Falling in Love with Your Head or Heart?

People fall in love either with their heart of head; the result of the different paths are not always the same. On Brojid Lifestyle this week, I want to share re-examine the two situations so that you don’t enter a wrong relationship.

Different Paths to Love

Let’s start with this: what does it really mean to fall in love? My guess is that it means to single one person out as the one that your heart connects with and commit to a long-lasting relationship with them. Many people do this with their heart, others with their head. I want to talk to you about each of them with the hope that you will be better guided as you enter relationships.

To fall in love based on your feeling is what I refer to as falling in love with your heart while falling in love primarily because your sense told you so, with or without feeling is falling is what I mean by falling in love with your head. Many people have made life mistakes because they followed their feeling and some have married people they are not really attracted to because they followed their head. Wisdom is to get the balance and know the one that matters most in choosing a life partner.

If you fall in love because of your feeling primarily, I don’t condemn you. However, more people have blundered in the choice of a spouse following their feeling than those who don’t. You know why? There are many factors that generate feelings for a member of the opposite sex which makes it highly unreliable in telling who qualifies to be a spouse. For the sake of your life today and the future, you ensure your choice of a spouse is not based on the wrong premise.

You see, if you spend a long time together regularly with a member of the opposite sex, whom you don’t hate, you will most CERTAINLY start having a feeling for them. It’s only a matter of time. Such feeling is not necessarily because they are best suited for you; or that you truly love them; but because you are under what I choose to call, Opposite Sex Proximity Effect. That’s what make brethren in the same unit start ‘catching vision’ with each other and colleagues at work starts ‘having a thing’ for each other.

Similarly, if you are heartbroken and so yearn for the pampering or cuddling of the opposite sex, the person who offers that to you in your time of pain and a dire need for it will have an exaggerated space on your heart. This starts breeding feelings and from there the delusion that you are in love starts creeping in. Many people make lifetime decision based on that at their peril! “Is it possible that it’s true love? Yes! Could it be fake? 96.865% yes! Feeling cold be a sign, but NOT a sure sign of love.

We all, maybe not really all, but a good number of us grow up having fantasies about the kind of spouse to have. Many of them are formed by casual events or crazy ideas we get in movies. For instance, I grew up thinking that the picture of beauty is a dark-skinned, chubby girl largely because my mum is dark and my most intellectually stimulating sister is darker than charcoal. The consequence is that I easily ‘catch feelings’ for people like that those days, before meeting Chidinma Tsure destroyed that perception. That again, is why feelings are NOT enough!

When someone treats you very nice, you are very likely to be drawn to that person. If that niceness is intensified, you may even to start catching feelings for the fellow. I have encountered ladies who talk to me nicely and accord me huge respect and before I realized what’s happening, I started getting a ‘feeling in my spirit’. Looking back, I realized that they are either well-groomed or have mastered the art of warming themselves into the heart of a man. Again, that’s why you can’t allow JUST your feeling to lead you into a lifetime relationship. It’s too UNRELIABLE!

It’s when people are driven by their feelings, not head, that they start reasoning away common sense truth in choosing a spouse. When you tell a girl who is beaten regularly by her fiancé to quit the relationship and she wipes the tears of the latest beating she got and say, “But I love her”, don’t be mad at her. It’s her feeling, not her sense talking. She needs a booster dose of sense.

As a church girl, if your pastor is truly anointed and preaches powerfully, you are likely to catch feelings for him as you sit under his ministrations time and again. Nothing is wrong with catching feeling provided that your pastor is single and untaken. However, anointing and skill to preach powerfully are not equal to the CAPACITY to be a confam husband and father. That’s why it’s RISKY to make a decision, just because of the feeling.

If what drives you in a lady is her body structure and what you look forward to a man is his money, you will catch feeling with anybody that has these things or any semblance of them. It is not necessarily love; it’s an attraction to the picture you have in your head. Those who follow such feelings usually make the wrong choice because when it comes to choice of a life partner, feeling is SECONDARY!

You know why a lady will catch feeling for a ‘yahoo boy’? Her definition of a husband is rich man and once she sees the money she loves; she doesn’t care that the riches were acquired fraudulently. She starts asking silly question like, “Are you 100% sure of how everybody made their money?” You don’t blame her because her sense of judgment has been beclouded by HER LOVE of money. She claims that ‘we just have a deep connection’, but the reality is that it’s an ephemeral connection due to her emotional attachment to money.

If you have ever seen a guy choose a girl who is obviously not a wife material, you will find that he is driven by his feeling. “My heart is just settled with her.” she lies to herself when the reality is that as far as a girl’s body is concerned, ‘the bigger the better’ is his motto. As usual, once they catch feeling based on their fantasies, they start trying to come up with excuses to explain their actions or shut up to voice of reason screaming in their head. If you love that brother, inject him a heavy dose of sense trice daily for three weeks for his healing.

“Brojid, you have been talking as if feelings has no place in love.”

Sorry for giving you that wrong impression. Truth is that feelings really matter; do you think I don’t have a feeling for #BrojidBae? The feeling is so strong that the mere thought of her can even make my diopka give me a nod. However, feelings re secondary. You don’t make a choice of a life partner just based on feeling because it’s transient and can be generated by all kinds of unreliable factors.

Now, the feelings you have for someone can be a signal; more of a pull and an attraction. However, before you commit to that attraction, you need to cross-check with your head. You need to ask yourself: why do I want to marry this fellow? What makes him or her good enough to be my spouse? That answer should make sense to you and well-meaning people in your life.

Before You Commit to Relationship

I believe in have feelings for the person you want to marry, but you don’t start from there. You start with recognizing that this one is suitable and then you deliberately cultivate feelings for him; not develop feelings and start deceiving yourself that you can’t live without someone that’s glaringly WRONG FOR YOU. If you are mature enough to even contemplate relationship, you should know WHAT REALLY MATTERS in a spouse and tick them off in a person before you allow yourself to develop feelings for him or her.

“Did you say ‘cultivate feeling’?

Gbam! Yes, I did and this is what I mean. Feelings are generated by all kinds of factors. If you confirm from an authentic source that the person you have a feeling for and claim you can’t live without is HIV positive, that feeling go shake o; that’s if it doesn’t disappear! In the same way, you can deliberately make yourself have feelings for someone through a series of actions. For me, I fell in love with my head and adopted a lifestyle that ensured I not only have feelings; but have the kind that almost led us into sin.

When you fall in love, with your head before your heart joins, you can involve your heart eventually. How? Spend long and quality time with someone regularly, share your life and gist as often as possible. Keep a memory of that person alive in your environment with photographs and focus on their good attributes more than their flaws. That’s what I did until both my head and heart were in love with #BrojidBae. For the girl that is NOT the right one, I did about the exact opposite and that generates enough repulsion to ensure the silly feeling I was catching was NEVER nurtured!

There are things that really matter in life, marriage and life partner. To know whether you are carried away by your feeling, instead of your sense, check your reasons for loving that person. They have to be serious reasons that can stand the test of time. It’s not about convincing anybody to agree with you about your choice spouse; it’s about being REALLY SURE that you have made the right choice!

My point?

Falling in love is good; but if you fall for the wrong person, miserable life is almost sure. Be sure your choice is not PRIMARILY based on your feelings alone; God didn’t build a powerful system like your brain as a load on your head; use it! Reason with your brain to arrive at the right spouse. Prayer is equally VERY important, but that doesn’t take away the need to actually use your God-given brain to reason out whether the person is suitable or not. You just need to train your brain with the word of God ( as in, renew your mind) to reason like God would. Your feeling is UNRELIABLE; your trained sense is!

You can read more of this kind of post on our Brojid Lifestyle Magazine, every Friday. For quick tips we share with youths every Monday, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin @BrojidWorld. You can equally subscribe to our exclusive contents here.