The powerful experience of falling in love is something that each and every one of us wants to do during our lives.

A friend said to me, years ago, something to the effect that if we’re not in a relationship we’re all looking for one, and if we are in a relationship we’re all looking to make it better.

At the time I didn’t really understand this, because I think at the time I was in a place of great difficulty in establishing relationships, but over the years I’ve come to see what he said is true. This is because the Lover Archetypal energy in us is programmed to connect with others from the day we are born to the day we die…. but it is also the archetype which can be most easily wounded, so that our ability to express love cleanly and clearly is very fragile.

The essence of a good relationship is being able to empathise and connect with your partner in a way that makes them open up to you so there is an experience of shared intimacy. However, for men and women the energies in building a relationship may be different. The Lover in women wants to connect – as does the Lover in men – but the primary attraction in men to the Lover in women may be a man’s Magician energy. (Read about the Magician energy, the Magician archetype, here.)

That shared intimacy is undoubtedly a development of the intimacy that develops (automatically) between child and mother (and father) when the baby is born. Indeed, this is the primal model for all our later relationships, and it’s the primal model for falling in love which we take through life. Let me explain.

When a baby is born, she or he is entirely dependent on mother for food, for well-being, and indeed for its very survival, so the baby makes every effort to make the mother bond with it, to make the mother fall in love with it.

It does this by smiling, by gurgling, by enjoying sensual touch, and by mirroring its mother’s (and of course its father’s) emotions. There’s a program in the human brain which enables this behaviour of lovers – deeply looking into each other’s eyes and enjoying sensual sharing enables a baby to fall in love with its mother – and vice versa. (You can read about the development of these responses in this book, which is all about shadow, human development, and the archetypal model [King Warrior Magicain and Lover ] of personality.)

When a baby falls in love with its mother, its mother falls in love with the baby, and the baby’s survival is assured. But sadly, we all know there are many babies born into the world which are not wanted – their experience after birth is negative – they don’t bond with their mother, their mother doesn’t bond with them, and their model of intimacy is forever affected thereafter.

In fact, if a baby has not bonded with its mother satisfactorily, it will pick up the message that it’s not lovable, or that it’s incapable of loving, and will carry that message through the rest of its life into adulthood.

As you may well imagine, a baby in this position is going to experience great difficulty in forming intimate relationships as an adult.

Indeed, she or he may avoid the pain of adult relationships because the experience it had as a child was so painful.

There’s a deep wound to what we call the lover archetype, the part of the individual that holds the loving and sexual energy so necessary for connection with another human being.

In the situation where somebody has a deeper or lesser wound to the lover archetype, their ability to form a relationship with another adult, at least a relationship of strength and equality, will be impacted.

There are ways to overcome this of course in adulthood and there are many therapists and therapies available to deal with these problems.

The point I’m making is not so much that you can overcome these difficulties, as to indicate the ways in which these difficulties may affect your desire to have a relationship in the first place.

You see, if you’re experiencing a desperate need to fall in love, or a desperate need to have someone fall in love with you, then it’s likely that you have some kind of emotional wound or difficulty in your lover, and it will impact the way in which you express your desire to be loved.

And of course there are plenty of good ways to love, all of which can express your intimate whole adult self openly and honestly to a relationship or sexual partner.

One good way of recovering your natural innate human ability to love, is simply being in a loving relationship that is open and honest, where each partner is working towards the benefit and growth of the other, as well as their own growth and individuation.

And there are other aspects to any human relationship.

Sexuality is a massively important aspect of sexual and emotional relationships between adult human. And it’s fair to say that if you want someone to fall in love with you you probably also want to have a sexual relationship with them.

Sidebar – a video diversion about love

You can discover the truth about sexual enjoyment here. Many of us are restricted in our level of sensual and sensuous pleasure, not fully sensing the level of sexual pleasure that we’re entitled to as human beings.

If you want to know how to pleasure a woman, there’s plenty of information here. (If you don’t understand what pleasure a woman means, it means taking her to orgasm – and sure, it’s equally true that a woman can pleasure a man – indeed men look to women for sensual experience because women tend spend more of their time and invest more of their emotional energy in the lover archetype than men do.)

But essentially sexual pleasure is about enjoying not only an intimate sexual relationship, but about constantly striving to enjoy better and better orgasms, so that the pleasure you can gain from your intimate relationship increases naturally as time goes by.

You see, many people don’t make an effort to increase their sexual pleasure, indeed a lot of men don’t make any effort at all to pleasure their female partner, expecting her to provide them with sexual fulfilment while offering none in return.

But the best way of being in a loving relationship is to offer and receive mutual sexual pleasure, and to understand that between the two of you, the potential for human expression of sexuality is almost infinite.

There is also a way of expressing sex that becomes transcendent, taking you into a spiritual realm. We won’t deal with that here, but the point I wish to make is that the level of sexual pleasure which most people experience is far below the potential sexual pleasure that a couple in love are capable of feeling for each other.

To enjoy your full birthright as a human being with sensual pleasure, it’s worthwhile learning those sexual techniques which expand the bounds of possibility beyond what you’ve already learnt in your previous relationships, with your previous partners.