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Can’t Compete with Love

by Alan Cohen

At a seminar I presented in Greece, a woman named Georgia reported that she had been married to a man who was emotionally absent. After long and frustrating attempts to infuse life into her ailing marriage, Georgia felt she needed to leave. "I told my husband I wanted a divorce, but he refused to give it to me," she recounted. "So I decided that even if he didn’t love me, I  would love me. I decided that I would give myself the love and kindness I had been seeking from him. So every day I wrote myself a long love letter telling myself how beautiful, wonderful, and desirable I am.

"Then one day my husband found one of these letters. Since it was unsigned, he assumed it was from another man. He came to me waving the letter in his hand and told me, ‘I can’t compete with this — you can have your divorce!’"

Everyone and everything that shows up in our life is a reflection of something that is happening inside of us. All events and experiences in our field of awareness represent the outpicturing of a feeling, belief, or attitude we are holding. Thus we can use every event as a barometer of where we are on our path. "We think in secret and it comes to pass; environment is but a looking glass."

This universal Law of Attraction means that we "hire" everyone in our play to act out the script we have written. This is why we experience repetitious patterns in relationship, work, or health; different actors are showing up to play out the same role. Eventually we recognize that it cannot be an accident that the same type of people keep doing the same things; it is we who have drawn them according to the signals we are radioing to central casting.

The good news about the Law of Attraction is that the moment we change our mind, heart, or attitude, the outer world must reflect it, often immediately. In Georgia’s case, she was holding an unconscious attitude that she was unlovable and did not deserve a husband who was present and attentive. As soon she grew beyond that limiting belief, released her husband from the onus of her emptiness, and gave herself the love she sought, he had no choice but to match it or leave. I have every reason to expect that Georgia’s next relationship was a vast improvement.

We can save ourselves all kinds of pain, and escape the struggle of endless manipulation, by determining what we would like to receive from other people, and then giving it to ourselves. This all-important shift can be difficult in a world where we are daily bombarded with the notion that we are empty and needy, and everything we want and need is "out there". Out there in a romantic partner; a hit record; a new car; a more prestigious job; a better house. The funny thing about getting things from out there is that if you did not know you were whole before you got the thing, you will not become whole when you get it; in fact you will feel even more empty and confused. As Buddha asked, "If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?"

Cool Runnings is a delightful (based on true) story of a group of young Jamaican men who decide they will enter the bobsled competition in the winter Olympics. The team faces and overcomes tremendous odds to make it to the competition. The night before the big race, one of the team members confides to the coach that he will feel like a failure if he returns home without a medal. The coach has some good advice for this fellow: "If you do not know that you are good enough without the medal, you will not be good enough with the medal."

February is the month of lovers. All of us truly want to be in love, for love is our natural state — literally who we are. The question is not, "Should we love?" but "Where will we find the love we desire?" If we decide that another person is the source of our love, we set ourself up for a roller coaster ride of heady ecstasy followed by painful frustration. Sometimes our partner will do things that make us feel loved, and sometimes he or she will do things that make us feel unloved. But as long as anything she or he does can make us feel one way or another, we have set ourselves up for a fall; we have given our power away in a most unkind (to ourselves) way, and we become little more than a yo-yo on the string of life.

There is another way to love, far more magnificent, real, and rewarding. This way finds the source of our love, power, and life within us. This way teaches that our purpose is not to import love, but to express it. Instead of being a love seeker, we become a love finder. We do not wait for love — we generate it. Then we get to bask in the warmth of our own beauty any time we choose, potentially all the time.

D.H. Lawrence elucidated this principle most eloquently:

Those who go searching for love only find their own lovelessness. But the loveless never find love; only the loving find love, and they never have to search for it.

Recommended book by this author:

"Happily Even After: Can You Be Friends After Lovers" 
by Alan Cohen
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