This morning, I knew I needed a vision of love big enough to inspire, yet practical enough to know what to write in a dating profile.

I awoke with the moon shining right on my face—a beautiful April early dawn.

And, I remembered, love is close, always.

When dating has been rough and partners have betrayed us, it can be hard to open your heart again. We retract into career, we chase success, we buy things, and decorate our house. But do we still believe that love will be there for us?

Love is close, always.

As a dating and love coach for corporate women, I needed something to help them break free from stuckness and find amazing men.

For one, there is so much confusion around love:

>> Love is always being there for each other.
>> To be with joy, mine or your own, to dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers (from Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s famous “Invitation“).
>> To risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive (“The Invitation” again).
>> Knowing you have been in each other all along (from none less than Rumi).
>> A love that shall not die, till the sun grows cold and the stars grow old (Shakespeare).

Whichever you personally prefer, all of these have one thing in common: they’re beautiful, but they don’t tell you how to get there.

Guiding women who are successful at everything they do, except love, I was in need of something that catches the essence of love and at the same time is a practical guideline.

Something that helps us powerhouses move beyond the dilemma: “When I am into him, he is not into me, and when he is into me, I am not into him.”

A vision of love that translates into practical guidelines on what to reply when he sends a chat message on the app.

An understanding of love that prevents us from always being the strong one, always giving, and when we finally are in need of help to discover the other could never give it.

A principle that calls in the romance, and prevents love together from ever getting dull.

Because that’s what we are all struggling with, right?

No description of love will help us—no matter how beautiful it is—if it doesn’t bring us the love we seek.

So here it goes: the practical, yet deep, description of love that I call the “Essence of Love” because it captures what love really is about as well as being a practical guideline in any and all of the steps of modern dating.

It’s the one thing about love you need always to keep your eyes on: the very essence of what love is made of, and the very essence of how we find love.

In just 13 words:

The Essence of Love is: True to Yourself and True to the Other.

The essence of love is that it lives between you and me.

Oriah and Shakespeare speak mainly about the other, and Rumi speaks about self, but the very essence of love is that it lives between you and him.

Our language has a hard time finding words for that.

The essence of love is that I am more me than ever before, and that he can be more him than ever before. And that from this place of living truth, something magical happens between us.

Not orchestrated by me.

Not planned by him.

Something that shines more than anything else and that births between us because I am me and he is him, and that allows me to grow more into myself and allows him to grow more into himself. Being true to myself and true to him.

Whichever part of the dating journey you are at, from self to profile to chat to date to bond to commit, at each step this essence is your beacon:

>> Is my profile true to me and true to the man I am looking for?
>> Is my chat reply true to me and what I feel, and also true to him and what he expresses?
>> Am I allowing him to see my full truth, in all vulnerability, and am I willing and capable to see his full truth—even when it doesn’t align with mine?
>> Am I expressing my deepest truths, and am I hearing his deepest truths?

Using these questions, the Essence of Love guides us through every step, and because we keep our eyes on the essence, that is what we manifest at the end: a relationship where I can be true to all of who I am, where he can be free to be all of who he is, and where love flowers new every day.

Love is close.

Truly.

~