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Wednesday, 02 April 2008 11:01 |
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Title: Keeping Love Alive Author: Margaret Paul, Ph.D. E-mail:
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Copyright: © 2004 by Margaret
Paul URL: http://www.innerbonding.com Word Count: 713 Category:
Relationships
Keeping Love Alive By Margaret Paul, Ph.D.
When I was 24 years old I fell madly in love. I was madly in
love for three weeks, and then spent the next 30 years
struggling to regain and maintain that wonderful feeling. In the
course of my long marriage and in the 35 years I’ve been
counseling individuals and couples, I’ve learned what it takes
to keep love alive and what diminishes the feelings and
experience of love.
The concept of what it takes to keep love alive is really quite
simple, but not so easy to do. The simple answer is this: love
flows between two people whose hearts are open to learning and
to sharing love. The hard part is keeping the heart open.
Before I go more deeply into what does keep love alive, I want
to focus on what doesn’t work to keep love alive. The bottom
line of what diminishes or even eventually kills loving feelings
is controlling behavior.
There are two major forms of controlling behavior that always
result in dampening loving feelings:
• Overt control such as anger, blame, criticism and judgment,
defensiveness, lecturing, teaching, righteousness, physical
violence, and so on.
• Covert control such as withdrawal, withholding truth,
compliance, giving oneself up, resistance, denial, and so on.
None of us like to be controlled. Most people, in the face of
controlling behavior, react with their own controlling behavior.
Controlling behavior diminishes love because the focus is on
changing the other person rather than on changing yourself. When
the intention of your behavior is to change your partner’s
feelings or behavior, your behavior will often be experienced by
your partner as manipulative and/or rejecting. Trying to change
how someone feels about you or treats you with overt forms of
control feels manipulative and rejecting to your partner, while
covert forms of control such a compliance or “niceness,” feels
manipulative and inauthentic to the other person.
The good news is that love can be kept alive, even in long-term
relationships. Love is kept alive when each person is more
devoted to learning about being loving to themselves and to each
other than to getting love. The moment the intention is to get
love, controlling behavior takes over. In any given moment, we
either want to be loving and share love, or to get love. Trying
to get love diminishes love. Being loving and sharing love keeps
love alive. Being loving and sharing love means:
• Each person learns to take responsibility for your own
feelings rather than making the other person responsible for
your feelings of worth, lovability, security, happiness, joy or
pain.
• Each person has your own and your partner’s highest good at
heart. Each of you supports your own and your partner’s joy and
well being. Both of you are considerate of the other person
without giving yourselves up.
• Each person chooses to be honest and authentic about how you
feel and what you want and don’t want. You are willing to speak
your truth without blame or judgment.
• Each person stays open to learning about your own and your
partner’s wants, needs, and fears, especially in conflict.
What keeps love alive is each person’s willingness to do
whatever inner work is necessary to keep the heart open to
loving and learning. Controlling behavior is motivated by fear –
of loss of self and loss of other, of engulfment and rejection,
of smothering and abandonment. When each person is willing to do
the inner work necessary to heal these fears, they are able to
keep their hearts open more and more of the time. Love flows
freely when hearts are open to loving and learning.
Practicing the Six Steps of Inner Bonding that we teach is a
powerful way of doing this inner work. Partners who both
consistently practice this process discover the great joy of
keeping their love alive. Even when it seems that there is no
way to get love back, it does come back when both partners are
devoted to learning to take loving care of themselves and to
sharing their love with each other.
We cannot give to another what we do not have within. Inner
Bonding is a process for creating so much love within that it
comes spilling out, to be joyously shared with others.
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