Falling in love is a funny thing. It’s a special feeling that can make you do crazy things, and it’s hard to put things into perspective when you meet that special person.

And she was special indeed…

Finally, someone to truly connect with; someone that vibrates on the same frequency as me; someone that genuinely ‘sees’ me. And not only that, she’s attractive too: long brown hair, slender posture, and magical blue eyes.

It all started with different intentions though… The first time I just wanted to be there for her as a friend, and go on a walk together. My Intentions shifted quickly when we started to connect on a deeper level…

Even though I try to resist, I start developing feelings…

This happened to one of my friends recently; he fell in love with a beautiful woman. Unfortunately, the feelings weren’t mutual and he entered the process of dealing with heartbreak. He sent me this voice memo in which he talked about a conversation he had had with a friend about this process.

His friend told him: ‘It seems like you always go all-in when you meet someone you like.’
‘I have learned not to do this. I take a more cautious approach and give small pieces of myself, one at a time, and see how it is received.’

Now, a few years ago I used to play poker semi-professionally. Thus, these ideas of ‘going all in’ and ‘cautiously putting in little pieces of yourself’ reminded me of playing poker. Furthermore, I tend to think in metaphors, so my brain started to create a poker/falling in love metaphor which I shared with him. He liked it and told me I should write an article about it, so here it is…

In poker, it’s usually not a very good idea to go all-in out of nowhere. Just as his friend mentioned, giving small pieces and seeing how it is received is usually the best strategy; you make smaller bets and only put some of your chips in the middle and you see how your opponent reacts, which will give you useful information on how to further proceed.

Moreover, going all-in out of nowhere often scares away the opponent, and is not a very good game strategy. This is also the case in the process of love and seduction, but I won’t go into that here.

The emotional effects of going all-in

What I want to focus on are the emotional effects of going all in. One of the things that distinguishes a good poker player from a mediocre one is how they deal with losing big pots. When a good poker player goes all-in and loses, he immediately lets it go. He doesn’t attach any emotional value to the money he just lost. He accepts his loss and moves on. This process of letting go needs to happen swiftly too, otherwise, he might get stuck in his emotions and his game might suffer.

A bad poker player, on the other hand, attaches too much emotional value to the chips he just lost and enters a state of negativity. If he rebuys and continues playing, what often happens is that he gets stuck in the negative state and makes bad, irrational decisions. This state of negative irrationality is referred to as ‘tilt’ in poker and creates this vicious circle of more negative emotions and more bad decisions.

The lesson here is that going all-in in itself is not a bad thing; how you handle it is what matters. Going all-in might be the right thing to do given the situation. However, you never know for sure what the outcome will be and you always risk losing your entire stack of chips.

Now, when it comes to falling in love, you don’t always have control over whether your feelings go all in or not. You do, however, have control over how you deal with what happens next. If you go all in and ‘lose’, you can either get attached to the idea of being with the other person and thus be doomed to suffer for a while (while at the same time not being fit to play the ‘game’ of love), or you can accept the loss, let go, and move on.

Of course, this is all easier said than done…

When you go all in and get your heart broken, it truly does feel like the end of the world. This perfect image of being together you have forged in your mind instantly shatters, and you desperately hold on and try to glue the pieces back together.

One significant way in which poker differs from love is that in poker you have a limited bankroll and in love, you don’t. In poker, when you go all in and lose, you have to rebuy and you could potentially do this until all your money, your house, your car, and your pride is gone and… well… then you are just screwed.

However, when it comes to falling in love, you can endlessly keep rebuying. As long as you keep your heart open, you have access to an unlimited resource of love within you. Thus, emotionally attaching that much value to this one situation and thinking that it is the end of the world is pretty crazy.

We do, however, genuinely feel like we have spent all of our love because we attach too much to that picture of being together with the other person. This makes us close our heart, which in turn cuts us off from love. We only have access to that unlimited source of love when our heart is open, so it is essential to work on this.

You might wonder: ‘how the hell do I open my heart?!? and what does ‘opening my heart’ even mean?!?’

Opening your heart means that you surrender to what is and that you’re not in denial and don’t fight with reality. Often, when we experience pain, we react to it by denying the pain and pretending it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, we build a wall around ourselves so we don’t get hurt any further and this gives us a sense of safety. By doing this, however, we close ourselves off from the world.

The side effect of this is that we are not just closing ourselves off from potential pain, we are closing ourselves off from everything; from interacting with the world; from living life; from love.

Embrace reality

Instead of denying pain and closing ourselves off, we have to embrace reality and the pain that accompanies it. That is what it means to have an open heart. This requires a lot of vulnerability and courage. It means that you will have to make a sacrifice in order to keep your heart open. You will have to sacrifice the image of how you think reality should be or how you want it to be, and you will have to actually see reality and accept it for what it is.

Doing this lifts a big burden off your shoulders and will allow you to interact freely with your environment; it will allow you to fully express yourself, including the expression of love!

Speaking of seeing and accepting reality as it is, it might be wise to ask yourself the following question:

‘Am I in love with the actual person or am I in love with the image I have created in my mind of the other person?’

We love to dream and fantasize, and we have all the freedom to do this whenever we meet someone new and don’t really know them yet. We fantasize about what the other person is like, what we would do with them and how nice it would be to be together with them. When we have fallen in love, we usually portray them to be our dream man or dream woman, and of course… we are their perfect match.  

We’re living on a cloud and the other person appears to us in the form of perfection. In reality, this is a fairly delusional image and to say you’re in love with the other person is quite a stretch, cause, in reality, he or she is not what you are portraying them to be.

Whenever you fall in love, enjoy it, but don’t attach too much value to that delusional image of you two being together in paradisal perfection, cause in reality that perfection doesn’t exist. Being together with someone beyond that initial stage of blind love and actually getting to know them requires you to sacrifice the idea of perfection, so you might as well do it from the start.

The lesson here is that going all-in in itself is not a bad thing, as long as you keep it real. Even though not going all in straight away usually is the best way to go about things, going all-in doesn’t necessarily have to cause you pain; it’s how you handle going all in that causes all the trouble. So, go all-in if you like, but see and embrace reality. Get rid of that image of perfection you have forged in your mind because you will have to sacrifice it anyway if you want to really get to know the other.

All is not lost when the feeling doesn’t end up being mutual. Remember: you have an unlimited resource of love within you so if you keep your heart open everything will work out!