But let’s be clear—not because essential love lacks romance, but because the romantic love we’ve been taught is a distorted version of essential love.

In the New Eyes On Love Model, we refer to essential love as what most people call “true love.” But we choose this term for a fundamental reason: love is not true or false—love simply is.

Losing sight of this simple yet profound truth is, in fact, the root of the three traps of love.

Idealization leads us to build unrealistic expectations about our partner and the relationship. And what we’ve come to know as romantic love is deeply tied to this master trap—which often becomes the root cause of so much chaos in our relationships.

Romantic love, as we’ve learned it, seduces us with dreamlike promises. We get carried away, sigh, and believe everything will be perfect and eternal; that love will be rosy and life will simply become magical.

But sooner or later, the moment comes when we realize that this “magic”… doesn’t last. Even though it promised us that we’d “live happily ever after.”

The illusions we nurtured collapse like a sandcastle at the shore. We feel deceived, frustrated, and empty. And then we ask ourselves: what is love, really?

That’s how the trap of idealization works. We think we’ve found essential love, but in truth, we’ve been pulled into the confusion of a fleeting love—one that slips through our fingers like water, without us ever understanding why.

Isn’t it paradoxical?

It absolutely is. Because, as we’ve already seen, we carry ambivalent beliefs about love that cloud our judgment.

I clearly remember a young woman who attended one of my workshops. She arrived feeling a bit hesitant, as she wasn’t used to spaces that speak to the soul. She decided to come because we had met some time ago in a professional group, and after going through a breakup that plunged her into depression, she reached out to me. She had worked on her self-love, but still felt something was missing.

During the workshop, she had a revelation: behind that breakup—and others she had experienced—were deep-rooted beliefs she couldn’t quite identify. Days later, she contacted me again to keep exploring.

Once we started her mentorship journey, we uncovered the “movie” she had been playing in her mind, along with the beliefs about love she was unconsciously holding onto. After the first date with any man, she would already imagine herself walking down the aisle, dressed in white, marrying him. She wouldn’t allow the relationship to flow; she didn’t give herself time to truly get to know them, and without realizing it, she would end up suffocating them with her expectations.

Of course—she was idealizing them!

We identified several limiting beliefs about love, beginning with the idea of romantic love. According to the script she had in her mind, every time she went on a date, she convinced herself she had found “the one.” She imagined he would sweep her off her feet, propose, and they’d live happily ever after. She had repeated the same story many times—but had no idea how to stop it.

Her path of transformation—leaving idealization behind and seeing love through new eyes—would begin with deconstructing the romantic love narrative she had inherited, and then breaking down the other misguided beliefs she held about love.

However, we also discovered two more essential areas she needed to work on to truly open to love and attract a different kind of relationship: a couple of unfinished lessons in her human potential, and the activation of her feminine energy.

Her Love Map helped her see with absolute clarity why her relationships hadn’t lasted. She understood why she kept attracting men who wouldn’t commit—even though she longed for a stable relationship. And there it was, the paradox: in her imagination, they were marrying her; in real life, they vanished without a trace.

She wasn’t alone.

How do I know that?

Not just from all the stories I’ve heard and all the research I’ve done on love—but from my own experience.

I idealized my first husband. I believed he was the “Prince Charming” from fairy tales who had come to rescue me. I projected onto him qualities he didn’t possess. My romanticized view of love led me to build an image of a beautiful marriage that, in reality, never existed—and I ended up paying the price in every possible way.

But as you already know, nothing is random. We live in a universe of cause and effect.

The beliefs we carry shape our reality, even when it’s hard to admit—especially when the outcome isn’t what we hoped for. But we become empowered when we drop the self-deception and recognize that we always have the power to create a new reality, one aligned with the force of life.

And then we understand that the romantic love script has been drawing us into the same experiences over and over—and it will continue to do so until we decide to break the spell. The first step to doing so is becoming aware of the three key aspects of the Model I’ll be sharing with you in this book.

Let me give you a glimpse of something that was deeply revealing in my own process: when feminine energy is blurred or out of balance, it often leads us to idealize. That’s why one of the three pillars of the Love Through New Eyes Model is inner unity between the feminine and the masculine. We’ll explore this more deeply in Part Three of the book.

Now… what do you say we take a closer look at how idealization works, so you can gain new insights and begin to free yourself from its spell?