Vex King - Closer to Love: How to Attract the Right Relationships and Deepen Your Connections

Photograph courtesy of the author

Thank you for being my greatest teacher.

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How can you share your life with someone else if

you are disconnected from yourself?

How can you establish closeness if you are

emotionally distant from your own emotions?

The truth is, it is virtually impossible to build a

healthy relationship with another person if you

havent built one with yourself first.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

I felt as though the wind had been knocked out of me. And even though I could see it coming from a mile away, I was still staggered by the impact of my first heartbreak. In a single moment, all I had known of love was wiped away and the future I created in my mind dissipated. For some time, I became a shell of my former self.

You could say it was a brutal, painful, but absolutely necessary wake-up call for my spiritual and emotional expansion. If it wasnt for the ending of multiple important relationships, I may have never learned to sit with my own darkness and crawl my way back to love.

When relationships fall apart, so does the illusion of the joint future you had mapped out in your mind. And the tighter you cling to those hopes, the harder you fall.

But despite the isolating feeling of heartache, I soon realized that there was nothing unique about the earth-shattering sensation I was experiencing. Most of us have gone through a break-up and lost someone were attached to or in love with. And if you find yourself in that position now, I know how lost, hurt, and hopeless you must be feeling. You might not see the rainbow at the end of the storm yet but I have. And Ill usher you there.

During every post-break-up healing process, I would roll my eyes at the sight of happy couples who seemed privy to the meaning of love and the secret to lasting relationships. What did they know or have that I didnt? This confusion and jealousy was a knee-jerk reaction because of my lack of self-awareness.

But everything changes when we become empowered by our role in a relationship. Many of us dont take the time to recover and, instead of doing a deep-dive self-inquiry about how we may have contributed to our own heartache, we seek out another person to help alleviate our longing for love. Then we repeat the cycle.

As some of you might already know, Im not a psychologist or professional marriage counsellor, and some of what I write may not align with you. The way you interpret anything you read also depends on your current emotional state, past experiences, and the context in which you are reading this book. That said, Ive spent most of my adult life learning about self-development and looking into different approaches to building strong relationships, and Ill share all of that with you here.

Ive always been motivated by my own belief that we are capable of living full, blissful lives if we are given the tools to do so. Love is a basic human need, but its also our greatest superpower. A life lived with love is rich, abundant, and rewarding, and if we can share that with someone special, all the better.

You may carry wounds from a decade ago that have begun to open up again in your current relationship. You feel the love slipping away but have no idea how to save whats so important to you. Or perhaps your relationship lacks the emotional depth and intimacy you desire, and you want to be closer to the one you love.

The most important thing I can share with you is not to wait. Dont let one more month, year, or decade go by without a heart-centred self-reckoning. By becoming radically honest about your relationship patterns, aware of your needs and attachments, and closer to understanding how to nurture and love yourself, you will liberate your heart and know how to experience authentic connection, intimacy, and true love.

When you are able to collect all the little pieces of your heart and show up fully in a relationship, the deep connection and bond you can experience are supreme. Often, modern relationships suffer from a lack of loyalty, fulfilment, and depth. That makes a lot of sense because our relationships can only meet us in the place were at emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. But it is possible to grow and move on to a more authentic way to love.

This book is an invitation to do something different; to pause, reflect, and liberate yourself from troubling relationship patterns.

The following chapters will help you to evaluate how and why you love, learn how to do so in healthy and unconditional ways, develop new relationship habits, and deepen your connection to self so that all shared love comes from a place of authenticity and self-knowing.

Use your heartbreak as a catalyst for your growth.

Discover why you keep repeating unhealthy relationship dynamics.

Actualize your ability to build thriving relationships, romantic and otherwise.

With every page you read, welcome new ideas about your capacity to give and receive love. Insecurities, fears, and doubts may rise to the surface as your heart and mind are exposed to what relationships can be and how they can look. But understand that, no matter how much loss you may have endured, unconditional love awaits you. It is nestled within the healing and restorative process offered in each chapter.

By traversing this journey of self-healing, I was eventually able to restore my heart, make peace with my past, and build a life with the most joy-filled human. And because I trusted the healing process, I let go of what I thought love was and found a new understanding about relationships that allowed me to give and receive the love she and I both deserved. Now is your chance to do the same.

This book will take you on a journey to self-awareness as we explore fresh possibilities for healing, love, and relationships. You will need to consider what to leave behind as you set out for a new destination one that will lead you into the unwavering arms of unconditional love.

What are you dealing with?

People are struggling. For years, I have heard from so many who are going through so much emotional pain and are looking for answers to the problems they are facing.

Much of what I hear has to do with people trying to make their relationships work. I get asked often about how to change someone, what to do when they wont change, and how to protect themselves from being hurt or from hurting the other. The issues stem from a lack of communication or feelings of being undervalued in some way. Many have been burned in a past relationship and are afraid to start a new one. Others want to know more about unconditional love and whether it really exists. They wonder how loving someone without conditions plays out in practice and are looking for ways to take their relationship to the next level. A lot of people feel like failures when their relationship breaks down, blaming themselves for not doing enough or not being enough.