Love-Life Workshops Blog

Workshops for Your Love-Life

The internet has certainly made the search for love more technically sophisticated. Dating websites are instilling the hope of a love connection whether promoting the availability of potential partners or guaranteeing compatibility. The problem is a growing number of people are experiencing the frustration of repeated disappointment despite the guarantees and assurances being made. Too often the hope of finding a genuine love connection does not survive the reality of actually meeting a potential partner online.

    

As a psychologist the complaints I hear the most are the time and effort it takes to sift through the sheer number of responders, the worry involved in possibly meeting a ‘crazy’ person on the internet, and complaints about the sexual intentions of men online. For many people frustration forces them to temporarily cancel their online dating memberships only to return when disappointment fades, hope returns, and loneliness compels efforts to find love again online.

    

The solution is not just to meet more people, compatible or not. A love-life gets better by being psychologically prepared for love when an opportunity arises and by learning more effective ways of finding and/or being in a love relationship. Unfortunately most people don’t like the idea of having to learn anything new about their love-lives. They simply want to remain hopeful about meeting the right person doing things the way they always have. 

    

What if love-life frustrations and disappointments could be reviewed by professionals online? Would this make it easier for people to work with their love-life issues? This option would be especially attractive to people already accustomed to using their computers to meet people, as well as those who are unable or unwilling to make their love-life problems known face to face with a professional helper. There are a large number of people who still find it intolerable to reveal and work on their love-life problems in a professional office even in this contemporary world of personal therapies and self-help groups. Whether its embarrassment, shame, or some other personal contingency that makes it difficult if not impossible to actually go to an office, the consequence is a large group of people in need of immediate help for their love-lives.

    

An effective online professional service for love-life problems would for starters have to be anonymous to circumvent the kind of defensiveness people usually feel revealing the details of their love-live experiences. Only the internet can provide the conditions necessary to support a truly anonymous professional service of this kind. Such a website would host anonymous learning forums with easily identified licensed professionals addressing a range of love-life problems from dating to marriage to divorce. The cost of such a service would have to be affordable to reach the widest possible audience. The website would also have to be a safe supportive place that encourages openness and allows members to identify with and learn from each other.

    

With these program requirements in mind, the Love-Life Workshops website is the first to provide anonymous psycho-educational love-life workshops conducted by licensed professionals. We offer the computing public an opportunity to join our online community and participate in love-life oriented chat-rooms, message boards, and low cost workshops, or by simply observing any scheduled workshop as a free benefit of membership. Participation is totally anonymous, convenient, and very affordable.

    

Workshops are small and conducted in chat-rooms on the Love-Life Workshops website. The focus is exclusively on love-life issues and each workshop explores personal experiences guided by a particular love-life theme. The emphasis is on getting people the personal information they need to better understand their love-life issues and what they can begin doing about them. One of the program’s strengths is its exclusive focus on personal love-life experiences. Workshop leaders never just lecture at participants. Instead they deal directly with personal love-life experiences in learning dialogues that take place in chat-room workshops with only a small number of participants.

    

Workshop leaders are all New York State licensed Ph.D. psychologists matched to their workshops on the basis of professional expertise and their own personal love-life experiences. Our workshop leaders are easily identified as professional psychologists at our website. The identities, expertise, and certifications of our professionals can be easily confirmed by their photos, credentials, and personal love-life experience available in detail at their own web page. We encourage our workshop leaders to be open about their own relevant love-life experiences as an aid in conducting their workshops. In fact, the combination of anonymous participants and easily identified professional leaders encourages people to trust being more consistently open and honest than usually found on the internet.

The Love-Life Workshops are always conducted in a highly personal manner. Because we are offering total anonymity to our participants they are free to be as honest and revealing as possible. Our psycho-educational approach to love-life problems consists of the delivery of personalized love-life information in the form of guidance and advice to anonymous participants. This personalized review of love-life experience in our workshops makes the free observation of workshops by auditing members very personal as well. For those individuals not yet sure about participating in a workshop themselves, this vicarious learning option provides a chance to check out a workshop and workshop leader before registering. The fact that each workshop focuses on a particular love-life theme guarantees an experience of personal relevance for anyone choosing to simply observe workshops.

    

Many people think of their love-lives in terms of what they are struggling to accomplish like finding a lover, making a commitment, leaving an unhealthy relationship, or just trying to live a healthy single lifestyle. Others characterize their love-life problems more specifically by a love-life experience such as divorce, marital separation, abuse in a love relationship, the experience of dating in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc. Our Love-Life Workshops are guided by these and other familiar love-life themes compatible with the usual ways people think of their love-life problems.

    

Once enrolled in a workshop our professional psychologists encourage participants to identify their love-life problems, consider more appropriate love-life solutions, learn something new about love, and think more broadly about their own love-lives. We encourage workshop participants to begin thinking about their own personal ‘love-life psychology’ as the underlying psychological pattern of thoughts, feelings, and actions that determine the success or failure of their love-life experiences.          

    

When our love-life psychologies are causing us unhappiness they are usually repetitive and formed from the disappointments with love that occurred in our lives sometimes as far back as childhood. The more hurtful our love-life disappointments were the more rigid our love-life patterns can become. We can get stuck repeating something over and over again in our love-lives because we are not yet conscious of the fact that it is happening and do not yet accept the fact that it has happened to us. Because of this lack of conscious acceptance we never let go of these disappointments and get past their influence in our love-lives. I like to think of the average adult love-life psychology as a mixture of unresolved childhood and adulthood needs for love depending on the nature and degree of love-life disappointment a person has had to deal with. The Love-Life Workshops were created to help people become more conscious of their love-life issues. Despite all the precautions about the internet these days, it is still a great place to promote consciousness.

What the World Needs Now Are Love-Life Lessons

Love is a natural capability we all come into the world with. Given the right conditions love is supposed to evolve into the experience of giving to others.When thwarted by the misfortunes of life, love can be transformed into something ugly and destructive. Unfortunately we still do not know how to take care of this most precious of human potentials. Favorable conditions for the development of love have never really been adequately implemented. It is so very easy for human beings to be trained instead with lessons drawn from experiences of pain and interpersonal violence. Perhaps we are made too anxious by the vulnerability and openness love requires. For many people defensiveness seems easier. Others take the path of offensiveness, bringing forth whatever hurt and unhappiness they themselves experienced and recreating it anew in the lives of other people. And of course there are some who have given up completely on love and instead seek power and control as more reliable allies in life. Where has all of this confusion left us? I say, in need of an education about our own personal love-life psychologies.

    

In the title of this essay I use the phrase ‘love-life lessons.’ What does it mean? By love-life lessons I mean an education that is ‘personalized,’ focused on what a particular person should learn about his or her particular love-life. For this topic, the specificity of individual love-life experiences is warranted. Otherwise it might be a little to general. For the purposes of this essay, however, I will supply the concepts and you the reader will have to do the personal application. There is not much in what I am about to tell you that you will not be able to identify with. Love is a very universal experience we can all identify with whether happily or disappointed. Consider these ideas as a crash course in a kind of love-life guidance, an attempt to move aside what you customarily believe about your love-life while introducing you to something new to think about. The old ways have already been tried and only bring you repeated disappointment and frustration. I think we can all agree on that. Why not think things through in new ways you may not have considered. The worse that can happen is a small waste of your time which you can shrug off pretty easily while quickly returning to your old love-life ways. No strain.

    

On the other hand, if you keep on reading you just might be influenced by something different, a new idea or two about your love-life. Remember little changes can often have big consequences. For starters let’s understand that every human being has his or her very own ‘love-life psychology.’ The outlines might be similar to someone else’s but in the particulars each and every one of us has a unique love-life experience. I call it a love-life psychology because I am asking you to focus on the inside of your love-life. Most people try to change their love-lives by changing something on the outside of their life style. Different clothes, different manners, different places, and perhaps different people, but the bottom line is they have not changed the common denominator, themselves. The first big idea I would like you to consider is that no change can take place in a your love-life unless and until you change your own personal love-life psychology. So don’t go out any buy any new clothes just yet. Our task is to change your thoughts, feelings, and behavior about love from the inside out.

    

OK now the next question that should come up in your mind is what does my love-life psychology consist of? Good, the short answer is needs, expectations, self-esteem, and defenses. Once a person becomes curious and interested in the composition of his or her love-life psychology 50% of the battle, so to speak, has been won. Put it this way, if you don’t know about something in yourself the chances are very good that it is on automatic. I other words, it functions without choice, your choice. This is precisely why personal freedom is so related to human consciousness. If you are conscious of yourself you have choice and you are free. If you are not conscious of what you believe, feel, and do you are imprisoned by these things beyond your own ability to modify them as needed during the course of your life. So here’s another very important idea about your love-life, everyone’s love-life psychology needs an update from time to time. Most people never consider the fact that their love-life thoughts, feelings, and behavior will need a tune-up as life changes and time evolves love-life experiences. Unfortunately, there are some people who are still living with a love-life psychology that was basically developed in childhood or adolescence and has remained at that level without change. This can be quite painful and disappointing to say the least.

    

The first thing to learn about your love-life psychology has to do with your love-life needs. Are they realistic or not? Do you still have some left over dependency from your childhood or adolescence influencing the way you think, feel, or act in love-life situations? Most of us have to outgrow childish thoughts, feelings, and behavior at various points during adulthood. If you accept this fact of human nature it’s easier. If you don’t then you will deny too much to be able to work with your self in this area. The objective is to develop a bit more independence in your love-life. By that I don’t me isolation and distance from others. I mean being able to love someone and be yourself at the same time. Another way to say this is to change into someone who is more interested in giving than getting.

    

There can come a time in your life where you realize the importance of giving as a general orientation toward others. Of course I don’t mean irrational giving, or giving without reason. That is, giving without thinking about the need of the person you are giving to and what it is he or she really needs, not necessarily what you wanted to give him or her. The incentive to make this move from getting to giving in adulthood is based on the recognition that there are more personal rewards from giving that getting. The chances of meeting our disappointed childhood and adolescent needs for love in adulthood are pretty slim. What is more likely to happen is the quest to get more in your adult love-life will only bring you additional disappointments. On the other hand, selfless giving fills a person with love and naturally generates health and happiness. There is a far greater chance of feeling satisfied trying to figure out how to give than how to get more. The later can only be grieved and outgrown as unrealistic to make room for something possible like adult forms of intimacy and love.

    

If the orientation in your love-life is to get as much as possible from a lover you are bound to be disappointed sooner or later. With this objective in mind, your expectations toward potential lovers will be largely unrealistic. You will probably try to get an adult lover to make up for past love related disappointments and deprivations. You will probably use a lot of subtle or not so subtle forms of control and manipulation to make that happen. Most adult partners will resist and rebel against your efforts to extract what you think you need from them. The end result will be more hurt and more disappointment for everyone involved. If this is you, the only real option you have is to realize this is an unhealthy pattern in your life and stop trying to make other people love you. Next you begin putting your energy into healing the disappointments that drive you to change other people in the first place. I know this is quite a change in the direction of your love-life. Think about it this way, the alternative is to be chronically unhappy for the rest of your life. Simply put, you don’t deserve that when all you are looking for is love.

    

I am just trying to loosen the grip these expectations have on your love-life experiences because they are making you unhappy. To unlearn the hope of controlling or forcing people to change or give us what we did not get is very difficult because there are emotions of hurt and unhappiness driving it. There may even be a belief or two in the way like the hope that someone’s love could complete you as a person, fill in the gaps so to speak. In the long run, learning how to heal your emotional hurts inside becomes more realistic and vastly more beneficial for your love-life. If you realize that no one can make up for what was lost in your childhood or adolescence, you will feel sad and unhappy, but eventually you’ll start accepting your own personal reality. Just because the person(s) who were supposed to love you earlier in your life when you couldn’t take care of yourself failed to do so properly does not mean you are deficient or lacking in some way. I know it is easy to feel that way but realistically you still have a lot more going for you in the form of natural resources than you realize. We all have to learn how to get in touch with those internal resources to readjust our expectations of love and heal our love-life disappointments.

    

Like I said, when the people who were supposed to love you did not do a very good job because of their own personal love-life limitations, it is common to apply a little childhood or adolescent logic and come to the conclusion that there is fundamentally something unlovable about yourself. This is when the self-esteem in your love-life gets corrupted. It is very common for children to come to such a conclusion based on the idea that there seems to be no better person to blame for the problem. It is also very common to continue feeling this way straight into adulthood. Figure it this way, if as an adult you never get around to reviewing your own love-life psychology the beliefs you took with you from childhood will pretty much remain in effect unchanged for good or for bad. Of course this problem ties nicely into the unrealistic expectations we discussed earlier. If you do not feel good about yourself in your love-life one false option is to try to get other people to make you feel better. That never works well or at least consistently and always seems to guarantee some continual measure of hurt and disappointment.

    

The real cure for love-life self-esteem problems is to root out the underlying beliefs that are supporting these limited conclusions about your self. After that it is all about practicing self-care and eventually self-love. I say practice because these things don’t change easily due to the fact that we have already been practicing the negative version for some time. This is precisely how bad psychological habits form. BY the way, low love-life self-esteem is easily determined by the kind of company you keep in your love-life as well as the ways in which you treat yourself. Treating yourself bad only brings unhealthy people into your love-life. If you can stop being so convinced that that is what you really deserve, the opportunity for something better has a chance to emerge. Better self-care is usually what starts to happen when love-life self-esteem is on the mend. This includes taking better care of your body and mind. You can even throw the spirit into the equation if you like. Regardless, the idea is to start taking care of your self as if you yourself are now the most important project you want to take to completion. The goal is good and consistent self-care. Nothing bad is allowed to happen to you. You are now the self appointed guardian of your self. It won’t be long before you start to feel the benefits of this dedication. You might even take better care of your self than the people who were supposed to take care of you earlier in life, body, mind and soul. If that is the case then you’ll have to get used to learning as you go.

    

From here you can begin to feel the possibility of love coming back or for the first time into your consciousness of and treatment of your self. Pardon the example, but it could begin to feel like falling in love with a pet you take very good care of and have warmed up to over time. The extent to which your very own pet depends upon you and only you to live is now visible to you. You have sworn to protect it no matter what, lucky pet. From here it is only a short step away from fully realizing the extent of your own personal value. Let’s consider the fact that you are a unique individual, one of a kind, never to be replicated again in all of your splendorous particularity. Don’t forget uniqueness is fundamentally the definition of what is precious in this world. So once you realize how precious you truly are in your uniqueness the importance of taking care of your self in this life is undeniable.

    

When you start to feel that subtle feeling of love for your self your love-life gets naturally and spontaneously better. A gift for all the anxiety and unhappiness you endured making this change in yourself. Remember the fundamental love-life lesson, if you want to change your love-life change your self, in this case, your love-life psychology. When you love your self and take got care of your self you naturally respect your self and never allow any one else to abuse or mistreat you in any way, period. No excuses, no rationalizations, it is a fact of life that brings more loving and caring people into your personal love-life. After a love-life change of some kind, like when a love relationship breaks up, it is always a good time to learn something new about your love-life. Unfortunately, some people jump right into a new love relationship without ever giving themselves an opportunity to learn something from the last one. The problem is hurt. Most people don’t life the hurt that comes from love-life losses and disappointments so they try to run away from them in any way possible. And there are a million and one ways to run away. The problem is what you run away from always haunts you in one form or another.

    

This difficulty most people have with love-life hurt seems to necessitate the use of love-life psychological defenses, or so it seems. Psychological defenses are a little like physical defenses, the major difference being they operate in the mind. When I physically defend against something I put up a block against it. When I psychologically defend against something I am also putting up a block against something I perceive as emotionally hurtful or damaging to me realistically or not. You see, it is entirely possible to believe that something could be hurtful to you, which in reality is really good for you and vice versa. So there is always a little judgment involved. Nevertheless, the point is we all use psychological defenses to minimize the impact of our experiences in life, especially our love-life experiences. What happens if you choose not to defend yourself or you can’t for some reason? You could feel vulnerable to an attack of some kind. You might even feel fear or at least anxiety, as if something is going to happen to you that you are unprepared to handle. The love-life lesson here is to develop a courageous tolerance for this feeling of vulnerability until you can figure out whether or not your fears are rational. If they are not you are free to be intimate in a situation where you would be ordinarily defensive and avoidant. Otherwise you can always go back to your usual defensiveness and remembering Shakespeare feel good about the fact that you took a noble risk in your love-life no matter what the outcome.

    

The simple truth is that anything you do, feel, or think can function as a psychological defense. In your love-life once you become aware of this fact a greater consciousness evolves for the what, when, where, and how of your psychological defenses you have to protect against the hurt feelings that can happen in love. Tolerating an awareness of this is 50% of the solution. Making different choices and practicing alternatives are the remaining percentage of change. The alternative to psychological defensiveness in your love-life is being able to see someone for who he or she is and tolerating the feelings that awareness creates. Let’s face it, the probability of some hurt in one form or another is pretty good in a love relationship. By the simple fact that you are dealing with two people disagreement is guaranteed. To avoid disagreement in a love relationship requires some form of deception, dishonesty or control. It is more useful to expect disagreement and difference, and see it as an opportunity for real intimacy. By real intimacy I mean two people who are real enough with each other at least from time to time and tolerate temporary unhappiness in order to be honest and direct.

    

To appreciate a relationship where differences are visible, accepted, and appreciated you have to believe in your own ability to heal hurts when they do occur. If you don’t believe in your natural ability to heal love-life hurts love can become a very scary option indeed. Psychological defenses become more important than risk and love is harder to find and receive as a consequence. If you believe in your natural ability to heal the expectable instability of love it becomes tolerable and even more enjoyable in time. Yes love can hurt, otherwise it wouldn’t be love, that crazy emotion we all dream about and fret over. Being cognizant of your love-life psychology means taking the time to review your love-life needs, expectations, self-esteem, and defensiveness for the purpose of getting better at giving and receiving the love that is possible in your love-life.                         

Sustaining Your Love-Relationship

So cupid’s arrow has struck and the feeling of love is being felt. Chances are this feeling of love is intruding a bit into life the way it was being lived prior to its appearance. You may even have generated a few good rationalizations for ignoring or at least arguing against this new emotional event. Ultimately if the coast is clear and both parties are available there is little in the way of its impact. Let’s assume both people are emotionally prepared for love. What comes next? Our lovers are now faced with the option of putting some effort into sustaining the feeling. Once you have let the loved person know what you feel in words and/or actions the next step involves keeping the feeling alive. If your intentions are to have a love-life endure over time then you will need to know how to sustain the feeling of love for as long as possible perhaps for life. Sustaining love requires two essential practices in your love relationship, the practice of intimate verbal communication, and the practice of intimate mutual independence.

verbal communication in love

Communication has a long history in the advice columns concerning love-life matters. Most experts advise lovers to communicate to each other. Talking helps lovers resolve whatever differences and disagreements you may have. Standard stuff right? Let’s take this a step further and say that in order to sustain your love lovers need to talk about specific things to each other. I have two topics in mind that I think are particularly important when it comes to sustaining love in a love relationship. The first is the emotional effects of your respective families of origin, and the second is your mutual defensiveness.

I take very seriously the notion that a committed love relationship is an ideal place for both individuals to grow and mature. So seriously that I believe this is one of the important advantages to being in love. If it was just for pleasure or procreation there would be a lot less at stake. A committed love relationship offers lovers a chance to mature as a result of their mutual participation. This is the way it is supposed to be when it works right. This is all the more reason to appreciate the importance of a stable love relationship.

My old analyst used to say that in this culture women socialize men in a love relationship. What he meant was that a woman can show her man how to feel and express his feelings in ways that mature him as a person and a lover. Men in this culture get much less practice communicating emotions growing up. Women are far more advanced in this area at comparably younger ages. Perhaps men have something to teach women as well. Some men know what real independence is and encourage their partners to separate and individuate themselves in the course of a love relationship. In this culture women tend to experiment with greater emotional independence in middle-age, encouraged or not.

Talk is very important in a love relationship, but some talk is even more important than others. Talking about your family of origin to your partner is very important. Many of the problems that show up in a love relationship originate from experiences that took place in the family of origin. This is essentially the first place we learn about love. Whether or not what we learned is useful for our adult love-lives now is an open question. If the answer is yes sit back and enjoy the ride. Those earlier experiences of love will guide your current love-life. If the answer is no, the problem of repeating the past can only be corrected through consciousness and practice. In this case, love-life consciousness is enhanced by the practice of communication. The more you talk and reflect with the person who shares your love-life experiences, the more consciousness you develop for the topics involved.

The focus is the family of origin. I have never met a couple that did not project their families of origin in some way or another into their love relationship. The variations are too numerous to mention and are usually enacted with very little consciousness. Like when you expect your wife to love you like your mother did or didn’t. Or when you expect your husband to make up for the love your father couldn’t provide, to cite a couple of the more common examples. The hard part is these experiences are usually outside of consciousness. That means they are just below the level of consciousness you might have for what goes on in your everyday life. As such you don’t see them operating in your love-life importing thoughts, feelings, and actions that are out of date and not very constructive. You really don’t need unconscious out of date reactions in control of your love-life.

Sharing family of origin experiences with a lover creates healthy mutuality as things get reviewed by both of you for the good of the relationship. This is love-life communication at its best. Another equally important area for mutual exploration and review are the ways in which both of you are defensive with each other. This particular topic can be as difficult to talk about as the influence of our families of origin or more so in some instances. Most people don’t like to admit their efforts to control another person’s effects on them. We are all taught in one way or another not to be vulnerable. But remember, no vulnerability no love.

Defensiveness comes in all shapes and sizes. Thoughts, feelings, or actions can all be used to control our emotional lives especially our love-lives. Anything that blunts or numbs a person’s experiences can be commissioned for defensive purposes. Defensive behavior is directly responsible for more of the damage that occurs in a relationship than anything else. And it’s not just your defensiveness. No it’s also your tendency to defend your defensiveness. Most people fight tooth and nail against any effort to critique the way they defensively relate in love. It’s easily perceived as an attack. For example, I am not supposed to tell you that whenever we argue you make it harder for me to speak by yelling at me. The yelling is your way of cutting back on what might hurt you in our argument. But you believe you are not supposed to hear that let alone talk about it to a lover.

The only real hope we have against the negative effects of defensiveness is to humble ourselves and admit the need to protect ourselves from hurt. This usually changes the conversation, and if it doesn’t there is a deeper problem. Look at it this way, repairing a love relationship is very critical stuff. The loss of a lover can be very painful to say the least. Extreme measures may be needed to recover or rejuvenate what is dying. When it is time to talk, remember as far as love is concerned, vulnerability is your only hope to be listened to and understood. It is sometimes more important to talk about how you talk to each other or not talk to each other than what needs talking about.

    

independence in love

It appears counterintuitive to say that independence keeps a love relationship healthy and growing. I know people who would have you believe that it is dependency that keeps a love relationship together. Dependency in adulthood is just another way of saying that childhood needs for affection and love and their disappointment are alive and well and influencing an adult love-life. More specifically, healthy independence in love amounts to differentiating your love-life from everyone else’s, making the conscious choice to love somebody, and accepting your partner for who he or she is.

When you differentiate your love-life from everyone else’s love-life you are practicing your love-life independence. What I mean is you are becoming conscious of your dependency on other people’s love-lives so that eventually you can move on to having your own. A good example of this is when a child grows up and recreates his or her parents’ marriage. Whether good or bad, someone else’s love relationship unconsciously becomes the model or reference for your own. The obvious disadvantage to this is that you do not get a chance to have and enjoy your own love-life in a creative sense. Everyone should have a chance to create their very own love-life guided only by their individual wishes and desires. Once this tendency to depend on others in this way becomes conscious it is easier to change it in favor of your undeclared individuality.

The conscious choice to love a particular person is another example of independence in love. You might remind me that love is not a choice and clearly beyond our ability to control. Love as an emotion is certainly not under our control, but the choice to love is. What I mean is, once the feeling of love exists you have choices as to how to relate to that feeling. You can disregard it, fight with it, or encourage and strengthen it. Choosing to love someone when you are in love is a very fulfilling and gratifying commitment. The act of choosing establishes your individuality in your love-life. Choosing to love a particular person is a statement that you accept the feelings you are having and that you have committed yourself to them. To choose and stick with that choice is the foundation of a commitment to love.

Finally, the last item on our sustaining love through independence list is the act of accepting a particular partner. When I talk about acceptance I am assuming that whomever you are trying to accept is naturally treating you well. I am in no way suggesting you accept abusive treatment of any kind. If your partner loves you but you have not accepted who he or she is, this is our problem. When you accept someone in love you are sending that person the message that he or she is OK the way he or she is. No additions or subtractions are required. This is not only, generally speaking, an act of love but it is also, more importantly an act of independence. By that I mean you are giving up the need for your partner to conform to whatever image you have of the perfect partner. This is a big move in a love relationship. I think independence through acceptance is what marital vows are trying to get at when they include the idea of commitment no matter what. The no matter what part is important. Unfortunately a lot of people are hooked on their fantasies about love and spend a lot of time and personal resources looking for the impossible and becoming very disappointed when they don’t get it. Real people never measure up to fantasy. Fantasy wins hands down. But fantasy ultimately loses because it can’t love back. Only real people love back. Practicing the gift of love for a real person in your life, while you forgive the minuses and enjoy the pluses, is really what a love-life is all about.

Independence is there because you are giving up the fantasy for the reality of a real person in your life.

Increasing Your Psychological Receptivity to Love

The best way to apply the ideas in this article is to practice those that are lacking in your life. Most of you are already prepared for love in some of the ways I will mention. The more ways you are prepared for love, the greater the chances of being receptive to love and being able to sustain love when and if it arrives. To begin preparing for love in adulthood we must first accept that much of what we do in our love-lives is learned. To our advantage, if something is learned it can be unlearned and something new relearned. Many people learn that love is not tolerable or even comfortable as a feeling. They learn to substitute control for the state of mind required to be in love. Now as an adult it is necessary to unlearn these negative love-life lessons and relearn something more compatible with the development of love in our lives. To be prepared for love in adulthood means learning and practicing a ‘love-life psychology’ that is receptive to a healthy love relationship. Your love-life psychology is your psychological pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting when looking for, committing to, and being in love.

    

Psychological Receptivity to Love

A healthy and prepared love-life psychology includes an understanding of the feeling of love as a life experience that contains the following characteristics: vulnerability, spontaneity, forgiveness, faith in your capacity to heal, diminished control, and a rational desire to give to others. My list may not be compatible with common views on what is required to manage a love-life. For example, most people believe that there should be far more strategy or control and far less of the vulnerable feelings when dealing with love. Taking charge and being in control are the proscriptions most commonly given to lovers these days. My concern is that this attitude and the actions it inspires are not preparing people for love as a very specific emotional experience.

    

One of the hallmarks of love as a human experience is the extent to which a person can feel vulnerable. Of course vulnerable to what is always the next question. A tolerance for the possibility of hurt feelings is certainly a prerequisite for lovers. Even if you never get to value being vulnerable, when you begin to feel like you need someone the feeling of vulnerability is inevitable. Add this to the potential for disagreement between lovers and you have a pretty sensitive set of feelings. Nevertheless, vulnerability is an experience that we certainly knew how to have when we were young. Closely related to the experience of love-life vulnerability are other important love-life experiences such as openness, tenderness, sensitivity, and empathy for others.

    

Allowing ourselves to be spontaneous also helps create receptivity to love. Spontaneity is freedom of thought, feeling, and action. Spontaneity in love is the freedom to be affected by the emotion of love. This is probably what most people mean when they say that love can make you ‘crazy.’ In this case craziness is spontaneity at odds with conventional behavior. In love there is less concern with how other people perceive us. In love a person allows herself to respond to desire more directly with considerably less inhibition. Personality is not always hospitable to love as a motivation. There is a considerable amount of conformity and control in appropriate social conduct. Love seeks its guidance from the inside out of our experience, from our own whims, not usually in line with convention. To be prepared for love is to be comfortable, or at least relatively so, with spontaneity. Put it this way, if you practice setting yourself free from whatever constraints or inhibitions you in the meantime, you are emotionally preparing yourself for love later on.

    

Knowing when to let go of something no longer useful or healthy has its advantages in love. Letting-go as a love-life skill is often described as a capacity to forgive or on a practical level to separate from a relationship that has expired. When a person lets go he is moving on from an attachment to something be it an idea, a hurt, or the physical relationship itself. In the latter case, too many people settle for an unloving relationship because letting go creates episodes of aloneness. For people who are unfamiliar with the joys of keeping one’s own company, aloneness is experienced as loneliness and unhappiness. You practice letting-go by learning to re-experience aloneness as being with yourself. When you finally realize that you are always in your own company, loneliness is recognized as the illusion it really is.

    

Related to letting go as a love-life skill is the faith a person should have in her capacity to heal. More specifically, a faith in a capacity to heal love-life hurt. It would be naïve to expect that anyone could be in love and not get emotionally hurt from time to time. Since there are always two people in a love relationship differences are inevitable. Differences mean disagreements, incompatible viewpoints, and differing personal feelings. Knowing that you can heal a love bruise in a relationship worth keeping is very important. Without this type of faith people usually don’t take the risks involved in love. They try instead to feel safe by mixing love with control.

    

The antithesis of love is not hate but control. In genuine hate there are always elements of personal attachment and passion. In other words, when you hate somebody you have been hurt by them because there were love expectations there, realized or not. No other emotion has the power and intensity to fuel the passionate feeling of hate. Control is the true nemesis of love. When a person is afraid of love she controls her love-life. This means controlling the impact of personal feelings and the object of love if that is at all possible. When a person practices diminishing control in personal relationships he is psychologically preparing for a better love-life. On a practical level this means not controlling feelings and expressions of love when they arise or the person you are trying to love in any way. Of course there are always good and rational reasons to desist and stay with what is proper, less visible, or safe. But for love’s sake, you have to learn how to take love-life chances and tolerate the risks involved when you diminish control in your love-life.

    

Let’s not forget the experience of giving. First of all, if you are in a love relationship to get love you have two strikes against you. Now why on earth would I make such an unpopular statement? Because the best love has to offer comes when love is given not when it is sought after. Many people are looking for love because they secretly crave the belated fulfillment of earlier love-life disappointments. The problem is new love can never make up for past love-life disappointment despite the hope many lovers feel. Old love-life disappointments require a grief experience. They require a recognition and tolerance for the fact that something has been lost. When we lose something of value that is irreplaceable the healthy way of coping with this misfortune is to experience the hurt and sadness, grieve the loss, and eventually move on to something else. Nothing is so precious as to rival the value of an individual person. In love-life matters, if you don’t get the love you feel you need there are always personal resources inside of you to fill-in the gap. Fortunately for many of us, this is something that is often realized in middle-age. I say better late than never.

    

The other thing about giving worth mentioning is the fact that what is given may not be what is really needed by a recipient. Sometimes what we give makes the recipient ill or weak. Like when money is given to an addict with the intention of support but only strengthens the addiction through co-dependency. That is precisely why I refer to rational giving. To give rationally is to give with reason, to think about the true need of the recipient and the effects of what you are giving. Sometimes what is needed is commonly associated with not giving as when you say ‘no’ to something requested you know will promote illness. A ‘no’ can be as loving as a ‘yes’ in many instances. What is given should promote the self-sufficiency of the recipient. Of course in some instances the recipient may be you. In fact, practice giving rationally to yourself would become the true source of giving to others. You can think of giving to yourself as a form of self-care, where preparing for love includes learning how to take care of yourself. Said in another way, your capacity to rationally love another is always commensurate with the degree to which you take rational care of yourself.

    

Most people still believe in the reality of loneliness. This is nothing more than an incomplete understanding and practice in the area of personal self-care. Once you become practiced at self-care you realize that you can never be alone. The aspect of your consciousness that can see yourself is never really shut off in conscious life. In other words, you are literally always in your own company. Whether or not we become fully conscious of this is the issue. When you know it and accept it you can cultivate it. You can develop your capacity to oversee your own activities in life. Like having a benevolent supervisor looking after us. The deeper you go into this realization the more you see that the truer self is not what you are watching but the observing aspect of yourself. Loneliness can only exist in situations where we negate the responsibility to take care of ourselves. Once this life-long responsibility is accepted you are free. That of course includes freedom to love yourself and anyone else you choose.   

    

This concludes our preparation for love as an emotional experience. We can now move onto a preparation for love that involves broadly speaking improvements in self-esteem. Love-life self-esteem is made up of self-respect, a realization of individual uniqueness, and a dedication to being your true self. To be respectful of oneself requires the self-care I mentioned earlier plus a willingness to protect and eventually love oneself. Care, protection, and love toward one’s own individual self constitute a healthy self-respect. When self-care is healthy you look after yourself as a benevolent and compassionate parent would a small child. The responsibility of doing this becomes a full-time job. Even though other people may be helpful and supportive when needed, the job of self-care can never really be fully taken over by anyone else. The existence of this responsibility signals a level of emotional maturity and preparedness for love.

    

Self-protection is a common topic of discussion these days. The media usually represents self-protection as a physical requirement portrayed by people who when mistreated rise up to exercise justice and retribution. The cinema for example entertains with stories of victims getting back at the bad guy. This of course is for the rest of us an inducement to keep the faith alive, that the good guys always triumph, and we should trust in that elusive feeling of personal safety we hear so much about. In everyday life self-protection can exist in the form of doing what is right in situations of interpersonal abuse or mistreatment, in short, standing up against people who would mistreat you. Unfortunately for some this is an arduous task they do not feel adequately prepared for. The mistreated often do not know where to simply draw the line that lets people in their lives know where the limits are. When this is not done or done incorrectly there is always somebody willing to exploit this inadequacy. Self-esteem is feeling good enough about yourself to not let anyone mistreat you. When you know how to do this and trust it, your self-esteem is prepared for love.

    

Other aspects of love-life self-esteem involve recognizing personal uniqueness and the practice of being oneself. The recognition of personal uniqueness is a love-life skill worth developing in order to appreciate and grow depth in your love relationship. Realizing that the person you are loving exists no where else in the world lends a feeling of uniqueness to a relationship. If we could place a value on human life that value would be determined by the uniqueness of your individuality. When something is unique its value naturally increases. It can never be replaced once lost. The preciousness of love exists as a recognition that who you are loving exists no where else in the world and will never exist again. The bitter sweetness of this understanding can increase the appreciation of love if the inherent sadness of potential loss can be tolerated. To prepare for love in this way you remind yourself of the uniqueness of everyone you know as a daily practice.

    

Closely related to the recognition of uniqueness is the practice of being oneself. Let’s agree that there is only one of you despite what some people claim is the multiplicity of a single human being. When you divide people up like that with multiple personalities or selves all with a bona fide claim on the psyche you are talking about mental illness or are espousing a fragmented model of human nature. Human beings have a single individuality present at the time of inception and throughout a lifetime. A person can alter this reality on a more superficial level through the dubious skill of misrepresentation. They can try being someone else. They can even create false selves and try pawning them off as the real thing. This is entirely possible but not without considerable emotional expense. More specifically, the cost is our ability to love and be loved. If you are not being yourself, you are not visible enough to give and receive love. What do I mean by visibility?

    

When you are being yourself, your true self, you feel centered and your integrity is intact. You also have a stronger sense of who you are. Much of this experience is natural and does not require effort. Falseness requires effort and lots of it. You are sacrificing what comes naturally for something man-made, so to speak. Love is certainly one of those naturally occurring experiences. You don’t make love happen and you cannot control it. You can only lie to yourself and others about it. As a false self you are nowhere near the inside source of your love. For that reason it does not emerge and you cannot give it to another. As a false self you are nowhere near the source of another person’s love. For that reason you cannot receive it when and if it is given. To prepare for love, you must practice being yourself in your life and relationships. In most instances, only you will know whether you are true or false. In some instances, you can use the clues given to you by the reactions of others in your life. Remember, being your self in life and love has risks. However with a little faith in your ability to endure it, you can begin to enjoy the benefits which greatly outweigh the resolvable hurts involved in being yourself.

    

So far we have discussed preparing for the experience of love and the individuality you must sustain while in love. The final preparation involves your interpersonal expectations of a love relationship. What do you expect from the people you love? I will make a case that the only expectation that nurtures naturally occurring love is friendship. As a form of human relationship, friendship is the most compatible with love. My critics might say everybody knows romance is the most compatible interpersonal expectation when love occurs. My counter is to point out that romance is not a relationship. Romance is whatever method lovers have at their disposal to secure the person being loved. I get you for myself by wooing you through romance. At the beginning of a love relationship romance is particularly pronounced as it should be. If we are talking about a love relationship that endures over time we must talk about friendship.

     

What are the qualities in friendship that promote the welfare and development of love? They are equality, freedom, and honesty. True friendship evolves a relationship that is equal, free, and honest. Friendship promotes depth and endurance in a love relationship. Unfortunately, many love relationships are not founded on friendship. Lovers commonly reserve romantics for each other and friendship for other people. In many instances, friendship is reserved for people who they are not sleeping with. Friendship may wane as sexual intimacy moves in. In certain cases, friendship wanes between lovers because of marriage. Two people who enjoyed a sexually gratifying relationship founded on friendship now evolve into a more distant and circumscribed relationship because they exchanged marital vows and have to live the way they were taught in their families of origin.

    

To prepare for a meaningful and satisfying love relationship, begin practicing true friendship in your relationships with people. Let’s start with equality. What does it mean to be ‘equal’ in friendship with someone? It means you have some humility and you assume the responsibility that is realistically your own. Equality in a love relationship means that you are willing to accept 50% of the responsibility for what goes on in the relationship with your partner. Even if it looks like you or your partner deserves blame, the reality is a shared creation of the experience with that person. This does take some humility because it is tempting to play the blame game and point fingers. Your capacity to solve problems as they arise in a love relationship will depend upon your willingness to humbly accept your rightful 50% without defensiveness. If this is not possible your ability to learn and grow in a love relationship will be stalled by excuses and arguments. Practice the democracy of true friendship in your relationships as a preparation for love.

    

What about freedom? Love grows and stays healthy in a relationship that is free. Let’s assume that the antithesis of freedom in love is interpersonal control. When you control your partner you are stifling the love that is possible in your relationship. Why is love so compatible with freedom? Where there is freedom there is no resistance against external force. The energy that would be invested in defense is now allotted to expressing what is inside of you. In a free relationship you are free to express what you think and feel. Free to be yourself spontaneously without fear. When you love someone but are insecure about yourself you may try to control your partner thinking control will solve your security problem. Sorry, control only creates more problems because of resistance and inevitable resentment. The only hope you have is to give everyone their freedom (including yourself) and see what happens. If love is there it comes to you and comes out of you, no force of any kind is needed.. If there is no love, you get a chance to work on your insecurity while you prepare for your next chance at love. To help prepare for love, set everyone free in your life including yourself.

    

The final form of preparation for love is the introduction of honesty into our love-lives. Honesty means you have made a commitment to telling the truth of your experience no matter what. The no matter what part is the most important part. When a person commits to telling the truth she risks upsetting the recipient(s) of the information. The upset that can occur has a dual purpose. It’s there to express the discomfort or pain of the listener when hearing the truth, and is meant to communicate a threat that a similar response will reoccur if the truth is spoken again. Now if the upset of your recipient is given the right amount of power (by you) it will succeed in dissuading you away from telling the truth again to that person. If not, you are on your way to an honest and love filled life.

    

Why is love so compatible with honesty? When you are honest you inspire trust in your relationships with people. The truth is a rock, you can build on it. It’s reliable and real. There is no betrayal and deception involved. People say what they mean and mean what they say. Love grows in a climate of honesty and truth. We are living in the age of strategy and manipulation. Interpersonal control appears far more interesting to people than the vulnerabilities of love. A big part of this strategic lifestyle is dedicated to getting over, known formally as lying. Lying takes two forms, omission and commission. When a person lies by omission he is intentionally leaving out necessary information. When lies occur by commission there is an intentional distortion of the information given. Either way the truth is obscured and not available by design. Dishonesty always diminishes love. 

    

Preparing for love by committing oneself to honesty is no easy task when you have been practicing deception and manipulation. Especially in love where the emotional stakes are high. A full commitment is required since you really can’t be honest selectively. Consider the prospect of a partial pregnancy for example. Certain things in life have to be a full commitment or they are bogus attempts to get over again. People who use so called honesty to manipulate others are a good example of this limited functioning. As I indicated earlier the trouble is tolerating the reactions of others. In a world where there is far more personal presentation than honest integrity, the judgment of others would have to be devalued. A commitment to the truth becomes more important than any one individual’s discomfort or dislike. Truth is so integral to so many human experiences like love, health, and personal fulfillment that the choice to commit to it should be unquestionable. If love is your objective, honesty goes a long way as a preparation. The openness alone will draw sincere people to you. An honest relationship has far more energy and life than the deadened consequences of hiding yourself in a relationship. For a life of love you have to have love of life, so that is why they call it a love-life. Be prepared for love. Tell yourself and you lover the truth no matter what.

Preparing for a Better Love-Life

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.

Get More Out of Your Online Dating Experience

Many online dating services promise a volume of possible love prospects. What they want you to believe is that the more single people you are exposed to the greater your chances of finding someone to love. The problem they overlook is that many disappointed lovers are unconsciously guaranteeing their own love-life disappointments by making the same limited love-life choices over and over again. Volume by itself cannot guarantee a love-life connection especially when you are still unaware of your love-life patterns. You can increase your chances of a love connection by becoming aware of the ways you jeopardize your love-life with self-defeating thoughts, feelings, and actions while looking for, committing to, or leaving an expired love relationship.

    

Other dating services offer estimates of compatibility to people looking for love. Usually in the form of survey results that identify compatible people with a measure of interests and other personal indicators. The assumption is that their measures of compatibility will increase the likelihood of a love connection more significantly than chance. Whether assessments of compatibility improve the possibility of falling in love is a matter of statistical analysis. If anything, the experience itself of completing a detailed compatibility survey nurtures the hope of finding a compatible lover. My concern, however, is that the multiplication of prospects and forecasts of compatibility only fan the hope of a love connection without becoming conscious of the personal complications and frustrations involved.

    

Many people using online dating services are in need of information that will psychologically prepare them for the love they seek and highlight more effective ways of being in love. It is now possible to get personalized love-life information anonymously from professionals online http://www.lovelifeworkshops.com. Providing people with the personalized love-life information they need is the key to a successful love-life. So when prospects are plenty and compatible, and the chemistry of love occurs, people who are prepared will respond in ways that encourage the growth and endurance of a love relationship. One of the more common tragedies in human experience occurs when the chemistry of love emerges to someone unknowingly unprepared to receive it. We all know that true love comes infrequently to most people anyway. You have to be mentally ready for love when it arrives and you need to know how to keep love healthy over time. Being mentally ready for love means having an accurate perception of the experience of love, a healthy sense of oneself as an independent person in love, along with the ability to form and preserve a friendship with your lover. Sustaining love requires an enduring interest in developing a capacity to communicate along with an ongoing development of one’s psychological independence in love.

    

Without a conscious recognition of what works and what does not work in your love-life it is more likely you will repeat what doesn’t work over and over again creating the same old chronic disappointment. Once you have reviewed and identified your particular love-life psychology you can begin changing the dissatisfying consequences it creates in your love-life. The first step is to know that you have a personal love-life psychology. A personal pattern of relating to love that determines the quality and satisfaction in your love-life. From there it becomes possible to do something different. To learn something new about love in the ways you think, feel, and act when you look for it, find it, or commit to it. Like everything else in life, once something new is learned it becomes a part of the way we live through practice.

Review Your Love-Life Psychology for a Better Love-Life

What is wrong with your love-life? If you say something like I’m too old, too young, don’t have enough money, not educated enough, job is not good enough, wife cheated on me, I’m single parent, or recently divorced you are overlooking the real reason for your love-life disappointment. Let me put it to you this way, the real reason for your love-life problems is not in the circumstances of your life or the people in it. The real reason is you probably never upgraded ‘love-life psychology.’ By love-life psychology I mean the psychological pattern that determines the thoughts and feelings you have and actions you take when you are trying to find love, commit to love, or leave an expired love relationship. If you didn’t know you even had a love-life psychology, you’ve been probably looking everywhere but inside yourself for the answer to your love-life problems.

    

Once you are convinced that you have a love-life psychology and it determines the fate of your love-life, you will be well on your way to creating an improved love-life experience for yourself. Most people experience a lot of defensiveness when they think about changing the psychology of their love-lives. Why can’t what we learned about love in childhood and adolescence guarantee a loving and satisfied adulthood? It usually doesn’t because much of the time we learn love-life lessons from someone else’s failed or limited love-life. These lessons from the past are never tailored to our own unique circumstances. It could be your parents or other family members who showed you by example. In other instances, you might form a love-life pattern from your earlier love-life disappointments, or a combination of the two. From hurtful love-life experiences we learn to expect and avoid more hurt in ways that keep us stuck in repetition and defensiveness. To keep your love-life fresh you have to periodically review your love-life psychology. This involves a review your love-life needs, your expectations of a lover, your feelings about yourself in love, and the psychological defenses you are using in your love-life to protect yourself from hurt.

Love-Life Needs

What are your love-life needs? In a general sense they are the feelings of need that you experience for or in a love relationship. They can be developed or undeveloped, dependent or independent, mature or immature, depending on your current state of mind. If your love-life needs are immature, your adult love-life will be heavily influenced by parent-child forms of need. There is a tendency for past experiences with love dating back to when you were a child or adolescent to still be shaping the experiences you have in your love-life. This could prove troublesome because parent-child love-life needs do not fit very well into adult love relationships. In adulthood, intimate reciprocal love relationships where there is an equitable give and take, work the best.

    

Love-life needs stop developing from the time you start trying to get adult lovers to make up for the love you did not get at some earlier point in your life, when the emphasis was on getting love rather than giving it. This kind of immature love-life need will start developing again once you become conscious that it has stopped growing in the first place. Admitting to oneself that something like this exists is sobering to say the least. But if you don’t, there is a good chance that your undeveloped love-life need will contaminate every love relationship you have resulting in repeated love-life disappointments. We all need to accept that we can’t make up for the love we didn’t get in childhood and adolescence by getting it in our adult love relationships. Once this is accepted, the feelings of grief and sadness that come can eventually set you free to have a more realistic love relationship in the present. This love-life sadness should be tolerated and shared whenever possible. It is an emotional sign that the required healing is trying to take place.

   

It also helps to know and believe that you are really not as dependent on someone else’s love to survive as you might ordinarily think and feel. Most people are taught to look away from themselves and toward others for the emotional resources required to survive hardships in life. As a result of that training we lose track of our true emotional potentials and become focused on always getting what we need from others. Some of us rediscover that the human heart is built in such a way as to be able to survive the disappointments of love earlier in life. When this happens a person’s orientation begins to shift from getting love to make up for past losses to giving love to others. No matter how emptied you feel because of complications you experienced in your earlier love-life, you still possess the capacity to give love. Whether or not you rediscover this resource in the course of your life will depend upon how much consciousness you can tolerate. The most rewarding experience in life by far is to rediscover your capacity to give love selflessly to another.

Love-Life Expectations

What you expect from your partner in love has a powerful effect on what you get in love. To make matters more complicated, the love-life expectations I am referring to may be working beyond your direct awareness. It is very common for people to repeat the same disappointing activities in their love-life over and over again. This usually happens because there is something unfinished in a person’s love-life that gets unconsciously recreated. Psychologically speaking, if an experience of love created hurt feelings that are unresolved we tend to recreate that experience across love relationships. This just might be the mind’s way of trying to go back to something that happened in the past in an effort to resolve it. The problem is that the resolution of past hurt we are seeking does not take place by trying to change what has happened in the past, but by grieving our disappointments and moving on from them.

   

Love-life expectations can also take the form of an effort to ‘complete’ something in ourselves by getting the love we think we need from someone else.

The origin of this expectation is usually an emotional emptiness again from earlier love-life disappointments often beginning in childhood or adolescence. Trying to get other people, in this case lovers, to complete something inside of you by getting them to give you the love you think you need is a set up for more disappointment. No one really gets a chance to make up for lost love in this way. A current lover should never be made responsible for replacing a love lost earlier in your life. Beyond the unfairness of giving someone new this responsibility, the chances of it happening are nil. For the simple fact that time has passed and you are no longer a child. Adult love relationships require the reciprocity of needs to remain healthy and grow. An adult lover cannot parent his or her lover without resentment and unhealthy feelings of self-sacrifice. Being in an adult love relationship requires a commitment to intimacy in the form of mutual loving and the satisfaction of need. Anything less, only recreates the conditions for the repetition of earlier love-life disappointments in the relationship.

    

Another form of unhealthy love-life expectation is to hope that a lover can be

a source of ‘correction’ in one’s love-life. Similar to seeking completeness, expecting correction means you feel cheated by earlier love-life losses and you secretly or not so secretly want your lover to make up the difference owed to you. As in striving for completeness, correction also breeds resentment and unhealthy forms of self-sacrifice if it is coveted during the course of a love relationship. When striving for past love-life corrections take the place of reciprocal forms of adult intimacy in a relationship it is only a matter of time before conflict and disappointment emerge. Past love-life disappointments get corrected by being grieved and accepted as the unfortunate limitations they really are. Whether or not we have to continue be limited by them in adulthood is the important question.

Love-Life Self-Esteem

Are you lovable? This may seem like a strange question. Strange because people do not ordinarily ask themselves this kind of question unless something is critically wrong. The answer to this question will tell you a lot about your love-life self-esteem. How you really feel about yourself has a lot to do with the quality of your love-life. For example, if you don’t feel lovable it will be hard to accept someone else’s love. You have already passed a negative judgment on yourself so there has got to be something wrong with anyone who attempts to love you. A closely related problem is a negative perception of the love you have to give, if any. Negative love-life self-esteem tends to contaminate both how lovable you feel and the perceived quality of the love you have to give.

    

One of the more common love-life problems that emerge when self-esteem is low is an unhealthy tolerance of abusive people in your life. When your self-esteem is low it is easy to lose self-respect and the respect of others. A person will stop standing up for herself which permits certain people to take advantage. In fact, low self-esteem enables mistreatment to continue long past the point where a more self-respecting person would draw the line. Once you get it in your mind that your love relationship is abusive either emotionally, physically, sexually or financially, change is just a few steps away. At this point a little support from people who can understand your need to either get out of the relationship or set limits is vital. Remember, once your attitude toward the abuse shifts to a more realistic perception of your partner’s emotional impotence, change is inevitable. The abuse does not continue when a mistreated person recognizes the ways she has been setting up the role of victim by seeing herself as only fearful and powerless.

Love-Life Psychological Defenses    

Psychological defenses can be both offensive and defensive. You’ve heard the saying the best defense is a good offense, right? Some people go on the attack right away at the first hint of fear. Others build great walls of defense against what they perceive to be the inherent dangers in love. For some, psychological defenses are best applied as self-protection when looking for love. For others, it is best to stay out of commitment so that an escape is possible once the going gets rough. Too many fish in the sea, right? Wrong, the problem is that psychological defenses limit the extent of intimacy that is possible in a person’s love-life. Take your pick, love or defense you can’t have it both ways. If you picked love, you have some anxiety to look forward to because that is what happens to us when we shed defenses. Everybody gets temporarily weak in the knees or a little shaky, all signs that love-life vulnerability is now in charge of your responses, and contrary to popular opinion, so far so good.

    

If you prefer to stay defensive in your love-life here is what you have to look forward to and why. Anything and everything we think, feel, and do can be used for defensive purposes. When we are being defensive we are protecting ourselves from something else, be it dangerous or not. Of course when something is not dangerous and we are still compelled to protect ourselves from it there is a problem. This kind of problem is common whenever love is the issue. This is because we all know what it is like to be hurt and disappointed in our love-lives on some level starting in childhood. So early on in life we develop a facility for protecting ourselves from further hurt and disappointment. Unfortunately, in love there is a cost for defensiveness. Many of the feelings involved in love require states of mind and heart that cannot be directly felt when you are defensive. Defensiveness trades off sensitivity for safety and security. In a love relationship this can be very detrimental.

    

Defensive behavior can be simply defensive or offensively defensive as mentioned earlier. This means you can either protect yourself by reacting to the aggressiveness of others defensively or offensively. When someone converts fear or hurt into anger or rage they are practicing the dubious art of defensive offensiveness. In love, people engage in defensive love-life behaviors like always avoiding certain love-life experiences, or controlling the experiences they do have in their love relationships, or making sure they always pick the same type of partner. Whatever it is, the underlying purpose is to control an experience that would threaten what is known or familiar whether or not it is healthy or satisfying. When love-life behavior is not defensive it promotes openness and risk-taking.

    

People retain all kinds of defensive beliefs in their love-lives. Everyone has a philosophy of love acknowledged or not. Some of us have a defensive love-life philosophy that constricts and controls love-life experiences. In many instances defensive beliefs are stereotypic generalizations made to avoid the assumption of predictable problems in love. It is common to believe that certain people are eligible partners because they possess certain characteristics that other people do not. The problem with this kind of defensive thinking is the judgment involved. Love is never bound by such beliefs. Other human motivations such as an interest in power certainly are. The important thing is to become aware of whatever beliefs and behavior are curtailing or worse interfering with love in your life. We all struggle with our personal commitments to ways of life that diminish our ability to love and be loved. Consciousness and tolerance for something new helps us outgrow what is blocking our development in this area of our lives.

    

Last but certainly not least is the role of feelings and emotions in our love-lives. Feelings can be used for defensive purposes like everything else. For convenience I have placed the feelings that are most commonly active in an experience of love on a continuum. Roughly speaking there are positive love-life emotions and negative ones, emotions that encourage and support an experience of love and emotions that do not. On the negative end of our continuum we have ‘resignation.’ As a love-life emotion resignation is extremely defensive. Its purpose is to deaden love-life need and love-life hurt. In this regard it does an excellent job. When love-life resignation sets in, a person feels very little need and takes no further risks with love. Resignation is common after a deep hurt or after many repeated love-life disappointments or failures. A common indication that resignation exists is, no longer believing there are any available partners left.

    

Anger and its twisted cousin rage are further along on our continuum of love-life emotions. Anger is also a very defensive emotion but not as defensive as resignation. The one advantage to anger is that the angry person is still feeling some kind of hope and fear about love. That is why he or she is angry. Otherwise the deadening defensiveness of resignation would take over. Regardless, anger is still defensive enough to interfere with the vulnerability required to be in love. In an angry state of mind love is diminished in favor of power. Toward the middle of our continuum is love-life frustration. In a frustrated state there is much more hope than fear and avoidance. Frustration is mildly defensive as a negative love-life emotion and focused more on manipulating love. People who are committed to controlling love in any way are subject to love-life frustration. As a negative love-life emotion, frustration is only a short step away from the more positive love-life emotion I will call ‘hurt.’

    

You might wonder how hurt became a positive love-life emotion given it intuitively appears negative. To be hurt in love is to be involved and vulnerable.

There is a degree of openness in hurt. It’s not defensive and it’s more amenable to love. In fact, it is impossible to be in love without experiencing hurt feelings at some point or another. The fact of separate people in a love relationship guarantees it. Our task as lovers is not to try avoiding unpredictable hurt. Our task is to retain a faith in our capacity to heal love-life hurt when it happens without being self-destructive. An even more positive love-life emotion is ‘sadness.’ Sadness is a natural attractant. People who have the capacity to feel sympathy for others are moved (e-motion) by sadness. It is an emotion that opens the heart and encourages feelings of love. The relationship between sadness and love is very interesting. In one sense, sadness reminds us that nothing is permanent least of all love. Mixed with sadness, love has the ability to heal the broken heart.

     

Lastly, there is anxiety and joy. I mention these two positive love-life emotions together because I think they have an interesting and often ignored relationship.          

Again you might wonder why anxiety makes it to the positive end of our continuum. I am not talking about clinical anxiety as an illness. I am talking about anxiety as a common state of mind that emerges when something new is happening or about to happen. Anxiety is not a bad thing. It’s a reminder that we prefer to keep ourselves safe and in predictable if not controllable circumstances of life. When the known transforms into the unknown there is going to be anxiety. A little or a lot, there is always some degree of anxiety in love. Joy is the ultimate emotion of love where a person is able to transcend the feeling of being alone in this world however temporary for a feeling of connection with something greater. In this instance, that something greater is the love between two people. The letting go of oneself in love is always unnerving. When the temporary state of joy is over there is always reality waiting. There is always the wish that joy would stay without the necessity of contrast with other emotions. These shifts create anxiety. The newness of love is very alive and joyful. For this many people will tolerate any kind of discomfort.

    

A conscious review of these various components of your love-life psychology will help you identify what needs to develop further. Remember, changing one part of your love-life psychology will inevitably change others. A review of your love-life psychology, supported by practice, initiates a leaning process that will transform your love-life from repeated disappointment to satisfaction and fulfillment. The only way to truly change your love-life is to make change on the psychological inside of your experience of love.    

    

Keeping Your Love-Life Healthy

Not too long ago I realized that I had to clean out garbage files on my computer on a regular basis in order to keep it functioning at its best. Machines generate byproducts that have to be cleaned. Your love-life is not a machine but it surely requires upkeep for maximum efficiency. Unfortunately a lot of people still think of their love-lives as maintenance free. Nothing new to learn and no problems to fix, the version you leave your family of origin (the factory) with is expected to work well forever without upgrades or maintenance. If this were the case, I wouldn’t be in business. One of the big reasons love-life psychologists exist is because people don’t bother to tune-up their love-lives.

    

The two items that are vital to the long term maturity and maintenance of a meaningful love relationship are the conjoint practice of communication and independence. At first glance they may appear at odds and perhaps they are in some ways. Communication is about connection. Ideally, it is about reaching your partner to participate in a dialogue of meaning and feelings. This is not to say you always have to talk in depth to your partner. It might get a bit tiring to do this all the time. The communication I am talking about is frequent but not constant. It grows in the context of a love relationship because two people realize, like with a computer, they will inevitably collect thoughts, feelings, and actions that will complicate and contaminate their love relationship. There is a time to clean, so to speak, by expressing the emotions and thoughts that have been generated in a relationship and it can only be done together.

   

Independence

on the other hand is a practice that many people find counterintuitive when it is associated with love. Most people think of love as a mutual dependency one to another.

Independence

is usually reserved for whatever separated movements away from the relationship are required. I am going to ask you to think outside the box. Think of independence as a love-life skill. Think of dependency as an immaturity that will eventually interfere with love if left unchecked. In this context, independence is the maturation of a capacity to sustain oneself as an individual in a love relationship, where more than the ambivalence and instability of dependency is offered to a partner.

    

Independence

means I don’t need you to fill in my gaps. It means that we are free to have a relationship where what I give you, and the commitment I make to you, are chosen. As an independent person I have the ability to decide where my love is directed. As such you will surely feel my presence in our relationship. This is the key. More independence equals more presence. My need for you never overcomes the love I have to give you.

    

Let’s think some more about communication. In love people can talk about anything and they usually do. The communication I am talking about has more to do with ‘how’ two people in love talk to each other than the ‘what’ or content of their conversation. More problems are created and remain unresolved because of the dysfunctional way two lovers can communication with each other. For starters, if you are going to be in love you should expect to be defensive. Defensiveness is the mind’s way of protecting itself from additional hurt and disappointment. If you can’t control something outright defensiveness is the next best thing. Nobody gets to control love and this is why there is so much defensiveness in our love-lives.

   

The defenses we use in love can range from the thoughts we have, to the feelings we have, to the actions we take that have self-protective objectives. Just about anything can and will be used defensively. The problem with love-life defenses is that they block the communications needed to constructively solve the problems and mend the hurts that can create distance in a relationship. So here’s the deal. In order to effectively talk about problems a couple has to communicate about their mutual defenses as well. You can’t do the former without the latter. What I mean is, until a couple acknowledges the ways their mutual defenses mess up their communication it will always be negatively affected by defenses.

    

Talking about defenses can be a bit of hard work. Most people do not enjoy having their psychological defenses exposed, never mind discussed. This sort of thing takes us right back to the vulnerability that has to be tolerated to be in love in the first place. Humility and honesty help of course. Equality also comes in handy, and the freedom to speak sincerely regardless of your partner’s response is also helpful. A mutual discussion of each other’s defensive efforts to control communications and their impact will clear the air but expect a bumpy ride getting there. You would have to say to yourselves that talk like this is good for the relationship no matter what. Interactions like these go under the heading, ‘Honesty in Love’ with reminders that if you don’t have honesty you don’t have much. Practice believing that love is not always smooth and effortless. Convince yourself that a relationship can on occasion be upsetting to do the work that love requires.

    

Sorry to say that talking about your mutual defensiveness is not the only unsettling conversation you are going to have if you want to sustain a deeper intimacy with your lover. The other big area of experience that needs a dialogue is the effects of each other’s family of origin on the relationship. Of course you can say that I’m a nut and you have better things to talk about. A lot of people will probably agree with you. The only problem is if you don’t talk about your respective families more of your experience growing up gets played out in your love-life. For good or for bad this is what always happens like it or not. The only way to avoid this intrusion of the past is to make family of origin influences conscious in dialogue with the other person it happens with, your lover. If there was love in your childhood you obviously have less to worry about. If there was mostly disappointment why risk the replay. Your love relationship is not just someone to spend time with so you won’t be so alone. It’s much more than that. It’s an opportunity to grow, change, and learn. If it’s not, expect some trouble.

    

Conversations about each other’s side of the family and how they influence thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the relationship can provide information that helps you avoid making the same fatal mistakes over and over again. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t repeat some part of childhood in his/her love-life. We use what we know, plain and simple. When we leave home we unconsciously take our family experiences with us in the form of needs, expectations, love-life self-esteem, and/or the kinds of psychological defenses we use to stave off any more love-life hurts. Our partner witnesses the transformations as the relationship endures. It is common to start out one way and end up another once noxious family of origin influences take hold.

   

Let’s consider a common example. I have met people who were free and passionate when they were single and living together. Once they commit to each other or marry, they become overly sensitive and emotionally closed with negative consequences for the relationship. The same thing can happen over time even if the couple does not marry or commit. As if time and familiarity (a word with its root in the word family) ensures that the family of origin’s influence will come to the surface, ready or not. The family of origin pattern of how to be in love whether constructive or destructive is there waiting to be activated. The only hope we have of doing anything about this fact of life is to move the whole thing into consciousness and regular dialogue.

    

An original meaning of the word consciousness, by the way, is the mutual exchange of information or knowledge. Shared perceptions divided by the fact that both of you are in love makes for a potentially strong learning experience. Sharing information is the way people learn and solve problems in a love relationship anyway. Sharing perceptions about the influences of each other’s family of origin is a particularly potent form of love-life learning. What is the objective? The objective is to point out the differences between who you and your partner are, as unique individuals in love right now, from all the other influences of people in your lives past and present.

   

Once those influences are identified they can be accepted, modified or deleted. Your love partner becomes an ally in helping you identify what you might be carrying around from the past. He/she is in the best position to help you make this differentiation because he/she is the closest to you. But first you have to put away your fear that this kind of openness will hurt your love relationship rather than help it. So what if your partner left you because you wanted to be honest and open (vulnerable) about such meaningful things with him or her? If he/she left over this, look at it this way, he/she did you a favor.

    

Along with sustaining love with the right kind of communication, you can also sustain love with the matured practice of independence in your relationship. Matured means not the kind of pseudo-independence or running away we hear so much about these days. Real independence does not take us away from intimacy. Quite the contrary, it brings on a deeper intimacy. The reason why a person runs away from closeness or hides from love is not because he is independent but because he is dependent. When you are independent you are no longer afraid of what others can say to you or take from you. You don’t need someone else to support your insecure sense of yourself. Your partner can be who he is while you live openly as the person you are. An independent person is genuinely intimate and knows he or she has love to give. When you are truly independent you have differentiated your love-life from everyone else’s, you have chosen to give your love to somebody special, and you have accepted the person you love for who he/she is without trying to change him/her.

    

Communication as a sustaining love-life activity is interpersonal. It takes place between the lovers involved as an interpersonal dialogue. On the other hand, independence as a love-life practice that sustains love is a personal experience with wide ranging interpersonal consequences to be sure. The practice of love-life independence always involves the differentiation of one love-life from everybody else’s. I discussed this theme earlier in relation to the communication of family of origin patterns. To differentiate your love-life means to identify it as uniquely your own creation different from everyone else’s. How other people influence our love-lives can be subtle and hard to discover. The influence exists as patterns of living both psychological and physical with their origin in childhood and adolescence. We take these patterns from home as if they were meant to guide us now that we are separate from the family. The implication of course is that the offspring (that’s you and me) have not done their thinking and deciding for themselves. This is what I mean when I said that your love-life is not your own. It becomes your own when you have acknowledged your ownership because it meets your own particular needs and wants not what someone else thinks you should need and want.

    

It’s very easy to borrow someone else’s love-life, especially if you love or loved the person from whom you borrowed it. In many ways it’s a matter of family loyalty. I also find that disappointment in love earlier in life creates a greater likelihood of repetition. In other words, we tend to repeat the love-lives of people who disappoint us in love the most. If you don’t heal it, then it has a high probability of being recreated again. Like when somebody comes from a divorced home and never really deals with the feelings of loss divorce created. The chances of getting divorced are high only because of the fact it is familiar and has a lot of unresolved emotion in it. We are often drawn to what is unfinished and has hurt us. So getting your very own psychological love-life going is very important. And remember the solution to this difficulty does not have to be so complicated. Once a consciousness for this stuff occurs, it’s easier to pick and choose the right actions to take in your love-life.

    

The great thing about love-life independence is the more independent you are the more you are able to engage in what is called ‘selfless loving’ without feeling cheated or used. When people are disappointed in their love-lives starting from at the beginning, it is easy to be focused on getting what you feel you deserve from others. The love you did not get is coveted and waited for, becoming a measure of how satisfying a relationship really is. When this is the case the focus is on getting love rather than giving love. The problem with this love-life orientation is that you can’t really satisfy childhood or adolescent needs for love in an adult love relationship. No adult lover wants to parent another adult and give up his or her own need for love without deep resentment. You could literally spend a lifetime looking for childhood love that is now out of date and no longer available.

    

Once this love-life fact is accepted and properly grieved, meaning the sadness of loss is acknowledged, felt and expressed, love-life independence becomes possible. It becomes possible simply because giving the love you have becomes more important and meaningful than getting the love you lost. Without a dependence on getting love a person is freer to give love selflessly. This is the most advanced state of loving there is, and it is only possible when a person has become independent. In addition to declaring your own love-life freed from the influences of others, independence in love can be expressed in the act of choosing to love. This is when you consciously make a decision to love someone simply based on the feeling of love that exists inside of you. This is what a real commitment to love looks like. It’s exclusive and for one person only. I choose to love you and no other. Congratulations, you have made a commitment to a deeper love. You can only do this when you are no longer dependent on resolving past disappointments in love and free to give the love you feel.

    

As an independent person in love, your greatest gift of love to the person of your choice is an acceptance of who he or she is as a person. It is so very common in love to want your lover to be better than what he or she is now. We often have a mental image of what form that should take. It is really just a selfish desire secretly meant to extinguish past love-life disappointments. This desire for better can be so subtle as to be only discernable in a feeling of disappointment that reoccurs from time to time.

   

When acceptance is given in love you stop trying to satisfy yourself by changing your partner. You stop trying to mold him or her into someone who will match your ideal. You get to love your partner separately and selflessly. If I think I will be happier or more satisfied with someone else but I am too afraid to risk loneliness, I can try to change my partner into what I think I should have. In truth this is only a defense. When I stop looking for someone else in love with you, I have found both myself and you in this relationship. I am now independent and can give a selfless gift of love to you or move on to find someone more compatible with my desires.

    

I hope this article has shown you how to take good care of love when it arrives. If you want a better love-life, over time work with your love-life psychology through these methods of sustaining love. The quality of love in your life depends upon your love-life psychology. Review it, bring it up to date, and by all means own it. Remember, you can only give yourself to someone else if you have an independent self to give. You can only know your partner as a unique individual in your life if you separate enough from your past to experience your own and someone else’s true presence. You can only be independent in your love-life if you let go of your dependency on fixing the disappointments of your past love-lives by getting someone else to make up for what you did not get.

   

When you are ruled by the past and someone else’s preferences for your love-life, you are not free to love. When your ability to choose love is forfeited because you are dependent on someone else’s judgment and choices, you are not free to love. If you must change your lover to match your own expectations you cannot meet anyone new since technically you are so focused on repeating your old experiences that you are not free to love. In a healthy love relationship you also get a chance to keep finding a new truer version of yourself with your partner, as he/she gets a chance to keep finding a new truer version with you. This is one of the priceless rewards you get for doing the work of sustaining love in your life.

Giving Love

Once you become aware that you have a ‘love-life psychology,’ the internal psychological pattern that governs your love-life thinking, feeling and behavior, it becomes possible to identify its characteristics and ‘work’ with it. The key to understanding your personal love-life pattern is to break it down into its primary psychological components. Our love-life psychologies are made up of our emotional needs for love, interpersonal expectations of love, love-life self-esteem, and the psychological defenses we use to handle experiences of love.

Our love-life needs are either child-like or adult-like or a combination of the two. Our love-life expectations are the ways we go about getting those needs met in our love-lives. Your love-life self-esteem is essentially how you feel about yourself as a lover, and love-life defenses are the ways you defend yourself against being hurt again in love. These four factors determine the form and health of our love-life experiences.

Today let’s focus on love-life needs. When your love-life has been largely shaped by unresolved disappointments early in life it tends to form a particular pattern. I call this pattern the ‘get love’ pattern as opposed to a ‘give love’ pattern. The get love pattern is focused on you guessed it, getting love. At first glance getting love as the primary orientation in your love-life may seem to make sense, but ultimately it recreates disappointment. An exclusive focus on getting love in love relationships suggests that underlying past disappointments with love are now operating and controlling your adult love-life.

     

For those of us with a get love mentality the invisible underlying disappointment with love is never too far from the surface. Chances are the people who were supposed to have loved you did a lousy job or were not there physically or emotionally or both most if not all of the time. Now in adulthood the need for love gets distorted into a need to make up for the love that was lost. The problem here is that this original need for love, twisted out of shape by past love-life disappointments, can never be satisfied in an adulthood love relationship. Attempts to do so always recreate the original disappointments over and over again in cycles of painfully dispelled hope. An adult partner no matter how much in love he or she is with you will never make up for your past love-life losses and disappointments. Any efforts to make that happen only waste time and mess up the opportunity to have a healthy adult love-life in the present.

     

The good news is that people caught in this disappointing ‘get love’ psychology can make changes for the better if they know what to look for. Being conscious of your love-life psychology is always the first step. From there you can identify the areas in your particular love-life psychology needing change. I identified four general parts of our love-life psychology as the first places to look when deciding what needs to change in a love-life. Remember the focus here is on changing the ways you think, feel, and act in your love-life. Obviously this is a little different than the usual ways of thinking about love-life improvements. Unfortunately, most people make superficial changes on the outside hoping that will change what is happening on the inside.

     

If you are always in some kind of love-life desperation or self-sacrificing for the love of another person your love-life needs are a problem. If your expectations of a lover are he or she will recreate your parents’ marriage, or complete or correct some disappointment in yourself or previous love-life experiences that is also a problem. How healthy your self-esteem is in terms of feeling lovable and having quality love to give is always a powerful influence on your love-life experience. Of course we also have to figure in the psychological defenses you are using in love-life situations. By defenses I mean things that people do like rationalizing or avoiding or controlling something so they don’t have to feel uncomfortable. The defenses are there simply because you don’t want to be hurt in the same way over and over again. So you try to protect yourself. Makes sense, except for the fact that your protections can eventually become habitual and a burden, interfering with the creation of a healthier adult love-life.

     

This may seem like a lot to digest, but the important thing is to begin thinking about what is going on inside your personal psychology that may be complicating your love-life. For most of us psychological change can be scary. Most people avoid and resist it preferring to stay with what is familiar even though there is plenty of evidence that what is familiar is not working for them. The hardest part is to get over your resistance to change. Once you know where the problem lies and what form it can take, it becomes a lot easier to fix than you might think. This is so simply because consciousness can make risk taking easier.

     

Most people would like to believe that the love-life lessons they learned in their families of origin are good enough for them if they were good enough for the previous generation. Wrong! In many cases they were not good enough for the previous generation either and deep down inside we know that they will not be good enough for us. Once you admit to yourself that your love-life needs some work and the answer is not in what you are wearing or where you go to meet eligible people or what you have bought your partner recently, a change is possible. The realistic hope is you can manage to become receptive enough to learn something new about your love-life and yourself. The rest will come naturally with a little practice and patience.

     

Moving from a ‘get love’ pattern to a ‘give love’ pattern also means that your love-life is about to mature. The only way to do that is to let go of what sustains your hope of correcting past disappointments in your current adult love-life. The choice is yours. You can spend the rest of your life trying to make up for the past or you can begin using your capacity to give to create a new love-life. If you choose to let go of past disappointments you will have to tolerate some grieving. Simply put, when we do not get the love we need as children and adolescents it constitutes a loss. Losses have to be grieved. It is the natural order of things. In other words we were made to grieve losses and move on. In fact the grief experience is the mind’s way of preparing itself to heal and move on to something new, to disconnect to reconnect again later. If you don’t grieve you really can’t move on.

     

Given this very human fact of life, there are a lot of people out there with broken hearts that have never been adequately healed. They are either afraid of grief and the deep sadness that can occur or they have been taught not to grieve because it is weak or some other such nonsense. The consequence is that a person stuck in such a feeling of love-life disappointment remains subject to that disappointing experience now automatically recreated in some form in their current love-life. In terms of wasted human potential such a personal outcome is very tragic to say the least.

     

Grief itself never killed anyone. Our reactions to grief, blocking it or twisting it out of proportion in some way or overreacting to it, they are the real culprits. Allowed natural expression, grief as a feeling flows out naturally with a beginning, middle, and end, as my old mentor used to say, decreasing in intensity over time. The most important advantage to grieving past love-life disappointments is the freedom it creates to move on with your love-life. And more importantly, a new love-life unencumbered by your disappointed past. One of the greatest pleasures in this life is the experience of getting our love-lives unstuck.

Online Anonymity Helps Resolve Love-Life Problems

Virtually everyone these days is interested in learning something new and useful about their love-lives. Popular love-life advice columns and informative articles on love relationships are on the daily reading list of millions of Americans. Add the internet as a source of information and the range of educative influences multiplies even further. In fact the internet is packed with advantages and potential opportunities for people who are interested in better understanding their love-life experiences. Of course, I am not simply talking about sex or where to find a date. The internet is far more useful than that.

     More specifically, the internet offers a chance to be anonymous online. It offers the possibility of anonymity while conducting a real time conversation with another live person. That is truly phenomenal. Anonymity of this caliber has never existed before now. The usual attempts at interpersonal anonymity always involved some kind of physical contact, like a face to face meeting or at least a voice contact as in a telephone communication where personal identities are unknown. Or there might be anonymous contact between people but no interaction in real time, like when two people communicate anonymously by letter.

     For the first time ever, the internet offers its users complete anonymity online. As a psychologist I can only marvel at the potential for human growth and development in this technology. One of the most important professional applications is the role of true online anonymity as a facilitator of open interpersonal communication. By ‘true’ anonymity I mean a totally anonymous verbal communication between two adults without any kind of identifying physical contact. One of the best examples of real time internet communication is the ‘chat-room,’ where two or more people can interact anonymously online.  

     Ordinarily, anonymous people interact with other anonymous people in chat-rooms. Temporary identities are established as usernames or screen names for the purpose of differentiating one chat-room participant from another and in some instances to add a little creativity to an anonymous presentation. The probability of personal identification is nil especially if participants follow custom and say nothing about themselves that would reveal their true identities. Of course some people choose to step out of this invisibility and reveal their identities because they like what they read online.

     When two anonymous people interact online their interaction is subject to what I like to call the ‘pendulum effect’ in online communication. You either get extreme honesty and openness or extreme falseness and misrepresentation. Sometimes you get both of these reactions in the context of a single online communication. This is not altogether a bad thing unless you are expecting an honest and straightforward conversation with someone online. It could be useful either way. Some people express their deepest and darkest secrets online or just vent to see what kind of reactions they can elicit. On the other hand, misrepresenting yourself online might also have its advantages, like a chance to indulge in playful fantasy. Of course online misrepresentation can run aground when you want to know that the people you are communicating with are actually who they say they are at least in the roughest outlines.

     Here is precisely where the professional application comes in. If you take two people in our chat-room situation and make one of them a verifiable professional helper the communicative possibilities change. What you now get is a communication between an anonymous person and a certified professional helper that skews the communication in the direction of greater honesty and openness. Add a few more anonymous people to the chat-room and a love-life theme like coping with divorce, learning dating skills, or identifying abuse in a love relationship and you have what I call a ‘love-life workshop.’ An online psycho-educational chat-room workshop where highly trained professional helpers focus exclusively on the personal love-life issues of anonymous workshop participants. Currently the only anonymous chat-room workshops focused on love-life issues can be found online at www.lovelifeworkshops.com.

     So far we have a clearly identified love-life expert communicating useful ‘personalized’ love-life information to a small group of anonymous people in a chat-room workshop focused on a specific love-life issue. Given the fact that a lot of people need to talk to somebody about their disappointments with love this computer application promises to have mass appeal. Online anonymity is well suited for any work you might have to do on your love-life. Especially if what you need is accurate personalized information to help you identify your love-life problem and figure out what to do about it. A service of this kind is complicated, however, by the fact that most people hide the reality of their love-life concerns even from themselves. Under the usual circumstances, admitting love-life problems to another person is difficult enough. A big part of that difficulty is tolerating the open admission of having love-life problems.

     Popular opinion is that sex and money are still the most important contemporary taboos. That may not be true anymore. Now that we have all become somewhat used to the media’s focus on the frequency of sexual misdeeds, and the importance of an adequate credit rating, the old cultural sensitivities in these areas are surely waning. What we are left with is a taboo in the area of a person’s love-life vulnerabilities. It is one thing to talk about who you slept with, another to speak openly and honestly about your love-life needs, hurts, and disappointments. What makes this a taboo is the vulnerability involved in an open admission of love-life feelings and needs. Nowadays most people do not like admitting this kind of thing and being publicly perceived as weak and vulnerable or ‘needy’ as the derogatory label goes.

     Given this less than fully visible sensitivity, a truly anonymous forum to discuss love-life concerns attracts the interest of most people. The very human problem we are left with is that our personal identities often differ from our real underlying experience. By identities I mean the patterns of social and familial influences that people adopt and use to define themselves in public. I am such and such, and so and so. ‘I am’ statements of identity certainly carry a lot of clout. So much so that most people do not like experience at odds with their identities to become visible to others. It is usually too uncomfortable to say the least. We wear our identities like we wear our clothing. It is essentially how we would like to be perceived and remembered by other people.

     A prominent part of our personal identities are devoted to our love-lives. I like to think of it as a personal ‘love-life psychology.’ Everyone has a personal love-life psychology defined as the repetitive pattern of thought, feeling, and action a person experiences in his or her particular dealings with love. It is psychological in that the pattern functions on the inside of our thoughts and feelings, and it is repetitive in the sense that a person may not be and may never become aware of his or her love-life psychology. Let’s just say your love-life psychology is automatic or unconscious and over time sets up the experiences you have in your love-life with or without your awareness or permission.

    Automatic psychological patterns are OK if they guide us in positive directions toward constructive objectives. If they are mostly derived from unresolved past disappointments in love we are in trouble. This usually means that your love-life psychology needs work, love-life work to be precise. Your love-life psychology needs to be made conscious and eventually changed simply because you are ‘locked’ into getting the same old hurtful or at least disappointing results from your love-life efforts. Making your love-life psychology conscious usually happens in situations where people are communicating openly and honestly about their love-life disappointments. This is not to say something like this cannot be done alone. It is just easier and more effective to do this work in a social context where you can bounce your feelings and experiences off other people going through the same experience.

     So how do I change my love-life psychology? Good question. Like anything else in life there can be complications. Unfortunately we all learn to defend against change and resist the influences of others, even when it’s good for us not to. Most people defend their love-life psychologies just the way they are, resisting the influences of others to induce change through awareness and learning. The good news is, under conditions of real anonymity most people feel much less defensive and resistant to constructive feedback and have a better chance of becoming aware of their own love-life difficulties.

     Online anonymity with a certified professional provides hope to people who would ordinarily be too defensive or resistant to learn something new about their love-lives. This also includes those individuals who are too uncomfortable or for some reason unable to actually sit in an office and talk about themselves with a professional helper. As an online anonymous alternative, you can sit in the comfort, safety, and familiarity of your own surroundings and talk about personal love-life matters without the worry of disclosing your identity. In an interesting but odd way a certain intimacy grows among anonymous people who are sharing similar love-life experiences in this way. As though a personal identity has less to do with connecting to other people than the emotional experiences we can acknowledge and share with each other.

     Imagine a chat-room filled with people who have experienced a certain love-life disappointment becoming strangely personal even though identities have remained invisible. What becomes more visible once the pride and ego involved in defending ourselves is put aside is the common bond with each other our search for love has created. Online anonymity with a professional helper and other likeminded anonymous people offers a chance to get out from under the limitations of customary ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in love to consider different and perhaps more constructive ways of finding a lover, committing to a lover, or leaving a lover if the relationship is over.

     If you can tolerate the consciousness involved in hearing straight talk about your love-life problems, the advantage to doing this kind of love-life work is greater receptivity to love in your life. Generally speaking, greater openness in the area of love has a lot of benefits. Keeping your love-life psychology up to date and free from chronic negative patterns is well worth any initial discomforts you might experience opening this area of your emotional life up for review. The tragic part of all of this is that some people make it to old age having blindly repeated the same worn out love-life patterns over and over again with the same old disappointing consequences. Whether repeatedly choosing and marrying the same kind of unhealthy or unavailable person, or repeating mistakes in a love relationship, or the same old mistakes while dating, a little love-life consciousness can change the course of your love-live, save you time, and help you stop repeatedly disappointing yourself. Given your present love-life disappointment, now is the best time to review your love-life psychology as a wise investment for your future.

     No question, love-life disappointments take quite a toll on so many people’s lives. Working on your love-life is easier to do once you accept the idea that your love-life psychology, not unlike your body, hairstyle or occupation, needs an occasional tune-up or upgrade, to use a more current term. Most of us do not have the privilege of relying solely upon what we have learned about love from our parents or other adults when we were young. Quite frankly, if the truth be told, a lot of our parents did not get it right either. Claiming your own love-life as an adult person means a life-long dedication to generating the love-life consciousness necessary to change what does not work and strengthening what does. Now that the internet is such a prominent part of our lives, many people will take advantage of the anonymity that is possible and work on their love-lives online.

.