“Please don’t shut out love-it’s the best thing about life.” James Patterson
One of the most common themes I hear when counseling couples is “I love him or her but I don’t know that I am in love with him or her.” Some say this with fear, some with an “I told you so” attitude, some wanting us to reassure them and some thinking it is over. The real truth is that this just means you are in one of the cycles of your relationship. Scott Peck has said that every couple falls in love, every couple falls out of love.
Love is at the core of our relationships. It is one of the major components of intimacy. It can make us sappy happy and also can drop us into slobbering sadness and pain. Love can turn acquaintances into life long friends, friends into lovers, lovers into soul mates. It is a hard concept to describe, almost impossible to define, difficult to explain, yet undeniable when we feel it. Love can be very intense or so soft and comforting and soothing.
Who we love or why we love is often inexplicable yet we know the other person is the one. The feeling of being in love, of being loved is at times almost euphoric. So much so, in fact that that feeling is what we describe as love. We expect to always feel that in the relationship, that is what makes us believe and feel that this relationship is the one; at least at the beginning.
The truth of the matter is the first years of a relationship are “lust” driven, that is emotion driven. We experience such emotional highs and lows and that makes us feel so alive. The only problem with that is to live at such emotional levels can be very trying and tiring. We would burn out quickly. It is very hard to maintain such high levels of emotional energy for any sustained length of time.
As we move into a more mature love we learn that loving feelings follow loving actions. We do the things that make our partner feel loved, wanted, needed and appreciated. As we continue doing these things the feeling of being in love, of being loved continue to keep us connected. We all have times in our lives where life, and the stress of that life, seems to overpower the love we share. In other words we fall out of love; a completely normal part of relationship cycles.
Thus, when a client complains of loving and not being in love we try to help them understand that the feeling of not being in love is the disconnection between the two of them. So where and why does the disconnection occur? The usual suspect is the lack of the little things not being done. In my experience most relationships fail because couples are not doing the little things in the relationship.
What are the little things? Dating, as was stated in last month article, sharing experiences, laughing together, working together, remembering important dates and occasions if that is important to the other, being considerate, caring for and being care for and whatever the unique couple you are defines as little, important things; these are the little things.
The usual pattern of disconnection is one like this; when you first get together, starting dating, courting and then moving in together or get married everything is great. You will steal time from others to be able to spend time together, you are in that emotion driven phase and it is so very intense, your relationship is the first priority. Then life becomes real, job problems, careers, school, kids, mortgages, kids and so on, what happens to that relationship, it usually gets pushed down the list until you are only giving it left over time. Most of us do not have left over time in our lives. Disconnection has occurred.
So how to repair it? The answer is simple. You need to start doing some of the things you did at the start of your relationship. Date, talk, spend time together, sacrifice for each other and care for each other. Life is too short to waste it looking for a connection when you already have one, just spend a portion of the time you would looking and building on rebuilding the one you have.
“Some live well, some love well, but few love well. To love well…that’s something else, It is a choosing-something done again and again and again.” Charles Martin
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