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Great I will keep a lookout for such people.
As for your second question:
1) I am open to receiving love, but it needs to be from someone who has self-respect. I can't abide codependent love because again it just feels like I'm up on a pedestal or being controlled or being used to fill a hole in their lives.
2) I imagine love to be a very physical act, lots of physical affection. That and some verbal expressions, such as encouragement. However, when I think of someone doing favours for me or buying me gifts, I do feel resistance to that, I feel a bit awkward, like I 'owe' them something back.
3) I also feel unease in terms of my flaws - the parts of me that feel out of control, like sinkholes of my personality, I don't want anyone to see me in those states, the 'unacceptable' traits. Where I'm a bit rough, a bit irritated or giving off 'bad energy', and also unresolved internal stuff - I feel unloveable there and don't want to show those aspects of me.
4) additionally, I always imagine them, at least initially, loving me for something that I do well, even if it's just my personality (infatuation), than loving me as I am. Yes it makes me feel like an object, a trophy. I just don't know what else would attract someone to me other than my attractive traits. And yet it's a self-fulfilling prophecy - I subconsciously lead with the best features of me, and then I always end up feeling like a trophy. I am not sure how to be loved for just being a mediocre person... :(
Great exercise though, seems to reveal a lot.
edit: nevermind, I think I've solved it. The problem with objectification is that it makes a person out to be only their desirable traits, and cuts off their undesirable traits in shame. When, if we view a person as a system, they must have all the traits they have to be who they are, they work in synergy. The objectified traits are only part of them, not all of them, it misses the wholeness of who they are and the life force that drives all of them. To see someone wholly, both positive and negative traits as a part of who they are, and the negative traits as necessary to the positive traits which we so enjoy, is closer to the ideal of love. Than simply enjoying someone's positive traits and condemning their negative traits, as if they could be what they are without their undesired traits, as if their undesired traits are a crime. It's like taking insects out of the ecosystem - all your crops would die. So taking a person whole, synergistically, is the key - enjoying the good traits and understanding the negative traits. Understanding that a person is greater than the sum of their parts. And loving them for that. And it starts with loving myself for that. :) because I'm a complex human being, and I'm not going to divide myself up any longer to be palatable to another.
I feel that my entire life since I was 5 (when my survival mechanisms began) my entire personality is based around getting admiration. And now I get tons and tons of it, I have so many ways to get admiration, I have honed many talents and my intellect and worldviews that impress people. But the thing is, I hate it. And yet I still get it, automatically, because my entire subconscious behavioural pattern is around getting it - even when consciously, I'm sick of it and no longer want it.
All I actually want is love. I want nurturance and to be held. But instead people put me on a pedestal, and in that same way, it feels like they distance themselves from me. All because my entire behavioural complex during my childhood was about getting attention and admiration. Love wasn't available in my childhood, so to survive I HAD to find ways of getting attention and admiration. I was severely abused and neglected.
And to this day I can't seem to find and receive love and warmth, whatever I try it always is a way to impress and attract people, never secure their affections.
I know I'm not alone, a lot of us intellectuals are getting fried on this, a lot of talented people, we developed from the absence of love, we developed due to perfectionism (the Clean Room route). So my question is - what IS the route to love?
Justified flaws seems to be an important part of that schema, but what else can a person do to secure love and warmth and affection? I'm willing to do anything now.
" There's a whole art form of expressing your feelings, even going to some very dark places, while still coming across as "rounded". "
Umm this is actually amazing. How did you figure this out and can you elaborate?