Manifestation: A Story of True Love
Fantasizing Love
Let me just put this out there: I do not have the typical love story.
Growing up, I didn’t have a scrapbook of my dream wedding like they do in the movies — I barely thought about what a wedding would look like for myself.
But I did dream about being married. In my dreams, I would fantasize about a boy named Charlie who was my best friend. His family and mine were intertwined for generations, though none of them had been married previously. We grew up, in my mind, as best friends and fell in love in our twenties, got married, and had babies.
We also had secret powers, but that’s another story for another day.
Can you tell I was a writer even before I wanted to be a writer?
In my dreams, we would go on epic adventures and he was always there to calm me down when the world became overwhelming.
He was the love of my life.
I didn’t date much between the ages of 20 and 31. I had two boyfriends in high school, one relationship that extended into the first two years of college, and then that was it. I was the chubby kid with undiagnosed ADHD and diagnosed ASD, who was obsessed with science fiction and fantasy, and generally wanted to be liked by everyone but couldn’t figure out how to be myself.
I carried a lot of shame and fear of being found out — of having the mask removed and my peers judging me for my inability to cope with sensory overload or the extreme emotional swings I would experience.
After my second boyfriend and I broke up, I moved back in with my parents and finished college locally. Then I moved from Miami to a suburb of Boston and started nannying. Meeting men, or women, or anyone was really difficult — mostly because I had a two year old permanently attached to my hip and was constantly getting hurt. I spent like two years on crutches between a knee dislocation, achilles tendonitis, and foot fracture.
For four years, I tried to use apps to date, but they aren’t like they are now. They were archaic and overwhelming and for the most part you had to be on a computer to log on. When I went to law school, I thought, finally, it’s my time to meet someone.
Three years went by, filled with stress and anxiety and lost friendships, and still I didn’t meet anyone. I was so shy and scared to fully be present that I just hid in my shell. But I kept daydreaming about this boy that I had loved my whole life, who I had never met and wasn’t even “real.”
At the end of law school, I moved home to study for the bar exam with the intention of moving up to New York once I had passed. While studying for the bar the second time, I started delving into the Law of Attraction and the teachings of Abraham Hicks. I was determined to have a better experience with the bar exam the second time and the materials I surrounded myself with were so helpful in making that a reality.
Stepping into Myself. Losing Myself. Finding Myself.
It wasn’t until after I took, passed, and was admitted to the bar, that my self-confidence started to bloom. I was no longer fearful of telling people about my struggles. I talked about failing the bar honestly — I was even on a podcast to share the story — and I started thinking about what I really wanted out of life and a partner.
In February of 2019, I went to a Jewish singles event and finally met someone. It was an incredibly toxic relationship that crashed and burned just a few months later after I traveled almost every weekend to spend time with him while he was on work breaks. I envisioned a life with him after a minute and put all my wants and needs aside to make him feel better about who he was.
Clearly this is not the way to have a healthy relationship and when it ended, it was like a supernova exploded. I was so concerned with losing the steam I’d achieved by actually having a boyfriend for the first time in 12 years, that I started compromising myself and my goals to talk and meet boys who had so many issues, it was hard to keep track. Again, not my finest moment but still a learning experience I am proud to have had.
After four weeks of talking to men on dating apps, being called names because of my weight, being aggressively stalked by one guy, and ghosted by countless others after kisses stolen in parking lots after dates, I finally took every dating app off my phone.
I was done. I didn’t want to find someone this way. I didn’t want to feel overwhelmed, rejected, and hurt because of strangers on the internet. I didn’t want to fall in love with a nice smile and then be left on read. So I put the phone away and focused on myself — for a week.
Co-creating Love with the Universe
One day during that week, I had a lull in my work and was reading some of the Law of Attraction by Esther, Jerry, and Abraham Hicks. In the law of attraction, Abraham teaches that you are supposed to ask for what you want, don’t give the Universe a deadline to deliver it, be open to it coming in various forms and by different avenues, and when it arrives, say thank you and move on because you always expected it would come.
So I sat down at my work desk with a piece of scrap paper and wrote a letter to the Universe asking to help me find my soulmate. I wanted to find someone who understood me. Someone with kind eyes and a sweet smile. Someone who loved holding hands and kissing. I wanted someone who understood there was a higher power at work around us; someone who loved his family and kissed his parents hello. I asked that they should give ample forehead kisses, cried during movies, and loved fantasy in the same way I did.
I wanted someone I could relate to on a granular level and still be so different that our relationship would push us to learn from one another and grow together.
I wanted, and needed, someone I could be my most simple self with. Someone who made me laugh, held me when I cried, and loved me for me — not for who I pretended to be when I was nervous or scared.
I told the Universe what I wanted and I fully embraced expecting it, whenever it would come.
And then I went about my day.
A few days later, after a quick trip to Massachusetts to watch the oldest kid I nannied graduate from high school, I showed up to work very late — my flight had been delayed — and felt a pull to download the OkCupid dating app again instead of drafting contracts.
Now, if you have never had to use a dating app, then let me tell you, they are work. Like, it takes time to go through your matches, swipe through people, talk to people, and meet up with people. It is exhausting — especially when you are a hypersensitive ASD/ADHDer introvert. But I downloaded it anyway and started to see who might have messaged me in the week the app hadn’t been on my phone.
On OkCupid, at least in 2019, if you didn’t pay for it, you couldn’t see your new messages until you swiped through matches and saw that one of those people had sent you a message.
So I sat at my desk, swiping and this man pops up on my feed. He’s holding a violin and he’s standing with a much older man. They both have huge smiles on their faces and then I notice there’s a small emblem on the top of the photo saying he sent me a message.
When I tell you he had me at his opening line, I’m not kidding:
“Hi, it’s nice to see another Latin Jew on this app.”
Now, I don’t know why that line did it for me, but it was one heck of a conversation starter.
When I asked what kind of Latin Jew he was, he replied Cuban Jew.
In South Florida, where we are from, there are a lot of Hispanic Jewish people, but there’s only a small sect of Cuban Jews and normally we all know each other. But I did not know him and he did not know me.
After a quick game of Jewish Geography and “Are We Related?” (We are not.) we exchanged phone numbers.
We texted back and forth for a few hours and then right as I was getting ready for bed, he asked to video chat. I was nervous because, well, one, I was in my pajamas, and two, I didn’t even know him. What if he immediately judged me for my double chin, no makeup, and alien abduction t-shirt?
But there was something about him, something I really wanted to experience.
A five hour video chat later and I was in love.
I thought I was crazy, but I was obsessed. I actually used to sing, “This is the remix to obsession,” over and over to remind myself this wasn’t normal.
We talked the entire next day, had a video chat again that night, and decided to meet up the following day.
When I tell you we have been inseparable since, I’m not exaggerating. I can remember every day I haven’t spent with him and why. Garrett — my husband — quickly became my best friend. And in four days of knowing one another we were exchanging, “I love yous” in private and “cotton candy” (our codeword for I love you) in public.
Six months later, we were engaged and everyone in our lives was giving us old gold jewelry so we could trade them in to have an engagement ring made out of my mother’s original engagement ring. Nine months after that, we were getting married in the middle of a pandemic, dealing with lost wages, filing for unemployment, and moving into our first apartment together.
It’s been three and a half years and we still talk openly about being hypersensitive and cry together while watching movies, especially ones that deal with Jewish trauma and exile. He has consoled me every month we don’t get pregnant, rubs my bum to put me to sleep when I’m anxious, and is always there with a forehead kiss to make me feel loved.
Literally Soulmates
When I met Garrett, Charlie had drifted into the back of my mind, joining my childhood invisible friend and memories of my favorite books and shows.
Then, in April of 2022, I was taking a Holy Fire Karuna Reiki Master course with my mentor and diving deeper into my psychic medium gifts. I was explaining to her one day about how I manifested my husband with that letter to the Universe. We laughed about it and then, suddenly, the memory of Charlie popped into my head — Charlie, my best friend turned soul mate, who’s family had escaped Europe with mine to come to America — and I realized, the boy I dreamt about all those years was literally my husband.
During our first year of dating, Garrett’s family had come to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family so that they could get to know one another.
Now, we knew that we were both Cuban Jews and I knew my grandmother had been friends in Cuba with his older cousin, but Garrett’s family had gone from Cuba to New York during the great diaspora after Castro took over, and mine had immigrated to Miami. So, we never had a chance to meet until OkCupid.
We also knew that we were both part Russian and Polish, but what we didn’t know, which we found out on Thanksgiving in 2019, is that not only were our families friends in Cuba, but my great-grandfather Jacobo, and Garrett’s grandfather Hillel, actually came over from Poland together on the same boat to Cuba — escaping just before the Nazi’s marched into Warsaw. Some of their family stayed behind and were moved to the Warsaw Ghetto together, and some died together in the concentration camps.
Our families were linked for generations, just like the boy in my dreams. Oh, and…my husband’s last name is Charnin. [Insert exploding head emoji.]
I dreamt and manifested meeting my soulmate my entire life and never knew it. I’ve been in love with my husband for over thirty years and only met him three and half years ago.
If that’s not divinely created, I don’t know what is.
And I really believe that had I not sat down and asked the Universe to help me find this particular person, I never would have met my beshert.
So this is my plea for you in 2023: Don’t settle. Ask, and intend, to find the person your soul cries out for. Expect them to show up in whatever way the Universe deems best. And then run with it. Enjoy it, and them. Things won’t always be sunshine and roses, but they will be a hell of a lot better with that person than without.
Alex is a medium, intuitive, writer, and attorney working on her new book, writing legal marketing for her clients, and helping her friends discover — and achieve — the life they’ve always wanted. You can find her reading tarot, doing power hours of writing, and sharing her life as a married, diabetic, fur mom, and medium on Instagram and TikTok.
