Once you have an awareness of how your current thoughts, feelings, and behavior help or hurt your love-life desires, or what I like to call your personal love-life psychology, you can prepare for a better love-life by taking in some new love-life learning. So what do you need to learn to improve your love-life? Like anything else in life, learning something new about anything involves consciousness mixed with ample amounts of practice. By reading this article you are already demonstrating an interest in increasing the consciousness of your own love-life issues. To actually change your love-life requires that you learn two things, how to psychologically ‘prepare for love’ and how to ‘sustain love’ over time. The rest is chemistry and chance. Thankfully neither of which can be controlled by human beings.
Preparing for Love
Preparing for love usually requires a new awareness in three areas of your love-life: personal experience of love; sense of yourself in love, and; friendship in love. Unfortunately most people resist this idea of preparing for love. We all like to think that what we learned about love growing up is at least adequate. How to be a loving person should not be something you have to learn over again. Think again. When cupid’s arrow will strike is beyond our prediction or control. Whether or not you are prepared for the experience when it occurs we can do something about. Think of it this way, if your love-life consciousness is developed when love finally arrives, you have a better chance of responding in a healthy and receptive way to it.
personal experience of love
The truth is, love is a scary prospect even when you are welcoming it into your life. Love tends to be therapeutically disruptive if you know what I mean. It tends to upset the false feeling of control and predictability a lot of people like to have in their lives. Love by its very nature is not a very cooperative experience. Learning to accept love on its own terms is a very important step in this process of changing your love-life. As far as the experience of love goes, it is important to understand and accept love’s more prominent characteristics. From my extensive observations over the years working with all kinds of disappointed lovers, I think the following list of items begins to describe love as an experience: creates vulnerability, requires spontaneity, you feel it when you let-go and risk, incompatible with control, can generate hurt which requires healing, and is best expressed by rational giving.
The experience of vulnerability is difficult for most people. In this day and age we try to stay as protected or defended as possible. Vulnerability is usually seen as a form of weakness or sickness not really having much value as a personal experience. In love, vulnerability means being open to another person. It is only in that state of mind or heart that a receptivity to love both incoming and outgoing can be fully experienced. Closely related to vulnerability is the experience of spontaneity. Reacting spontaneously from the heart without the excessive vigilance characteristic of our times promotes receptivity to the experience of love. Letting-go as an act of releasing what might be blocking love and taking risks is essential to prepare for and feel love. Giving up control, even if only temporarily, as the common effort to manipulate our emotional lives and the people in them also promotes greater receptivity to love.
As you may have already noticed there is a lot of overlap in the love-life meaning of these qualities. The true purpose of this exercise being to use language to create a state of mind from which you can learn to be more receptive to love when and if it occurs. It’s tragic when love comes and you are not psychologically ready or willing to receive it. In many instances previous experiences of hurt that are essentially unhealed can block your receptivity. We can’t expect never to be hurt in love. But what we can expect is to heal hurt when it happens especially if it happens without malicious intent. The innocent bumps and bruises of love are realistic. People don’t always do or say what we want or need them to. This is a fact, even more so in love.
The last item on my short list of love’s psychological characteristics is what I refer to as the experience of rational giving. By using the word rational in this way I also admit to the existence of irrational giving as an opposite. Let’s assume that irrational giving is giving unrealistically. We can also assume that irrational giving can keep a recipient from growing as a person. Contemporary authors talk a lot about irrational giving with terms such as codependency. For our purposes the idea involves giving to others what is not realistic and ultimately not good for him or her. Practicing rational giving in your dealings with people establishes a skill that prepares you psychologically for the experience of love. It is the act of putting time and effort into figuring out what somebody else really needs to be healthy even if it is not what the person wants.
The whole idea here is to prepare you for the often turbulent and largely unpredictable experience of love. With a consciousness of love’s psychological characteristics you might avoid the kinds of over-reactions or avoidances that foreclose precious love-life opportunities. Truth be told, more people run away from love simply because the vulnerability involved makes them feel uncomfortable. Or they do what one of my patients used to call “looking for love closed.” The right state of mind and heart can make a world of difference.
sense of yourself in love
Another simple observation about love is, the more you respect yourself the better your love-life. This is a great little formula with a lot of implications for a person’s love-life. Think about it this way, if you take good care of yourself, in effect like yourself enough to treat yourself well this amounts to a daily practice of self-love. When you love yourself, body, mind, and spirit, you are practicing the art of giving love, the fortunate recipient being yourself. This is a great way to practice rational giving especially during those periods of aloneness between love relationships. If you get skillful at giving yourself what you realistically need, it is only a short jump to practice rational giving with another. The principle is the same only the recipient of the love changes.
Respecting yourself has other obvious benefits like establishing a higher standard for the kind of treatment you will not tolerate from a lover. The more you respect yourself the easier it is to stop a lover from abusing you. You do not settle as much for less than you really want for yourself, or better yet, less than how you yourself will treat yourself. This kind of standard is very useful when keeping your love-life free of unhealthy people who are not themselves prepared for love no matter how much they say they are. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who take advantage of more vulnerable people unprotected by a good feeling of self-esteem. When you respect and love yourself you accept nothing less than real love from anyone else.
Along with self-respect, your sense of yourself in love is also made up of a real appreciation for the uniqueness of individual persons. This is an interpersonal skill that has even more importance in a love relationship. In a very real sense, lovers are unique and not replaceable. You can love someone else but you cannot replace the person you loved. Love is a very specific and particular emotion. When you love someone the love you feel in essence is very specialized. This is one of the reasons why love is such a special human emotion. True love is never substitutable. When a person has problems with commitment in a love relationship something is wrong with the inborn capacity to recognize another person at this level of relationship. When you are able to sense and feel another person’s uniqueness you realize how special individuals really are. To know a person like this is to freely love him or her without effort and without duplication.
Self-respect and the recognition of personal uniqueness are complimented by a lifelong refusal to live falsely. By this I mean no false selves, no alternate personalities, and no hidden characters. The idea is to be someone who practices integrity on a daily basis. Everybody gets one true persona. It’s very hard to love multiple selves. For starters who am I making love to? And to bring it to absolute absurdity, who is making love to me? Seriously, it is going to be hard to track a false self let alone trust one. This is probably where all the surprises come from. One fine day your partner turns into someone else. As if who he or she became was who he or she was all along only you did not know it. Integrity means you are the person you ‘say’ and ‘do’ you are. Simply put, love requires integrity to thrive and wilts on deception and falsity. The traditional belief about people who love falsely is that deep down inside they are afraid that their true self simply will not be acceptable. They believe that they are fundamentally unlovable, although they may have really never been free enough to truly know themselves and test it out.
friendship in love
Unfortunately a lot of people are not friends with their lovers. This may seem like a pretty odd statement until we look more deeply into its meaning. Friendship is a fundamental form of human relatedness. True intimate friendship always embodies the values of equality, honesty, and freedom. When a love relationship is also a true friendship it endures over time. Love is always enhanced by friendship. It is the mutuality of friendship that matures a love relationship. Otherwise you have a love relationship guided only by the intensity of passion minus the stability of friendship. Friendship is usually more difficult for people than passion. There is essentially less to learn in passion. The practice of friendship requires a greater amount of personal maturity and effort.
Equality in a love relationship means that both people are not only equal in their rights and privileges but also equally responsible for what goes on in their relationship. This latter responsibility is usually harder to accept. Most of us are not really use to thinking in terms of a 50/50 relationship in our love-lives. When something goes wrong we like to point the finger of blame and absolve ourselves from any responsibility. The truth is if you look deep enough its always 50/50. Equality in a love relationship is a requirement if you are looking for a relationship that will grow over time. When there is no equality you have dominance and control. In most instances when a love relationship is not equal the less equal person eventually changes by outgrowing the old arrangement or psychologically sacrificing himself or herself to stay in it.
Honesty in love essentially means speaking the truth even if it hurts the one you love. Anything less diminishes the growth in your love-life. For most people this is a bitter pill to swallow. It seems like it is a lot easier not to make waves. In the longer run, however, dishonesty either by commission (distorting the facts) or omission (leaving out the facts) works against love. Love thrives on openness and the risks involved in revealing oneself. It is much harder to love someone who is hidden and distorted by dishonesty. The first thing to go is trust and after that you get the feeling that you do not really know the person you are supposed to be in love with. Telling the truth may bring consequences you do not like but it is still the healthiest thing to do. If the truth is so strong that it costs you your love relationship than at least you get to keep your integrity and an opportunity to continue working on yourself for the next love relationship. Most people will not like what I just said. Regardless, once you develop a tolerance for the truth and the temporary discomfort that comes with telling it or hearing it your capacity to love and be loved increases substantially.
The last item in our preparation for love sequence involves the issue of freedom in love. Freedom like equality and honesty is one of those basic human values that encourage growth and the experience of love in human beings. Freedom in a committed love relationship, however, can be a tricky matter. When it comes to love most people try to control or at least predict where love is going and how it’s going to get there. I think this happens because of the vulnerability problem I mentioned earlier. People get anxious about love because of its tendency to upset their cherished feeling of control so they add more control as a way of lowering their anxiety. Sounds logical, right? But the consequences for our love-lives are tragic to say the least.
Simply put, control and love do not mix. Like oil and water, they are very different and each has its place and purpose. The problem comes in when people try to use control to deal with love-life difficulties. The two forms of control I will consider are: attempts to control another and attempts to control your self. The former is far more toxic for your love-life than the latter, even though too much self-control can be a problem as well. Control in a love relationship always breeds resentment. There is no getting around that. When you control someone it is only a matter of time before underlying resentment hits the surface in some form. Real love requires freedom to be felt, expressed, and grown. Controlling oneself is less of a problem since there are many instances where a measure of self-control helps establish and grow a feeling of love. Self-control becomes problematic when it exists as a defensive effort to control the feeling of vulnerability that is occurring. Ultimately, we cannot stop the spark of love from happening, but we can stop it from growing.
Love as an emotional experience, a sense of yourself in love, and your capacity to be a friend to a lover are three important areas of love-life learning that prepare a person psychologically for the experience of love. The objective is to soften the heart enough to increase a receptivity to love given and received. Being ready for love in one’s life just doesn’t mean having money in your pocket, your own place, and a closet full of new clothes. More importantly, being ready for love means being ready psychologically to give and receive love when and if it happens. This kind of love-life consciousness increases the chances that love as an emotional and interpersonal experience will take root, remain healthy, and endure over time.
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