By Suzanne Carré

So far we’ve learned that vampire love starts in the heart, is accepting of our mind and body, is not sexual, and unconditional love has absolutely no cost. Now we have all the ingredients for love, how do we make this vampire style love grow?

Love needs space

By space, vampires are not talking about physical dimensions but the room for love in your mind. It’s the designer trend these days to clear the clutter from our homes, and organize our lives, by putting all our personal possessions in neat compartments. Love also requires us to clear our minds of the emotional clutter so it can function inside the way love is supposed to work. Then what is this emotional mess stopping us from finding love?

Mind-field of Feelings

Not all our emotions are detrimental to the function of love. Most of what we feel is important to describe ourselves in terms of our emotional needs. But some feelings are destructive and threaten not only the establishment of love but also its growth. The vampires identify some of these negative feelings as jealousy, insecurities, fear of love, and uncertainties of the self.

Negative emotions don’t normally exist in our minds by themselves. They usually come in pairs, and often form clique groups, of destructive feelings set to make our lives miserable. Jealousy and insecurities work to restrict love and “protect” it. But love needs to be free to work, and the most powerful feeling doesn’t need protection. A fear of love prevents us from letting our love grow so we suppress what love we have. Insecurities, usually of ourselves, quickly smoother love and prevent it from even developing. Working together, these demons of the emotions cause love to die and ensure it won’t spring up unexpectedly.

If after accepting yourself, and letting your love free, you still have these bad feelings plaguing your mind, then the vampires would claim this is caused by not having confidence in your love. Trust in love, and yourself, to banish these horrible emotions forever the vampire way.

Confidence in the Mind

Vampires are very confident of who they are and this comes from their complete freedom of gender definition and expectation. It’s not because they are liberal but more a consequence of vampire sexuality being unclassifiable. Male vampires are confident of being male and female vampires are confident they are female. The reason primarily comes from their sexual activity, whether they have fun sex, vital or required sex, their sexual culture is not determined by social prejudices of gender expectations.

In my novel, Vincent identifies the prime reason why Marie cannot let go her insecurities dampening her love, is her lack of confidence in being female. He then teaches her how to be confident in love and the female vampires agree to instruct her in the confidence of her sexuality. This focus to her femininity is not primarily sexual (even though this is the aim of the females) but to define the essence of self.

Vampires separate love from sex, but we don’t. In our modern world of cataloging every aspect of our lives, the sex of a person is key datum placed high on the list along with our names. For the sake of identification, the fact of your sex (and the presumption of your sexuality) becomes part of our so-called vital statistics. It matters whether we are male or female for everything from buying a house—because us girls live longer—to getting a filling in a tooth—well, at least vampire teeth are gender specific. We need to change the rules, and forget the pressure of sex, or at least place three options on the forms we fill out—“male,” “female,” and “a bit of both.” (Notice here I didn’t put the option of “don’t know” or “not sure” because vampires are not confused when it comes to sex.)

This reminds me of a time when I worked in a hospital, in the neonatal clinic, and on the first day the head nurse showed me around the facility so I’d know what my duties were. In the nursery were three piles of colored cloth diapers, so I made the comment they were color-coded for a reason—blue for boys, pink for girls, and yellow when you can’t tell—hmm, my boss was not amused. I’ve noticed they wrap kids in white these days—sorry, it must have been my fault.

Anyhow, back to vampires and the pure love they achieve. Unconditional love requires you to be completely accepting of yourself—in your mind, in your body, and in your identity of self. This total acceptance of the whole person that you are, is very vampire. The way to achieve this harmony in all the aspects of our existence starts with the important step of finding trust in both your love capacity and the love you create. Confidence in love ensures it will dwell in our minds so we can use it to love others.

Next, I’ll answer how long this vampire love takes to happen.

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