Is He/SheThe One?

Sometimes we get so excited and hopeful with the possibility that we finally have met "The One". The person you met has most of the qualities you have ever wanted. You move super fast wanting to do everything with this person. The other person feels the same way. But as time goes on a bunch of things start coming up and you feel disappointed once again. Yet you are not sure if maybe he/she is "The One" or you are just going through a difficult period.

These are a few guidelines to protect you while dating until you figure out if he/she is "The One" or not.

• When you first meet someone and you believe it is love at first sight for both of you, pause and remember it is more like infatuation at first sight. This person can do no wrong when you first meet. Infatuation can last a day, a few days, a month, maybe months, possibly even years. But wait and see what happens once infatuation is over before you have sex, move in together or make any other major commitments.
• Pheromones, hormones and other chemicals produced by the body are at play as well. You believe it must be love if you are so attracted to each other. This is common, but it's just your hormones and pheromones. Pheromones are an individual's signature human odor. It seems mother nature has the perfect pheromones for each of us to attract a person that will make a good match in order to procreate. While pheromones are an indication of getting the okay from mother nature, it is definitely not the only thing that matters when picking "The One" if you want it to be a lasting, healthy relationship.
• Trust your intuition. Many people ignore their intuition because they get so caught up in the fantasy and possibility that a person they have met could be "The One". A lot of times it is our ego that is giving us false information. Spend some time consulting with your intuition. If you can't tell the difference between your ego and intuition please contact me and I will share that information with you.
• Go slow in the relationship. If you are meant to be together the relationship will pass the test of time. It gives you an opportunity to see the real person. Once he/she has gotten comfortable his/her true colors will come out. You will see if he/she has certain tendencies and characteristics that are definitely not for you. Also, no one could hide serious character flaws for long, so if you slow down you will find out if he/she has any before you are in too deep.
• The person that is "The One" will match up with you spiritually, physically, mentally and emotionally. Most men and some women (although we are rapidly catching up to men) are only looking at the physical aspect. Some people do ensure that there is an emotional or mental connection as well. But it is very rare for people to wait until they find someone that they connect with on all four levels. Then they wonder why things do not work out.
• We all have our moments when we are not our best selves. Consider if your partner is having one of those moments or if it is a permanent thing. Keep in mind that if your partner is in any way abusive (physically or emotionally) or is dishonoring you, there is nothing to consider..stay away from him/her! There is no excuse for abuse. The excuses a person gives for being abusive are ignorant and only low frequency people think that way.

Real Love

Infatuation is often confused with real love. Infatuation is when you feel sparks and sexual longing towards someone you don't really know. Infatuation could be the beginning of real love, but often times it is not. Sometimes the reason for this is that once the infatuation stage is over, people think that they made a mistake in selecting the person as their mate.

What is actually happening is that you are given an opportunity to choose your partner as someone to grow with and develop real love. Real love can be very passionate as well, but in a calm, healthy way. What the movies, television, novels show us, are characteristics of the infatuation stage, not real love. But many people believe it is. So when the relationship they are in is not full drama, craziness, and intensity, they end the relationship without allowing real love to grow.

Also, people believe that real love means always agreeing with their partner. So after disagreements begin, usually right after the infatuation stage is over, they bail out or cause the other person to leave. Ofcourse, no one should stay in a relationship that is unhealthy or abusive, but if the only reason for leaving the relationship is that you are not flying high with ecstasy and passion, consider that you may have unrealistic views of real love.


If your passion for him is making you dizzy and confused, slow down and step back. It might be infatuation and not true love. A good way to know the difference is to examine how you feel. Dr. Richard Levine says that a feeling of insecurity marks infatuation. "You are excited and eager, but not genuinely happy. It's a bond or attachment that is not entirely based upon reasonable perspectives. It is often accompanied by suspension of rational decision making," he says. If the relationship keeps you off-balance and everything about the man is unpredictable, you may be headed for trouble.

-Janis Spindel, professional matchmaker

In Order To Attract A Healhty Mate...

Many people have things backwards when it comes to love. They believe they have to put their life on hold until they attract "The One". But what I have learned about the Law of Attraction is that first you have to be happy with yourself and your life in order to attract a happy partner.

This does not mean that because you have a happy life as a single that you are not interested or you do not do what you can to attract love to you. But there is a difference between desire and desperation. When your life is lousy or you do not feel too good about yourself, you look for external things to validate you. These are the people who choose partners out of desperation and therefore end up with someone they will not be happy with long term.

When you love your life as a single person, you do not choose the first person who is interested in you romantically. You take your time to decide if the person is ideal for you long term.Your plan is to enhance your life, so you are careful that the person you are with does not disrespect you, add stress to your life, or make your life in any way worse than it is now.

But when you do not love your life or yourself, you are just looking for someone to attach yourself to. This ensures that you keep on avoiding your life and waiting for someone to rescue you from it. This also stops you from taking the time for getting to know yourself and learning to love yourself. Which is the real reason you are not attracting the love that you desire.

You also have to make sure you do not go to the other extreme. Being single because you are afraid of taking any risks, but hoping that one day maybe you'll magically end up with someone. Yet do not do anything to make this happen.

While you can not force love to happen, there are still some things that you could do to improve your chances on attracting love. Please contact on me on Facebook or at carbajalzulma@gmail.com for more information.

Stuck In A Rut in Love?

"Being stuck in a rut comes from being scared -of change, of loss, of regret. If you are stuck in life, you are likely stuck in love. When you live your life in a place of fear, you are in the Victim role. This means you see yourself under the control of the situations and people around you. You live in a place of "if only," rather than making proactive changes that will bring you happiness and satisfaction you seek. This is not a good position for finding love."


- Laura Berman PHD


These are the signs you may be stuck in a rut:

• You wont let go of a relationship that is not fulfilling and you tell yourself often "It's not so bad". What is actually happening is that you are afraid to face the truth. You do not wish to feel the pain of loss. You may also be afraid that you wont find anyone else.
• You are dating the same type of person over and over. You are stuck in an unhealthy pattern because you have not made it a commitment to heal your old wounds in order to move on to a healthier relationship.
• Being too picky instead of being choosy about the people you date. You date people for superficial and shallow reasons instead of paying attention to who the person is at their core.
• You don't date for love, you date because of fear of being alone.
• You date so that someone will save you or fix you and your life.
• You date numerous people at the same time to feed your ego and low self-esteem issues.
• You are promiscuous because you confuse lust with love or you believe that being wanted sexually means it must prove you are okay.

If you would like some assistance on healing old romantic relationships to prepare the way for new healthier love please contact me at carbajalzulma@gmail.com and I will share the various tools and exercises I have used for my own healing. If we do not heal old relationships wounds, we end up staying stuck in a rut in love.

Breaking Unhealthy Love Patterns

Generally, I have been a person that does not dwell on the past. I did go through periods in which I wondered why certain things would happen in my life. But I would then shift my attention. I especially made sure not to think so much about the past in fear of recreating it again in the present when I learned about the Law of Attraction. However, I continued to attract low energy people. What I have learned in recent years is that while consciously we may be thinking about the present our subconscious still holds our memories from the past and is bringing us the people of the same energy resonance in our present.

Our subconscious is like a computer. It files away the memories from our childhood and when we meet someone new the subconscious quickly checks the files and tells the psyche, "You don't like him" or "You like him". This happens so fast that you are not aware of it. This is the reason it could be hard to break patterns that keep you attracting low energy people. It is especially harder for the person that comes from a dysfunctional family.

As I've mentioned in my other articles, my childhood was a difficult one. Although I have gone through tremendous growth and healing I am still experiencing the results of some childhood traumas. However, they are not big issues as they were in the past when I was not aware that my past was affecting my present situations. I did not want to look at my childhood. It was too painful and I did not think it had anything to do with today anyway. Instead, what I did was to immerse myself in spirituality. Thinking that since I was a good person, God would bring me a good man eventually.

While spirituality gave me temporary relief from the pain of yet another break-up with a dysfunctinal person, it kept me feeling hopeless. I thought I was defective in some way.

One day I heard someone say that if you keep on meeting the same kind of people you have to look at the common denominator as the problem. That person also said that if you attract cheaters or other emotionally unavailable men there is something in you that does not want to meet someone who is emotionally available. At the time when I first heard this I thought it was nonsense because I consciously believed I did want to meet someone healthy and ready for commitment.

However, something did shift inside of me. I was no longer meeting cheaters. But I was still meeting emotionally unavailable men. They did not start this way, but once infatuation was over their true colors would come through. Then I came accross a book Keeping The Love You Find, by Harville Hendrix, PH.D. He gives detailed descriptions about how what happens at every stage of your childhood affects your present relationships and your subconscious keeps bringing people into your life that will cause old childhood wounds to come up.

In my case, I had two challenges to deal with. One of them was that while I consciously wanted marriage, subconsciously I was repelled by it. My parents had a horrible marriage and I can't recall one incident in which they demonstrated love to each other. Also, my mother always said my father took the best years of her life and that women always suffered with men. So my subconscious had filed away "marriage is bad for women". Therefore I attracted men who were not suitable for marriage. I had good reasons for the break-up which also kept me from seeing my own commitmentphobic tendencies.

My second big challenge was that I chose emotionally unavailable men because spiritually I wanted to heal this. Both my parents were emotionally unavailable. They had their own demons they were dealing with and they had nothing to give. I was attracting men who were emotionally unavailable because on the unconscious level I wanted another chance to fix my childhood. I wanted love by a person who was not capable of giving it to me.

The key to healing is to become aware of the wound first. Let go of denial. I still do not think it's good to dwell in the past for too long. However, if your past is keeping you from changing your unhealthy patterns, then you must pay attention to what happened in your childhood that may be causing the same low energy people to come into your life now.

If you would like to learn more about how your childhood affects your romantic relationships, read Dr. Harville Hendrix's book. He mentions how the dysfunctional relationhips that are brought into your life are perfect for healing childhood wounds. About falling in love he writes, " It gives us the strength for the long undertaking of self repair and the arduous work of a conscious relationship. When we are in love, we have the feeling that we can do whatever it takes to work things out. Falling in love forces our hand; without it we would choose to stay in the safety, however unfulfilling, of our singleness, or of a safe 'arrangement'. Romantic love is nature's anesthesia."

The Purpose Of Dating

"God uses relationships to heal us and change us. Although we are not suggesting that dating be the primary place that someone seeks healing (this is a horrible idea), it is a place where good things happen in people's souls....People could have good dating relationships where they learn, are healed, grow, and are stretched, even when the relationship does not lead to marriage. It has value in a person's life." -Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend


Dating could be discouraging and this is why many people choose to stand by the sidelines or use excuses not to date, such as being too busy with work, school or family. The following are the reasons why dating is good paraphrased from Dr. Cloud's and Dr. Townsend's book, Boundaries in Dating

1. It gives you an opportunity to learn about yourself and others. It teaches one what is needed to develop better relationship skills. Dating is for growth and learning. It is a time to develop yourself so that you will be ready for marriage.
2. Dating is for working through issues and recognizing that being solely attracted to someone will not be enough for a long term, happy relationship. While dating,you begin to recognize what your values are.
3. You start to develop relationship skills. Many of us have come from dysfunctional families and do not learn how to relate to the opposite sex until we begin dating. You also find out what your weaknesses and insecurities are.You recognize your maturity level- if you are ready for a healthy, permanent relationship or not.
4. Dating can be healing. If you are willing the person you are dating will help you heal past wounds, maybe not directly,but indirectly which prepares you for "the one".
5. There is value in the relationship even when you are just dating casually. You share emotional and spiritual intimate moments. Yes you could love the person you are dating. Love is not restricted just to the person you are meant to marry. There are different types of love. If you do things right the person could end up being a good friend even if the dating does not lead to marriage.
6. You learn what your preferences are in the opposite sex. Hopefully your preferences are not so superficial that you ignore the important qualities and type of character that make a happy relationship survive and thrive.
7. "Dating gives a context to learn sexual self-control and other delay of gratification." - Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend

Self Love

"Most of us are trying to figure out what to do to make our relationships better, to make them work, because we have skipped over loving me into love you. Self-love means taking the time to smile at, listen to, and tenderly embrace yourself. Without time spent this way, the thing we search and hope for in relationships will continue to elude us. That experience-total acceptance, honest acknowledgement, trusting support, and honoring of self is all the experience we need to make any relationship a good one. When we have this kind of self-love, we are more than willing to do the work, the sometimes nasty work, required to establish, build, and maintain a relationship. Without it we are bound to get lost in a pile of mess." - Iyanla Vanzant


Self-Love Means:

• You are not codependent. You know that by forgetting about your own needs in order to get love is not the healthy way to go about things.
• You don't put yourself last on the list.
• You don't compare yourself to others.
• You are patient during your meantime experiences even if they take longer than you hoped.
• You are gentle wih yourself when you are learning something new.
• You accept your God given body just the way it is.
• You do not spend time with energy drainers and avoid having a relationship with people who hurt you in any way.
• You make time for your goals and dreams.
• You trust and believe in yourself.
• You do not dwell on your negative characteristics or your faults instead you focus on the positive.
• Whether you achieve your goals or not, you pat yourself on the back for giving it your best shot.
• You do not care what others think of you. Your thinking is, "Your opinion of me is none of my business".
• You do not let yourself feel bad about something not turning out the way you wanted. Instead you congratulate yourself for trying.
• You know and remind yourself that you are attractive even if you are not attractive to a specific person.
• You do not focus on your failures, instead you focus on your successes.
• You let go of those who do not honor, celebrate, or love you. You recognize they are on their own chosen path and let them go with love.
• You spend time with your tribe. Those people who are like minded and who love you for being your authentic self.

"You may love a person dearly, but you must also accept that they may not walk the path with you. They have chosen another way, another lesson, one on which may not be complimentary to yours. Which raises the second issue: Learn to face the truth....Remember that you are always prepared for something better or protected from something worse. When the divine reason for the meantime union has been fulfilled or when the divine season for the meantime experience comes to an end, you will move on to exactly where you need to be." - Iyanla Vanzant