In Love: Should You Choose with Your Heart or Your Head?
179. In Love: Should You Choose with Your Heart or Your Head?
You know the saying “the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of” and you wonder whether it is better to listen to passion, the famous butterflies in the stomach, or to decide with your head, meaning your reason.
You may have heard from certain coaches that you should forget criteria and let yourself go with the encounter, and you wonder whether this is the right choice?
Personally I think that one does not exclude the other and that you can resolve this dilemma by bringing your head into agreement with your heart.
In this episode I explain the advantage of each of these decision centres and how you can bring them into agreement. Having accompanied more than 600 people, this is one of the most frequent inner conflicts in the choice of a partner.
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The advantages and disadvantages of choosing with your heart
The feeling of attraction, the famous butterflies in the stomach (see episode 29 of the podcast how we fall in love), indicates your degree of compatibility with your partner from a genetic point of view and in terms of the love models that you and they have learned in the past. This feeling of attraction passes on information that your head is not necessarily aware of and it should not be overlooked. It is also what distinguishes a simple friend from a lover. The disadvantage lies principally, if the love models you learned in your past are making you unhappy, in your love life now. How do you know? Simply by looking at your results in love when you chose your partner purely with your heart. If your results are not what you want in love, this means that you have registered limiting models in love. Watch my free webinar where I explain all of this.For you
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The advantages and disadvantages of choosing with your head
The great advantage of using your head is being able to evaluate your potential partner with clear compatibility criteria, to check whether they have the capacity to build a healthy relationship (see my episode 133) and whether you have the same life vision/project. Once you have defined what type of partner and relationship you are looking for, you simply need to find the partner who naturally meets these criteria, without trying to change them. What is the right balance between the never-ending checklist, the criteria that reduce our chances of meeting someone, and having no criteria at all? Personally I do not think we are compatible with everyone, that over the course of the relationship there will be enough differences to discuss (according to the Gottman Institute, 69% of problems are perpetual) and that it is worth having a minimum of common ground to get through the more difficult phases of the couple. And it is this common ground that should make up our 5-6 criteria for choosing a partner. To arrive at defining these 5-6 criteria I invite you to ask yourself the following questions:- What are the values that are important to you that explain the results of your life?
- What values would you like to live in your couple?
- Among your list of criteria, what would be the 5-6 values that would summarise most of your criteria?
- Consciously choosing the criteria you are okay to give up?
- Are you aware of the criteria that reduce your chances (not by chance: height, financial status, age, looks, with children or not)
- Ask yourself why it is important? Your room for manoeuvre?
- Challenge this room for manoeuvre: do you see people outside these criteria who still attract you? If so, what additional value do they have?
Reconciling your heart and your head
The first step to reconciling your heart with your head is to understand why your heart sometimes falls in love with people who, at the core, are not right for you, or who even make you suffer. For this you need to identify the limiting love patterns you have unconsciously registered in love, then deprogram them using a psycho-corporeal approach (this is what we do in the Opening Up to Love programme with the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: a psycho-corporeal approach to deprogram the automatisms of the nervous system and reprogram new relational reflexes to be attracted to the models you now want in Love. Once this deprogramming has been done, your head and your heart work in the same direction, namely your love happiness, and they become important aids in choosing or evaluating your ideal partner.Make up your mind by bringing your heart and head into agreement
Who said you had to choose between one and the other to make a decision? The heart and the head are two command centres of your body and if they exist it is because both have their use. So instead of positioning them as enemies, ask yourself how they could come into agreement:- Write down what your heart is telling you
- Write down what your head is telling you
- What do you need to change or decide so that your head and your heart are in agreement?
- You fall in love with someone who has a child and your head refuses to enter a relationship with someone who has a child, because you do not want to take on another person’s child. Bringing your head and your heart into agreement in this situation would be to observe whether this person manages to devote enough time to the relationship without the child present and whether the children are old enough to be part of the relationship without being the priority over the relationship.
- You meet someone who attracts you from the point of view of their character, who corresponds to your ideal in that sense, but physically they are too short. Your heart tells you there is something there, but your head tells you that a man shorter than his partner does not look right. Bringing your head and your heart into agreement in this situation would be to get to know the person longer, to see whether your head’s argument disappears over time.
Pour aller plus loin
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Going further
And if you would like to work on your love patterns and transform your love life, you have the programme Opening Up to Love.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir a l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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