She Loves Me …

She loves me.
She loves me not.

Have you ever played this game with a flower, plucking off the petals in order to get an indication of whether the object of your affection really loves you? I have.

Can I make a suggestion? Stop doing this.

As soon as you start contemplating that somebody may not love you, negative thoughts start invading the relationship. Once that happens, it is difficult to recover.

The other danger is that while we are pulling off the petals, we are keeping score. One for the good side, one for the bad. People stumble and fall sometimes. Give them long enough and they will eventually disappoint you. If you start keeping score, every negative thought will take away from every positive one.

Another problem with this horticultural experiment is that we often start defining in our own terms what constitutes the other person’s love. If it doesn’t live up to what we want, then it is a “she loves me not”.

Your powerful imagination can start taking over. You can start dreaming up things that are not really there.

I suggest you change the image from a flower to a bucket. All you do is count the drops of love that hit the mark. She loves me. She loves me again, and again, and again. Each molecule that hits the surface is a cause to celebrate. Don’t even look at the ones that miss.

By doing this, you concentrate on receiving with gratitude the love that is given to you without keeping score. So what if somebody doesn’t hit the mark all the time? With practice she will, but she won’t as long as you keep reminding her of when she misses. She will focus on her giving, too, not on what she has to do to please you. There is a huge difference.

What if your trust in this person is unwarranted? Welcome to the course, Life 101. If you are expecting everything to go your way all of the time, then you are naïve. Every love in your life will not be the right one. That is part of the learning process.

Anyway, will worrying about whether somebody loves you or not help? Absolutely not! It puts you in the position of where you are being anyone but yourself. You are jumping through hoops like a trained dog instead of offering the person the beauty of your soul for them to accept or not. Been there, done that! It wasn’t fun and I was trying to manipulate the other person into loving me.

Instead of plucking the petals of a flower, why not present it to your sweetheart as a token of your love? I think you will find that it is a better investment of your time.