born. That aspect of me is now something I am unconscious of. I can reunite with my denied, rejected, suppressed aspect internally or externally. Externally, I fall in love with what I have lost.

Let’s take this to the new level. The things about us that we deny, reject, suppress and disown that cause the problems in our relationships are the aspects we dissociate from because of trauma that we have experienced. Being born relationally dependent into families that socialize us into a society that is not fully evolved yet makes it so that we learn that some aspects of ourselves are acceptable, and others are not. What is acceptable vs. unacceptable depends on the perspective of the family you’re born into. The aspects of us that are seen as unacceptable (both positive and negative) are rejected by our family and the aspects that are seen as acceptable are not. So, being relationally dependent, in the name of survival, we do anything we can to disown and deny and suppress those aspects in ourselves that are disapproved of whilst exaggerating those that are approved of. We dissociate from what we disapprove of. This self-preservation instinct is our first act of self-rejection. An example of this is that if we grow up in a family where we felt terror, but that terror was unacceptable, we suppressed it and denied it and now that terror and fear became subconscious. We overcompensate for whatever trait we have denied. For example, the person who suppressed the aspect of themselves that is a striver, becomes apathetic. The person who suppressed the aspect of themselves that was apathetic, is such a striver, they excel at everything. So what do we do? We become romantically attracted to people into our lives who mirror the aspect of ourselves we are missing. We are a perfect match to them. Together we feel more whole. This means the person who is apathetic will end up with a success freak and both of them will be caused pain by the other because each is a reminder of the rejected aspect of themselves. They reflect to each other, each of their lost selves. I briefly explained why this causes us pain in my video on YouTube titled Projection. But for the sake of this article, let’s understand that when we see positive aspects of ourselves that we denied in other people, it causes us to fall in love. It feels like our opportunity to become more whole. We want more of it. We become addicted to it. We glorify it and put it on a pedestal and even idolize it. Need is that starved feeling of craving something or someone. Desire does not hurt like need does because it is not necessarily coming from a space of lack. Our conscious self has desires. These desires are things we want but not things we feel we will die without. The subconscious mind however, has needs. Things we want and do think we will die without. Instead of getting too complicated with this, I’ll just say that your subconscious self has different needs in a relationship than your conscious self. And the subconscious mind will win out. That is where the all-powerful intense attraction to someone is actually coming from as opposed to the conscious intimate connection and appreciation of someone. Having said that, it is possible to feel that all-powerful intense attraction to someone that is motivated by the subconscious self and also have a high degree of conscious attraction. But more often than not, when we have chronically painful relationships, the conscious mind is not even factoring into our relationship choices. We are simply like a starving person, compelled by an inner void to find any way we can to fill that void. That spark we felt of attraction goes away in the relationship when we attach to the other person in the same way that the magnets, once they touch form a complete circuit. Because that point of attraction is now fulfilled and our partner has taken the place of what is missing. All we are left with is what’s left over after that. Sometimes we find that we actually consciously dislike the person we partnered with after our subconscious needs were fulfilled. Here is an example, a woman may consciously know that her motivation to have a partner is an intimate connection where she and he understand each other and are unconditionally available for each other. But the subconscious mind might have the motivation to be safe. Because of this, she never stays single long enough to find someone who fits what she consciously wants in a partner. Instead she may end up forming a relationship with the first person who crosses her path that fits her subconscious definition of love which is safety. And if safety is a relationship in general, she will have no discernment and will boomerang from one relationship to the next for the sake of safety. For most of us it is our subconscious that walks us into relationships, not our conscious and our subconscious mind is full of shadows. Then guess what happens? Those shadows are mirrored by our partner. And more than that, once our subconscious needs are met, suddenly we see that our conscious desires are going totally unfulfilled. So in the above scenario, once this woman is with a man who makes her feel safe, she will begin to be highly bothered that he is incapable of intimate connection and does not try to understand her and is emotionally unavailable. Ready for the extra layer? She has attracted this man both because of the subconscious need she has, but also because of her past wounds that she is trying to heal. We call this love reincarnation. If we had a primary attachment figure who did not love us in the way we needed to be loved, we continually fall in love with people who have similar attributes to that person so we can try to heal that wound. So chances are, our example woman had a daddy who was not emotionally available and who didn’t try to understand her and who was incapable of intimate connection. On a higher universal level, by being with a man who is like that, she has an opportunity to heal her own past wounds, become more whole in and of herself. On a lower level, she is convinced that if she gets a man like daddy, and get him to be available to her and understand her and form an intimate bond with her, she’s solved her past wound. It must be said that people with less wounds or less trauma, make better relationship decisions because subconscious wounds aren’t compelling them into relationships. There is much more conscious to the relationship than subconscious. Our intense attraction to other people has much more to do with past wounds and traumatic experiences than it has anything to do with real love. And it compels us to make life choices for ourselves that ultimately are a step towards healing but are also by default a step towards serious hurt. This is not to say that you should fear that feeling of intense attraction. It is to say that whenever we feel that intense feeling of falling in love, we must be completely aware that our subconscious mind is at work trying to get it’s needs met. We should put effort into finding out our subconscious motivations for the relationship. We must be prepared to encounter huge shadows. Hopefully, we have chosen a partner that is prepared to face those shadows as well and with us. It must be said that if two people were capable of working through the shadows that arise in their relationship so as to become two whole beings in one relationship, instead of two halves of a whole person, all that would be left in the wake is love. At that point, the choice of whether to be committed to one another exclusively in marriage for example would be a deliberate lifestyle choice rather than a choice motivated by internal compulsion. Yes, I know it sounds less romantic but anyone who has experienced the peaceful embrace of this kind of love will tell you how amazing it really is. If we become completely whole in and of ourselves, what is the point of coming together? You have to ask yourself that question, knowing that if you get to that point yourself, the answer may change. But maybe it will be to share our wholeness, to genuinely love one another, to witness one another and to share our life experience.

The studies done on arranged marriage have perplexed people because not only do they show a higher rate of long-term success, they also show higher rates of satisfaction among participants. If people aren’t choosing partners based on love, how can that lead to happiness? Let’s take the lack of freedom out of the equation and look at the real reason for these results. It is because in an arranged marriage, attraction is not the thing that is leading the decision to get married. That means, the subconscious and all the wounds therein are not leading the people into the relationship. Happiness therefore is really left up to whether the couple is compatible or not. If yes, genuine love is more likely to result from the union, if not, it will be an unhappy marriage. Genuine love is easier to develop when the subconscious and all its various wounds are not involved in the matchmaking business. The bottom line is, we must question our chemistry. When we say things like “It just feels right” or “We have great chemistry”, it means there is polarization present in the relationship and that means there are shadows at play that we are currently unconscious of. And if you felt empty before you got into the relationship, you will end up feeling just as empty after you get into the relationship. It’s just that those fairy tales you’ve been watching on TV, always cut out after they commit to one another, so you never get to see that part of the story. On a universal level, it serves you to leap on your feelings of intense attraction that you call falling in love. This, leads to expansion. Nothing will mirror your unconscious to you larger and thus cause you to become conscious faster. So it is not wrong to jump on those feelings. This universe benefits by you doing so. But great expansion always involves great contrast. And so we must beware of thinking that those feelings are any indication of a promise of relationship happiness.

When we are swept up in the intensity of the feeling of the intense chemistry or attraction, we often ignore the red flags and do not stop to examine the rest of the relationship. Once the attraction turns into a relationship, we are floored in the relationship. We fall from the cloud we were on and our life becomes about the challenging realities of sharing our life with another human being. Most people put more effort into deciding what they are going to eat for breakfast every day than they put into deciding who they want to have a relationship with. When we feel the intense connection and chemistry and all of the potential that holds for the future, instead of day dreaming about our future together, it is a good idea to imagine stripping that aspect of the relationship away and looking at what is left behind. If there were no attraction, would I be compatible with this person? Love does not conquer all when it comes to relationships. Think back to your past relationships and ask yourself… No problem or conflict is insurmountable if we love enough. Is this true about your past relationships?

It is possible to love someone and for it to be a bad decision to make the lifestyle choice to be with them in a relationship. For example, we may love someone in the army, but know that we are going to be miserable if we are left on our own for months if not years at a time with our partner overseas. We need to play the tape forward to see what our future might actually feel like when we are sitting alone in our house and when our partner is missing Christmas and Birthdays. Some people could do that, some people couldn’t. If you’re a person who couldn’t and you chose to be in a relationship with someone in the army anyway, your relationship is headed for pain. We should never put commitment before compatibility. But once we have established compatibility, we must commit for the relationship to work. Regardless of how much you love each other, your differences are going to matter. Relationships rarely ever end because two people do not love each other enough. They usually end because the two people were not consciously compatible or consciously committed. There is a saying “As long as two people want to make it work, they can make it work.” This is accurate. Love does overcome many things. But many things, it does not overcome. What we find when true incompatibility is present, is that the two people have desires that are pulling in two opposing directions. They are opposing to a degree that they cannot accommodate one another. So the desire to make it work goes away. It feels more like forcing oneself sideways. Some differences can be accommodated in a way where both partners are happy. Others cannot. We should always look for a 3rd option, or a way to accommodate differences if we have already committed and incompatibility is arising. But we also have to know that if there is no way to accommodate both people’s desires and stay together, the relationship commitment should end.

It is not any more or less smart to act on intense feelings of attraction as long as you are aware of what you want more. Do you want the fastest expansion and personal growth you can get? If so, definitely follow your intense attractions. Or do you want a peaceful, tranquil union for a relationship? If so, do not follow your intense attractions over sensibility. If your goal is not rapid healing and quick enlightenment, if instead your goal was to be genuinely peacefully happy in a relationship you have to practice the following mantra: Love is not enough. Love needs conscious compatibility and commitment.