What is love?

What is true love?

What are soul mates?

How do you find true love?

How do you find your soul mate?

Well one thing is for sure you won’t find love unless you put in some concentrated effort and are out and about being seen and mixing with people. The love of your life won’t come knocking on your door unless he or she happens to be the milkman, postman or some other delivery person, so that would leave your options somewhat limited!

Meanwhile everyone will have his or her own ideas on what the recipe for love success is (corny I know) but my recipe would be as follows:

Compatibility + Attraction + Friendship + Trust

For the purpose of this blog I shall just focus on compatibility and attraction as the other two should go without saying!

Compatibility

Ideally you will share some common interests, goals and moral values.

Compromise is all very well, but if everything is a compromise I feel that either one or both of you will be unhappy and unfulfilled at some point so it is better to have more in common than not. Constantly sitting through films you don’t enjoy, going for holidays that bore or tire you can be tolerated in the short term, but for long term success finding a partner who shares your likes and dislikes means that you can enjoy more of the same things as you grow old for longer. If you don’t enjoy similar activities that could mean spending increasingly more time apart and leaves room for them to find another partner who shares their interests while you are not around!

I am not though suggesting when you do enter a relationship that you spend every waking or spare minute together as I do believe independence and having your own interests is healthy. It’s all about balance.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Opposites attract mainly because the differences make things a tad more interesting at the start and it can create a useful balance, but as time rolls on, those differences can become annoyances and sources of irritation, so while opposites may attract they don’t necessarily create happy lasting relationships.

Attraction

I do place importance on this aspect for the simple reason that if friendship and trust were the most important things, we’d be dating our friends. But we generally don’t unless there is a little something extra that attracts us to them. If you find someone that you have a strong physical attraction to straight away, that is fantastic, otherwise you might find that attraction grows naturally as you get to know the person and their other qualities draw you to them. Similarly, a person you initially find very attractive can easily turn into an ugly toad if their personality turns you off them. Physical beauty really is only skin deep and first impressions are not lasting ones when it comes to love. You can go off people!