Discovering Your True Romantic Self – Part II
by Melissa Balmer


 “Truth is a deep kindness that teaches us to be content in our everyday life and share with the people the same happiness.” – Kahil Gibran


I don’t know about you, but recognizing that I deserved to be romantically happy was just not how I started out my own romantic existence.  Certainly I longed for it in my heart of hearts, and experienced fragile fleeting moments of its magic from time to time, but it took until I was in my mid thirties for the concept to become something I could even wrap my imagination around as something I could put my intentions on.

Until that time I knew how to be a workaholic and jump on another person’s train (to take a line from a favorite Cure song). I knew how to be helpful and organized and put together a great sales plan and look great in a suit. I even knew how to buy sexy lingerie and how to make everything look great from the outside in, but I had no concept of what romantic happiness was for me because I had no clue that my true romantic self really was.

Now in my mid forties, I see romantic happiness as essential as eating, something I need and want to have as a part of my everyday life – and this is true whether or not I’m currently in a romantic relationship.  I’ve found that romantic happiness comes from taking the journey to figure out your true romantic self, and allowing that romantic self to have a major say in how you go about living your everyday life.

Deciding You’re Worth It
It’s not easy to shift our attention from the outside world to focus instead inside ourselves; we aren’t really trained to have much of an attention span. We live in a culture and a world that likes to use the idea of sex and romance to constantly sell us things more than it likes to give us truly useful information on how to be romantically and sexually happy.

We are told again and again if we buy this car or that toothpaste or that pill we’ll have a much better love life, we’ll be desired, we’ll have great sex, and we’ll be happy – but then we buy these things, or lose the weight, and find it just isn’t so. Something is missing, and what’s missing is our authentic self, and getting clear on what our own authentic romantic taste is. It’s not that the car or the white teeth or losing weight are within themselves bad things, but they just might not be the right expressions for your own romantic happiness.

Your romantic self is entirely unique, and a work in progress, changing and growing as you change and grow. But the only way to get clear about this aspect of yourself is to take the time to listen to yourself, and in order to do that you need to get pretty quiet and pretty still and very patient.  Meditation is a very good start, but it might not be for you. You might be the sort of person who can get still and listen to yourself by taking a scenic drive, or a long walk, or reorganizing your sock drawer.  How you start to listen to yourself isn’t nearly as important as deciding you’re worth it and simply starting to do it on a very regular basis.

Committing to the Process
Getting to know your true romantic self is a process. Yes, it’s full of “aha” moments, but even the best “aha” moment isn’t an arrival at total truth, it’s just one more step on the journey. We are never going to totally arrive as long as we’re alive. There is always going to be more to discover and decipher and learn. Every time I accept this my life flows, every time I think I’ve figured it all out I start to stumble. As Karen Armstrong notes in her wonderful autobiography The Spiral Staircase:

“Insight does not always come to order, and there will certainly be no renaissance if you are merely trying to “get” something for yourself.”

Committing to learn about your romantic self = a very good start, just trying to get a date for Friday night probably won’t reap quite the rewards you seek. Getting dates, or finding a significant other isn’t actually that hard, we’ve almost all done it at one time or another.  The challenge isn’t so much in finding someone out there; the challenge is finding ourselves first before we head out the door so we can actually be ready for and enjoy who we encounter.

Using Kindness to Inch Towards Romantic Happiness
Turning in and tuning in are an excellent start, but if you move forward with harsh and critical self judgment towards yourself, your past, your present and your future (and many of those involved in it) you might want to run screaming right after you focus on that dial. Try moving forward with kindness in the forefront of your intentions – towards yourself and everyone else – if for no other reason to give yourself a fresh chance at happiness, romantic and otherwise. Take to heart what Confucius says:

“Forget Injuries; never forget kindness.”

Intending kindness shifts our intention and focus. We find new spaciousness and opportunity to be more than we thought we could be, and it allows others the same. Once you commit to kindness as a way of moving forward you realize how often your favorite soapboxes and arguments just aren’t going to hold you up anymore. 

Recently I dated a man for several months who, on paper, was completely different than the sort of man I thought I’d ever find myself in a relationship with. I’m sure he felt the same about me. We were an odd couple on paper, but that didn’t mean the relationships wasn’t great fun and sexy while it lasted.

A very important truth about the matter was that neither of us had settled, we had simply moved out of our comfort zones and discovered someone new. It was very exciting to be in a relationship with a man who shared my commitment to living a greener lifestyle, who loved to cook (and was better than me at it), who was inspired by natural beauty and needed to get outdoors as much as possible, and who was very committed to his own moral path and who I greatly respected in how he conducted himself in his work, and with his family and friends.  These all fed into the romance because I so respected who he was and what he stood for. He was also a great, open minded, responsible and respectful lover.

We agreed from the get go to move forward in the relationship with kindness as our goal, had we not it would have been very easy to get mean and hard when we misunderstood each other. In some very crucial ways we had very different ways of seeing the world. We had grown up in very different circumstances and had worked in very different fields, and in the long run we did have different long-term romantic goals, but what I took away from the relationship was one more knowing that the more specific I can get within myself about how I want to feel romantically the easier it is for the right kind of man to show up. Looking back I see very clearly that every time I make a major shift in my romantic awareness a new man shows up, each one closer to “right” than the one before in very exciting ways.