Something happened to me in Buenos Aires that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. And it happened on a tango floor. I was learning a particularly difficult move and getting frustrated because I couldn’t quite get it. My instructor stopped me and said,
“This is a difficult move. Lean on me. Let me support you. Let me help you.”
Such a simple thing.
Let me support you. Let me help you. 💕
And I wanted to. But I couldn’t. I could literally feel it in my body. Part of me wanted to soften. To let him lead me. To let myself be helped. But before I’d even had time to think about it, something inside me had already answered:
I’ve got it. I knew that old feeling. When I was seven years old, I made a decision.
I would never allow a man to hurt me again. Of course, seven-year-old me had absolutely no idea what that decision would eventually cost.
She just knew she never wanted to feel that powerless again.
- So I became strong.
- Capable.
- Independent.
- I became a woman who could take care of herself.
And that strategy served me incredibly well.
I built a life. I created success. I learned how to handle things on my own. I travel the world. I live an extraordinary life. I’ve had deeply loving men in my life. But standing on that tango floor, I suddenly saw something I hadn’t fully understood before.
There was only so much of a man’s love I could actually let in.
Because letting it in meant allowing myself to need him. To rely on him. To not always be the one who had it handled. And somewhere inside me, that seven-year-old girl was still saying:
No. I’ve got it.
That moment cracked something open in me.
I started thinking about the patterns we carry into love.
The things we do so automatically that we don’t even recognize them as patterns. Why was it so hard for me to simply let a man help me?
Why did “I’ve got it” come out of me before I’d even had time to think? I’m a successful woman. I’ve built a life. I’m independent. I know how to ask for what I want.
Yet there was something very different about allowing myself to need someone. That was the piece I couldn’t stop thinking about. I became obsessed. And I started looking at the successful women I’ve worked with over the years. Women who are incredibly capable. Women who know how to make things happen. Women who can lead, create, build businesses and beautiful lives.
And yet love can bring out an entirely different set of patterns in us.
For one woman, it might be becoming fiercely independent. For another, working harder and harder to make the relationship work. For another, anticipating what everyone else needs before she even checks in with herself.
And for another — and I know this one well — it can be seeing so much possibility in someone that we stay connected to who they could become instead of who they’re showing us they are.
And I started wondering:
- How much of what we think is simply who we are is actually something we learned to do a very long time ago?
- What if some of our greatest strengths are also the ways we learned to protect ourselves in love?
Because the more I explored this, the more I started to see that underneath so many of our patterns in love, there was something deeper.
An invisible rule. Something we learned about who we needed to be to feel safe, stay connected, or keep love. I’ve started calling these our Invisible Love Rules™.
And I’ve been creating something around this that I’ll be sharing with you very soon. I am ridiculously excited about it. But right now, I’m genuinely curious about you.
- When you look at who you become in relationships, what do you notice?
- Do you become more independent?
- Work harder?
- Take care of everyone?
- Hold back what you really need?
- Keep believing in someone’s potential?
- Or is it something completely different?
Hit reply and tell me.
There’s no right answer. You don’t need to make it profound or write me an essay. I genuinely want to know what you see when you look at your own patterns in love. And yes, I read your replies. More soon.
Love, Angela
