CONTENTS OF THIS PAGE:
WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT?
WHAT IS LOVE?
LET'S BE REAL! - Taking it from myth to reality to create a much better result and
eliminate the "dangers".
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WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT?
The two most important pieces of making a relationship work are learning how to love and learning how not to criticize, blame or make wrong. Do these and you'll experience marvelous results.
After all, they both fit right into the definition of love:
1) Accepting the way the other is
2) Accepting the way the other isn't
Loving as above allows spontaneity and natural openness to occur and helps to create the relationship as a true partnership to support the goals and activities of the relationship and of each other.
WHAT IS LOVE? The essential ingredients:
I. ACCEPTANCE (AND APPRECIATION) OF THE OTHER
Dropping the "make wrong" paradigm. Being trusting. Dropping
unrealistic expectations.
II. WANTING GOOD FOR THE OTHER
III. DOING WHAT IS USEFUL TO SUPPORT THE HAPPINESS
OF THE OTHER
Find out what has the greatest value. Do it. (Learn. For this helps
you understand, develop wisdom, and do effective action.)
LET'S BE REAL
Love is glamourized, idealized, mythified, and made to be something unreal. That viewpoint is dysfunctional and harmful. Nobody minds making up something if it really benefits one's self, but there are repercussions of this unreality upon life - and those repercussions aren't pretty.
Unreasonable expectations need to be replaced with reality and appreciation rather than putting up with a spectacularly high failure rate. See Relationship Intro.
On a day to day basis there is little glamour and not so much amor (amorousness) feeling that is automatic. We must generate it. We must care for it, like tending a garden. It must be a conscious thing, utilizing all the three parts of love, as a doing, and not just a bunch of chemical feelings. We must have the attitude of generating love, as in the Loving Woman (see below.)
THE "REALITY" OF THE PROCESS OF FEELING LOVE
If you learn what reality is, you will have more perspective and knowledge so that you can manage and maximize "love". (Follow the reading sequence starting with What Is Reality? - Know What It Is Or Suffer From Irreality. A warning on learning reality: it blows up the false ways we look at love, blowing up some fantasies but creating more good feelings in the long term. The illusions will disappear and what you'll get is more of what really works in life.)
We "like" and "love" based on getting good chemicals from associating with another person. If we don't keep on getting good chemicals from associating with that person, our liking and/or loving them begins to dissipate, as it is no longer worth our time and effort we put out to have them do or be that which is the generator of good chemicals - i.e. the cost is greater than the reward.
At first in a new relationship, one will often get good chemicals from the hope of having a relationship that is safe, exciting, ideal, offers a good future (such as "growing" and learning together) and such.
What actually occurs in some people is that they are instantly or quickly attracted to, even in a crowded room, someone by the primitive brain recognizing a person who has the same dysfunctionalities as a problem care giver in childhood - and having the primitive brain say "aha! Now I can find the solutions that have been missing ever since childhood - and that is hugely chemically exciting - but surely not enough to sustain love. And besides that you are not likely to solve the problems, so you are likely to experience the same bad feelings as you did before. Almost always, this is a bad choice, despite the fact that you feel good chemicals and are so "in love" with him/her, interpreting the chemicals as a sign of love or a good way to go. (See also Intuition.)
The basics over the long term are simply "physics". If you feel good chemicals from interactions with that person, you will become attached and love them as your source of good feelings. If you don't keep it up, then there is "love lost". So, you must learn to give them sufficient and/or a great level of "good chemical feelings" or they will not "like" or "love" you anymore. You must do "fair exchange", giving enough value in order to keep them so that they will give you what generates enough good chemicals.
(Yikes, that sounds mechanical and harsh and cold and depressing. Mechanics? Yikes!)
Though this sounds "meaningless", it is, in fact, meaningful to you because it gives you true value in terms of what it is that creates happiness - maximum good chemicals over time. See What Is Life About? How To Maximize Happiness In Life - clue: it is providing the "means" to cumulatively cause one "good chemicals" that feel good - that's it, though we do construct a thing, based on that, called "meaning", which creates even more happiness for us.
