Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

The Johnny Lee song Looking for Love (In All the Wrong Places) made its debut In the 1980 John Travolta movie Urban Cowboy. While the one-hit-wonder tune is mostly forgotten, the message of the song has remained relevant for more than 40 years. The song is about searching for our person in singles bars only to find one night stands and broken hearts. And yet it seems to be much worse on the dating scene in modern times with dating apps, ghosting and “hooking up.”

A lot has change in our world since 1980. One thing that hasn’t changed since Urban Cowboy and Looking for Love (In All the Wrong Places) arrived on the scene is… Hollywood. Our movies and culture remain filled with the theory that love is found when we find that special someone to give it to us.

In 1990, Pretty Woman had the downtrodden-yet-beautiful prostitute being ‘rescued’ by the handsome billionaire, “and she rescued him right back.” The 1996 Tom Cruise film Jerry Macguire brought us the famous line, “you complete me!”  - and left us feeling like we might all have missing parts that only someone else can provide to make us whole. Even more current movies, like 2014’s Winter’s Tale, leave the moviegoer looking for miracles - especially when a main character like Beverly Penn says, “Each baby born carries a miracle inside. A unique purpose and that miracle is promised to one person and one person alone.” It gets sort of depressing if you think you’ve missed the one person who has your miracle, doesn’t it?

There is, however, good news if you step out of the theater and step into your own mind. Researchers including behavioralists, sociologists, and neurologists are finding that love and other emotions aren’t things we need others to trigger but rather feelings that we can trigger from inside of ourselves.

Avoid the trap of believing that you have to seek out and find some special person who has love for you. The trap springs shut when a relationship struggles. Suddenly we feel without love along with the absence of that other person. Our mind says, “that person gave me love and now they’ve taken it away.” It’s a false belief - that other person didn’t provide the love, they just helped you generate it.

So how do we re-learn to generate internal love? Some experts recommend adding a daily meditative practice to reconnect to positive feelings like love. It can be as simple as closing your eyes and remember a wonderful day with a baby or a puppy. We’re hard wired as humans to feel love in those moments.

Dr. Marsha Lucas, a Washington D.C.-based psychologist and author of the book Rewire Your Brain for Love, says that the practice of mindfulness “produces real, measurable changes in the brain in key places so that deeper connections, better love, and healthier relationships can really take hold.”

Lucas recommends spending 20 minutes a day really focused on that feeling of love - not the one on the silver screen but the one on the inside of your own mind. She contends that this kind of meditative work can not only help you feel your own love inside but can help you attract new love or even heal a current relationships that has lost its zing.

If all those Hollywood love stories have you feeling frustrated because you haven’t found that one perfect person or you’re not sure if the one person your with is the right one, you will generally find that you’re better off working on yourself and not trying to find or fix someone else.

And while modern science is studying the brain and finding out how love is processed, they’re really just confirming what a lot of experts on the mind have known for a long time - that love isn’t found by working on the search or the relationship but rather by working on yourself. After all, it was 13th century Turkish mystic Rumi who offered: “Your task is not to seek for Love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

Looking inward doesn’t really make for compelling 90 minute Hollywood love stories - and that’s okay, you aren’t living one of those. You’re living a life. And it’s full of love if you just let yourself feel it from the inside.

I guess Johnny Lee was sort of right. We have been looking for love in all the wrong places.