Have you ever found yourself feeling intensely attracted to someone you just met?
That magnetic pull, according to western society, means romance - potentially that you are meant to be.
I don’t give relationship advice, but I do write about the feelings we experience within our human bodies. And I notice these feelings are important to understand, because that magnetism is not necessarily yelling ROMANCE!
Because the more you deepen into yourself, the more intense it will feel to experience being seen.
The intimacy of being seen
Consider for a moment how much of your inner human experience is completely private, intimate. There are truths about you that you may have never spoken to another human being. Perceptions you’ve never had the words to articulate. Creative actions you take that are soaked in depth and meaning, which others seem not to see (and so they remain private).
Most of who you are is actually so unseen, that being human is the reverse of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
You carry countless secrets with you every day, openly scrawled all over your posture, your clothing, your words, your art. Like a tattoo that is so rarely commented on that even you forget it’s there, until somebody walks up and starts talking about it.
Suddenly, through observation, someone is pulling your intimate depths up and into your conscious awareness. And all in a relational way. You feel seen, understood, and warmth blooms inside your chest. You may call it resonance.
It can go the other way as well.
You’ve worked intensely on yourself, and you come across someone whose life's journey has clearly had some overlaps with your own. When you articulate what you see so clearly scrawled across their experiences, being seen by you may feel shockingly magnetic to the other, especially compared to their everyday interactions.
When resonance is mistaken for romance
Our meaning-making systems instantly and dutifully reference their internal rolodex of meaning (created by all the societal ideas they’ve catalogued) and conclude:
Intense feelings + preferred gender = romantic partner!
But resonance can’t always mean romance, because the more you explore yourself, the better you will be at articulating (and thus evoking) deep resonance in other humans. And the better they will be at evoking those experiences within you.
This can happen in therapeutic and somatic work, too. In fact, the nature of the work invites it. You're sitting with someone whose role is to understand and recognize parts of you that may have gone unseen for years. Of course that can feel extraordinarily intimate. Of course you might feel drawn to that person.
And if you experience this with your therapist or practitioner, it's something you can talk about openly. These feelings aren't inherently inappropriate or shameful, and in a well-held professional relationship, they can become another part of your experience to explore.
More than one kind of connection
I'm writing about this because a recent experience reminded me of Ram Dass sharing his experience of falling in love with everyone.
It’s a real phenomenon in the spiritual world.
Buddhism recognizes Spiritual Friendship as an integral part of the path.
John O'Donohue wrote about Anam Cara, the Soul Friend.
And in light of recognizing how natural resonance is, I find myself wondering how many extraordinary human encounters we've misunderstood and fumbled, because we’ve been given such a limited vocabulary to help us make sense of why we are drawn to one another.
Sometimes it might be romantic love. Sometimes it might be friendship. And sometimes it might simply be the extraordinary experience of discovering that another human being can see something you've carried quietly inside yourself for years.
Or that you can see what others carry quietly within their hearts.
Perhaps we can simply let ourselves experience that warm draw, without falling into the need to fold the other up and tuck them into our pocket.
