Will This Secret Help You Easily Manifest Your Perfect Romantic Partner?
I love my husband but it didn’t have to be as difficult as it was
Most little girls dream of meeting their Prince Charming, that romantic ideal. We’re taught from an early age that all we have to do is “put ourselves out there”. It’s his job to find us and make all our dreams come true.
In my mid-twenties, after a failed engagement and moving to a new city, I realized that wasn’t as easy as it sounded. So, I took matters into my own hands. I fell back on that other fairy tale staple, magic.
A popular magazine had a feature on using manifestation to call your soul mate to you. All you had to do was write the 50 traits you wanted in your lover on a piece of pink paper. Then, every night for 50 nights, you lit a pink candle. You visualized how your dream lover embodied the next trait on your list.
The trick is that you had to do this 50 nights in a row. If you missed a night, you had to start all over again at the beginning.
The first time, I covered a little over 20 traits before missing a night. The second time, I only lasted until 10. The third time, I tripped up on my first week.
Clearly, I was just too busy. I set the paper aside until I had more time to devote to it. And forgot about it. I found the crumpled pink paper shoved in the back of my desk, as I was packing to move in with my new fiance.
To my surprise, my fiance ticked every box on my list — even things like “must like Disney movies”. The magic had worked!
It just hadn’t worked quickly. I met him when I was 42.
Benefits of finding love later in life
Meeting the man of my dreams in my 40s had many unexpected benefits. However, these benefits were only realized because I did not spend the intervening years “searching for love”. Instead, I spent the time fully realizing my potential as a person.
Established self-identities
Experts say that finding true love requires being true to yourself. That’s easier to do when you know who you are, and aren’t still on a voyage of discovery to figure it out.
We both had self-identities, independent of our relationship.
I’d navigated a challenging career in the tech industry. And I’d also created a successful secondary career as an author. I knew which hobbies and activities I enjoyed, and which I was good at.
He’d created a startup company that he poured all his energy into. Then he dealt with the destruction of that company. He’d wandered to exotic places, and returned to care for his ailing parents.
We both knew what we needed (as opposed to wanted) in a partner. We had the self-awareness to know which traits of ours would make us difficult to live with. (For example, I refuse to share a bathroom. He can use mine, he just has to keep all his stuff in his bathroom.)
He knew exactly what he was getting in a partner, as did I.
It’s like adopting a pet from the shelter. A grown cat or dog has a fully formed personality that you can judge. Will it fit into your life or not? If a puppy or kitten has a behavior you dislike, you have no way of knowing if it will grow out of that behavior.
Willingness to get help
Often, when we’re young, we feel we need to figure things out on our own.
By the time we’re mature adults, we’ve recognized the benefit of getting expert help and advice. Sure, we could figure things out. But there’s no guarantee we’d get it right. And we’d waste a lot of time.
My husband and I had no problem seeing a couple's coach who helped us establish a “couple bubble” and other skills. We learned how to unpack emotional reactions. We practiced effective methods of asking for what we needed.
After 12 years together, we’re pretty solid on the basics. In fact, many of our friends ask us for advice because our marriage is so strong. But it only got to be that strong because we had help during the first few years when we were still adjusting to married life.
Solid financial situation
Financial stress and arguments combined are the 2nd biggest reason for divorce. (Cheating is #1.)
Nearly two-thirds of marriages start off in debt. I know one of the guys I worked with nearly didn’t get married because his wife had over $80,000 in debt.
What are some of the biggest sources of debt? Student loans, and the cost of raising a family.
If you don’t fall in love until your 40s or 50s, you’ve long since paid off your student loans. You’ve moved up in your career from your entry-level job, and have more disposable income. If you’ve been careful, you have savings and investments that you can fall back upon in case of trouble.
My husband lost his job while we were dating, and I was laid off two years after we got married. Yet because we had years to build up our reserves, this wasn’t as devastating as it would have been to a young couple.
Low pressure
When we’re young, we’re under family and societal pressure to get married and start a family. We’re also under pressure to launch our careers and establish ourselves professionally.
Later in life, that pressure is gone. We can spend more time with the person we fell in love with because we’re already established in our careers. We don’t have to divide our attention between a spouse and a baby.
In my case, I did press for marriage. I would not uproot my life and move halfway across the country for anything less. So we got engaged after about 8 months. But family and society would have been content if we’d continued dating for years.
Aligning life goals
When you’re young, you may have big dreams. But you don’t know how those dreams are going to pan out. By the time you’re more mature, you have replaced dreams with goals.
You have a solid sense of what you want to do with the rest of your life, and what it will take to accomplish that. The best relationships will support and strengthen each other’s life goals.
My husband and I actually felt so committed to each other’s life goals that we wrote them into our wedding vows.
The risk of being too picky
In the movie Practical Magic, Sandra Bullock’s character doesn’t want to fall in love. So she uses a love spell to create an impossible man. She asks for him to have eyes of two different colors, whistle her favorite song, and ride a pony backward. It takes a long time for this challenging combination of traits to manifest.
That’s what happened to me. My list of 50 traits included plenty of traits I’d have been willing to do without.
Did I really care that my potential mate loves sailing? Not really. I just thought it was a cool idea. And I didn’t even specify that he had to be a sailor. Just that he loves it.
Living in landlocked Colorado, my husband always wanted a boat. He bought coffee table books with pictures of boats and dreamed of what it would be like to take to the open sea. But he never actually sailed.
There were 10 must-have traits on my list, describing necessary virtues. 10 traits that were pretty important for me to admire a man. Things like dark hair, green eyes, and a gorgeous voice. And maybe another 10 traits that ensured we had common interests and pastimes.
But those last 20 traits? I was digging deep into the barrel to come up with them. And they didn’t matter. Would I have been willing to give them up, to find love sooner?
I can’t imagine falling in love with someone other than my husband. He’s perfect for me, and I will wait for him. But I wasn’t just waiting. I was busy doing other things that sculpted me into the ideal woman for him.
No kids
The biggest loss of waiting until late in life to find love is that you lose the chance of having kids. Or at least having kids with that person. Fortunately, I was never particularly maternal.
My friends would coo over babies, while I was mystified as to the appeal. They were noisy, smelly, and did nothing interesting. I couldn’t imagine wanting one.
I also had a past life regression where I died in childbirth. I came out of that convinced I was never, ever going to get pregnant. It was too big a risk. A short time later, I was diagnosed with uterine cancer and had to have a complete hysterectomy. I’ve always felt the cancer was caused by that conviction.
My husband is also not interested in having kids. He has big, world-changing ideas. Those are his kids. If he had to spend his time nurturing tiny human beings, he wouldn’t have time or energy for his big ideas.
But if you do want kids, maybe some of those other nice-to-haves should come off of your list. You’ll have a better chance of finding someone sooner.
Impossible ideals
The largest risk, when being too picky, is that you create an impossible person. You will never manifest this idea, because no one human being can meet your requirements.
So you have to ask yourself, how many traits are necessary to define your perfect love? And for how many traits are you being needlessly picky?
This is not “settling”. If something is important to you, by all means, put it on your list!
But get clear on which are “needs” and which are only “wants”. Leave off the nice-to-haves and sounds-good-to-mes. They’re not necessary, and they’ll only make it harder to manifest your ideal.
As Netflix’s show Indian Matchmaking illustrated, it’s okay to have high standards. Someone can be found to meet even the highest standards. But being too picky is a self-deceptive way to avoid commitment.
Manifesting your own ideal mate
Rather than wait for Prince (or Princess) Charming, you can manifest your ideal mate. Focus on the traits your mate must have and how they will embody those traits.
The pink paper and pink candle are optional, although write your list of traits somewhere.
If you have to wait a long time for your ideal love to manifest, you might actually be better off. You can use that time to improve yourself.
Mature lovers have established self-identities and can be true to themselves. They’re more willing to accept help. They have paid off their student debt.
The dating situation for mature lovers is more low pressure. And they know whether they can help and support each other’s life goals.
The big risk of waiting too long is that you may lose the chance for children. If this isn’t a big deal for you, you have a longer window of time to manifest your ideal.
Finally, if your list of traits is too lengthy and needlessly specific, you may never find someone. The person who meets all those traits may not exist.
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