How to Fall in Love
First: you have to want it.
You may be afraid of falling in love, perhaps so afraid that you have convinced yourself you aren’t really desirous of love at all. This is a lie, and you know it. You saw the title of this post, and you started reading it. You want to fall in love. Love is the reason we exist at all. Let that be true.
You must accept that this core desire to fall in love will, despite any puzzle box of fears and objections you may have constructed around it, never be eroded or abated. The desire will outlast every objection you’ve raised. Let this sink in, painful as it may be.
When you fall in love, something both feral and sophisticated is awakened in you, and the whole world becomes more enchanted. Meaning permeates your days; synchronicities abound. You begin to feel a kind of investment that, if not exactly forcing it, at least makes a very compelling case for surrender to a higher order, to something like fate. Something will be enacted through you, a hyperobject whose shape you don’t get to see, but you can trust that it will be beautiful and it will mean something. And what is all of this survival for, if not that?
(Yes, there is an analogy here with the creation of art. It’s not accidental.)
How do you hollow out a space for that fate hijack to occur?
First you have to “put yourself out there.” That means: refine and enhance your specific qualities. Know who you are and also play it up. Be a character. It doesn’t matter what kind of character, just be a character. You are an emanation of a Higher Self, so feel what yours is and lean into it.
Then go to places where your catnip exists. You know what your catnip is. The interests and qualities that give you the little frisson. Follow the frisson.
But the most difficult part is that you must open yourself to the influence of the other.
Let them land in you. Their way of seeing, their obsessions, the precise textures of their attention: you let all of it in, and it changes something. Part of what you’re doing when you fall in love is building a narrative: what is the latent story here, what is the trade, what qualities and perspectives will pass between you and awaken something new in both directions? You have to become an oracle. You have to hear the story as music and let it move you. There is a necessary specificity to us, to this particular interchange in the clockwork mechanism of the universe.
Falling in love is an act of faith. You might get wrecked, but it matters, and you have to believe that it matters.
In this scenario, which of you is the immortal billionaire werewolf, and which is the blushing delicate waif? Ideally, you are switching back and forth all the time. That’s how you know it’s true love.