The Kind Of People You Often Think About Years Later Usually Have 5 These Old-Fashioned Traits
Wesley Souza | PexelsOnce when I was in college, a close male friend and I were surveying a group of attractive young women at a party when he leaned towards me and quietly whispered with an unforgettable air of smug confidence, “Bryan, don’t you sometimes feel like you could make any woman in the world fall in love with you?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I dismissed his question as arrogant and deluded. I didn’t have it easy with women. I figured women were simply difficult to convince.
Besides, I couldn’t see in me whatever they might see in me. Getting a woman to fall in love with me was always going to be hard, so I thought. I now believe he was striking at a truth underneath all that youthful arrogance.
The experience of authentic love is simply awesome. Naturally, we are all ever-eager to fall deeply, passionately, exquisitely in love with one another. It’s mostly our protective facades and fears, and perhaps a little chemistry, that ever prevent love from happening effortlessly. But turns out, to be a person that people think about years later, whether you fall in love or not, is far from rocket science.
Here are the old-fashioned traits of people you can't stop thinking about, even years later:
1. Authenticity and vulnerability
True intimacy is only possible through vulnerability, which means being honest about who you are. Nobody likes to be manipulated, and that's what our social masks are designed to do: manipulate other people's opinions and behavior in our favor.
But a sensitive, open heart can feel through the facade, and one's carefully prepared fiction doesn't interest an open heart. We yearn to feel the truth in one another — what I call The Real. We ache for the Real. Authenticity and vulnerability can be wildly attractive because they are acts of openly offering ourselves as Real as we come. Besides, when you see me honor and share my Real, you feel more comfortable honoring and sharing yours.
2. Radical acceptance
Each of us ultimately wants to be accepted for who we really are, because it’s exhausting trying to be someone else. When I can communicate to someone that I can truly hold all of them, from their best to their worst — in sweetness and in anger, in adoration and frustration, in their smiles and in their tears — they can’t help but start to love me for that. Of course, to be able to fully accept a person in their full range of being requires that a partner connect to the true source of their power: their heart.
3. Connection to heart
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A person's true power isn’t in their brains; it’s in their heart. We can’t fully accept another person and their vast and complex range of emotional expression if we're living from our brains alone. Our logical brain only works to solve the apparently endless problems other people seem to pose.
It’s only the deep love radiating from our own illogical heart that can continue loving someone when they show up looking like a problem his logical brain can’t solve. Only a person connected to their heart can cherish someone else in their wild and radiant fullness.
In a world that often tells people they're either too much or not enough, most people are aching for a heart-connected partner who can fully cherish them, however they show up in this unpredictable moment.
4. Confidence
Oh, the shame and disorientation that still runs rampant through our modern world. For much of my life, I wasn’t always clear what to do with the passions that would rage through my body like wildfire. The world mostly taught me to hide them lest I be discovered for the strange creature I apparently wasn’t supposed to be.
So I often hid these passions from other people, worried they would be frightened by me. As a result, I let countless available women slip quietly away who might otherwise have fallen in love with me had I shown them in healthy, heart-connected ways that I was, in fact, cherishingly starving for them and not content with loitering long in the friend zone.
It took me a while, and admittedly, a healthy amount of connections, to realize that others are just as genuinely jazzed about connecting as I am. This is a wondrous gift. It is nothing to be ashamed of. Wielding it responsibly, ethically, and in ways connected to the heart is an art form.
But when embraced and perfected, this art form can inspire the most intimate parts of our being to arch backwards in eye-popping delight and dissolve us blissfully into love, and a remembrance that lasts forever.
5. Patience
Nothing says “I am a safe, strong place for you to relax your weary self” more than showing someone you have no intention to push them to do something before they're ready to. And nothing inspires someone's love more than being with a partner whose presence they can relax in.
That essentially means being clear with what you want — whether it's time, affection, or whatever — while assuring them that I’m already enough in love with my own life that I don’t need anything from them to be happy already. I’m self-contained and self-satisfied.
Into my pre-satisfied patience, then, I get the great joy of their authentic gifts: their radiance, brilliance, smile, and love. And that’s all most anyone really wants to do in life: give their authentic gifts to the world, and to each other.
One could argue that other factors are essential too, like chemistry and timing. But could it be that we are all powerful chemists capable of creating love reactions simply by mixing in the right empowering ingredients? Perhaps.
Regardless, I never knew how much capacity I had to create the opportunity for love to blossom until I began understanding just how much we all deeply yearn to fall in love with each other.
As I turn 40 and reflect on my entire life of relationships with women, particularly the ones that got away, I’m learning just how powerful I am — have always been even though I didn’t know it — to create the space within which a person can fall in love with me, and I with them, simply by showing up in my own raw authenticity, connected to heart, passionately connected to my truth and actively fascinated to explore.
Throw in patience and a sprinkle of time, and voila! a recipe for creating the experience of falling in love and being remembered for years afterward, regardless of whether or not we follow through with it.
Bryan Reeves is a former US Air Force Captain, author, blogger, life/relationship coach, and workshop facilitator.
