Excitement, mystery, and blissful connection only scratch the surface when it comes to describing romance. Words almost can’t do it justice. For anyone who’s experienced, or even watched, good romance, the very thought of it can kick up butterflies in our stomachs. Somewhere deep in our core, we’re wired to love and experience connection.
One of the main reasons romance is exciting is that a potential outcome is the ‘happily ever after’ type of love that we’re practically expected to have as a central goal in life. In many ways, romance is the result of us optimizing around our prime instincts. Since we all gravitate towards finding a mate as it is, we’ve evolved to make the experience as magical and fulfilling as possible.
When we think about the magic in experiences that make them romantic, one attribute we can’t ignore is risk. In almost all cases, risk makes things way more exciting. For there to be a wildly rewarding potential upside with a correspondingly painful downside, there’s a palpable tension around every event that takes us closer to the revelation of the outcome. And in the case of romance, two hearts are either blissfully bonded or broken.
Here, we find Romance’s number one killer-- fearing the risk of rejection and heartbreak. Taking on heart risk is scary for anyone coming from a place of scarcity. In other words- anyone who looks at their emotional stability as a finite resource. You can imagine someone sitting at a casino and their pile of chips represents their confidence and emotional stability. In the game of love, people lose chips way more often than they win them, so once their pile is small they’re terrified to lose anymore chips. Then, when people seem to be losing more chips than they can replace, they look to use way less chips, cheat the odds, or stop playing at all.
We can’t blame people for avoiding emotional risk. Rejection and heartbreak create a spicy type of trauma that makes an impact in our subconscious, so we’re naturally inclined to avoid the source of trauma. Most people just stop taking romantic risk. But for those people with more power than most, they try to avoid, or at least dilute, the emotional risk by reducing their vulnerability relative to the other person [cheating the odds, if you will]. And while creating a vulnerability imbalance may allow someone to establish a meaningful relationship, the romantic upside is limited. Simply put- you can’t have idyllic romance without a balance in vulnerability.
Balanced vulnerability between two people creates mystery and magic. It creates that feeling where two people don’t care what the future holds as long as they get to take it on together. And as beautiful as that thought is, it’s equally difficult for two individuals to keep their vulnerability in sync. Here, we should emphasize that the importance lies on the individuals more than the collective. Before there’s any hope of sustainably balanced vulnerability, both individuals have to come from a place of equal emotional security and abundance. It’s a place that takes a ton of hard, introspective work to find. Work that’s full of hunting and accepting personal insecurities in the spirit of radical self acceptance.
When individuals have the foundation of radical self acceptance, they can then build towards having enough self love to be able to truly act from emotional abundance. As a simple and wide reaching concept-- we can give what we have inside to give. Based on our casino example, having an abundance of self love is effectively having unlimited emotional chips to risk.
When two people are acting from a place of emotional abundance, then romance is only limited by their collective creativity and comfort with the pace of the relationship. There’s so much beauty, love, and joy that comes with Romance. I hope she finds more comfort in our hearts and decides to stay a while longer.