Are You Open To Love?

Can we get something when we do not know what we want?

"Are You Open To Love?" I ask. You say.."Ofcourse! What kind of question is that?, who isn't?". Isn't it amazing that we think that and yet, there are millions of people who say they want love yet when it comes to the crunch they are not really open to it.

Imagine..you want to buy something. You go to the shop. You see the items you want in the shop. But then just before you pick the item and about to pay for it, your mind tells you..."no I dont want this" and you go put it back on the shelf. How many times have you done that?

What do I mean by that? Well, everyone needs love. We all feel lonely now and then. So we think we need love and go around our daily chores thinking we will bump into the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with. Occasionally we meet people we think we like and get along. We think "wow, he or she seems to be exactly the one I am looking for" etc.

Time goes by and we get to know that person who seem to fit our bill of qualities we want in a lover / mate. We get to a point where we need to make conclusive decisions regarding the relationship. You need to decide whether to get more closer to this person and get him or her committed to you either as an exclusive boy friend or girl friend or move in or get engaged etc.

The moment arrives when you are put on the spot to make a decision to get committed to the decision to move forward to the next step. You panic. You come up with all kinds of excuses not go to the next step. You wonder why you can't seem to make the decision to go forward. You can't seem to put the finger on why this is the case. On a deeper level, we are sometimes confused about love. This can be due to several reasons. Some are as follows;

1) Painful Past Experiences

2) Lose of Independence

3) Lack Of Time

4) Fear Of Commitment
5) Busy Lifestyle
6) Financial Reasons
7) Our Need To Remain Who We Are
8) Fear Of Intimacy

1) Painful Past Experiences - We want love but we don't want to be too close to someone because of our past painful experiences. We associate love with painful experience because thats what happened in the past. We think that what happened in the past is going to happen in the future. We think that past equals the future.

2) Lose of Independence

On some level we believe that opening the door for love means loss of our own independence. We think that by letting the other person into our lives we might lose our own way of life. We might be forced to do certain things or our way of life may have to be changed etc

3) Lack Of Time - We believe that our times through the day have to be shared with the other person, we might be required to communicate with the other person on a regular basis even if we don't feel like.

3) Fear Of Commitment

We think that by commiting to the love from this one person we might be committed to that person for life and it might appear final for our decision on our lover for life. Although the "Fear Of Commitment" is due to several other factors, simply put this may also influence our 'openess to love' coming into our life as well.

4) Busy Lifestyle

Our lifestyle whether it is work related, habit related or our friendship network etc. may not lend itself to a new person coming into our life. We think that by letting love into our life we have to change our lifestyle drasticaly which we might regret so we decide not to be open to love

5) Financial Reasons

We somehow believe that having new love intou our life, we might be required to spend more money on ourselves whether to make us look good by dressing better and spend more money on the other person in terms of gifts. We think the new love may interfere with our work and time to which can be spent on making our finances better

6) Our Need To Remain Who We Are

We all shy from change. We all want to remain true to who we are. We don't want to change our habits for anyone. Especialy if our habits and values are something which makes us happy as a person. We think that letting love intou our life, the other person may make us change who we are. So we remain closed to new love or letting our existing love come closer to us

7) Fear Of Intimacy

We all have our fear. Whether getting closer to someone emotionaly or even physically at intimate moments.

Fear of emotional intimacy interferes with our ability to connect with our lover emotionaly by not letting us express, connect or let the other person come closer to us

Fear of physicaly intimacy is our ability to be intimate with our lovers physicaly whether during lovemaking or other intimate moments. This fear of physical intimacy might stem from variety of reasons depending on our physical makeup, our past experiences and our perception of how we perform sensualy and sexualy. If we have issues with performance anxiety or other concerns about our ability to make our lover happy, then the willingness to be open to new love or letting our existing lover closer to us may be an issue

Solution? We need to explore factors including the above 7 factors and think through why we are not open to love based on the above points.

Only we can make the decisions and direct our lives. We are in control of our destiny. Whether is our love destiny or our other dreams in life. When we focus on solutions we can achieve anything in life. When we try harder with smart solutions it is possible to be open to love

Let me leave this with you. When you are closed to love, love will not enter your life even if there are opportunities in life. You have to open the door to let love in so you can experience the joy love has to offer. Never ever give up on love.