The Ups, Downs of Love and Healthy Loving Relationships
Few drugs in life are more powerful than new love.
The mere thought of it drives fantasies, hopes, and even entire life directions. It’s no grand revelation to say that love is a universal human pleasure, the ultimate passion. A great many say that it is the very purpose of life itself.
In celebration of February, the month of love in the United States and elsewhere in the world, and as we celebrate Valentine’s Day on February 14th, let’s explore love, what makes it so challenging, how to deal with red flags and the past, and how to have a healthy, loving relationship.
At the Root of Passion Lies Suffering
Interestingly, as much as we love the passion of love, the root of the word passion, itself, has a completely different meaning – suffering. One of the great tragedies of life, to quote the glam rock group Poison, is
“Every rose has its thorn.”
Love brings pain, hardship, and just plain challenges.
It doesn’t take long before every single love runs into problems, from Narcissus and Echo to Cleopatra and Mark Antony, from Romeo and Juliet to Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.
Thus, it is only good, right, and salutary that we take a moment to think deeply about love and the inevitable problems and pains it brings very shortly in its bumpy wake, no matter if it’s new love in your 20s or your 80s. (And, yes, having done work as a nursing home chaplain, I’ve seen new love occur in people’s 80s.) The appeal of the drug perhaps never fully wanes.
What Makes New Love So Challenging?
New love is challenging. This is such a multi-pronged issue that it would take a lot to completely flesh out all aspects of it.
A few aspects are more important than others. The most important to always bear in mind is that love feels like a drug because it does, in fact, release various chemicals in the brain that create unrivaled highs and comforts, all of which chemicals I am completely unqualified to speak on. For our purposes here, the only thing you need to remember is that it’s an extraordinary drug.
For simplicity, the challenges of love can be boiled down to past, present, and future.
Perhaps the greatest problem is that people come into dating and situations of liking someone – the natural precursors to love – with a past unique to them that colors and drives their experience of love in the present. That past drives what they want from love, to be sure, but also how they view love.
The Past and Red Flags
One of the most powerful things I’ve seen in counseling folks over the decades is how much the love they were exposed to in their childhood home creates the template for their own future conceptions of love, either what it should be or shouldn’t be, as they see it. The childhood experience of love, or lack of it, by the mere fact that it lasts as their teaching model for love for years, even decades, and is being taught by the most powerful people in the person’s life, is normalized into the young person’s very definition of love (or anti-love).
No matter how toxic it may be, more often than not, the love the child sees as a kid he or she then recreates in teen years and early adulthood – “monkey see, monkey do.”
Repeating Parental Love Patterns
So, we respond to situations in dating and new love in ways that have become patterned by the repetition of parental behaviors. If a child saw a parent forever serving in love and, hence, another person taking and taking, it is highly likely that the child when finding him-/herself in love will either give and give or potentially take and take, depending on which person the child most identifies with.
And, this isn’t just the realm of young love, folks in their teens and twenties.
The imprinting of messages surrounding love is so extraordinarily powerful that people will not only be influenced by them but be outright driven by them, even mimicking them, into their 60s and 70s. I’m incapable of numbering the times I’ve dealt with this precise issue in clients well past middle age.
But, the power of the past doesn’t just inform what a person does, but what they don’t do, don’t say, or even don’t see. This is critical.
It’s the realm of red flags.
Love Is the Realm of Red Flags
Consider this, if little Billy grew up seeing Mommy beat the hell out of Daddy and shout at Daddy what a POS he is and how Daddy’s a bad provider and crappy lover, he’s going to, quite likely, go into dating unable to see what is acceptable and unacceptable. So, if he has a girlfriend, or boyfriend, who treats him nicely and listens to him, and perhaps even kisses him or touches him softly, he’s going to be over the moon because it’s balm to his precious soul. But if he discovers, before long, that this girl also insults him, puts him down, and occasionally hits him with or without remorse, little Billy thinks, “Yes, this IS love,” for it’s precisely what was modeled as love, growing up, AND it comes with warm words and high feelings. Thus, it’s both furry soft, AND familiar.
And it’s that which is familiar that is often the undoing of love.
What so many adults know from their own extra decades of experience is that love doesn’t come without pain. When you’re used to love always coming with doses of big pain, love without big pain can be disorienting, seemingly boring, and often isn’t trusted. For, there is a sense that this person who is giving only loving acts and words must want something from me. And when is the other shoe going to drop? Love is never this good all the time, the person thinks. Plus, it doesn’t come with the drug rush of the highs, lows, fights, fears, recoveries, and reconnections. The conditioning of the familiar causes the expectation of and allowance for pain.
Back to Billy.
What is in some ways worse than Billy receiving the exact same treatment he saw modeled, growing up, laced with some nice love aspects (‘til those likely lessen) is Billy receiving a watered-down version of childhood and completely missing how bad it still is. What if Billy starts dating Sally and Sally is totally verbally abusive to Billy, but – BUT, Billy says – she’s not physically abusive? Often a person in Billy’s position won’t even notice the giant red flag of verbal abuse because,
“Hey, my girlfriend doesn’t beat me. This is so great!”
His pain meter is so completely broken that he has no baseline of a good normal.
Red Flags Are About What’s Going On Inside You!
This cuts to the heart of red flags and problems in new love and, really, all love.
Too often, we spend our time and energies in love focused on the other person and how this person and all that this person is doing and how it makes me feel. But, if our pain meter, or feeling meter is broken, often all we can really feel is love in even the smallest of doses because it’s such a powerful drug, or pain only in the highest doses because we’ve been so conditioned to take the pain and take it and take it some more. The quest for the drug is so great, we endure hell, in small and big, to get it and keep it.
If we can’t feel small pain, or even if we ignore it because we so want this to be the one or because we hope it will go away or that we can change it, we lose the ability to see red flags.
See, the mistake so many make in the conversation of red flags is they think red flags are about spotting things in another person’s behaviors and then walking away when those things are present. But, if that’s your focus, you’ve already taken your eye off the ball.
Red flags are not about watching another person’s actions, per se. They’re not about awareness of what’s going on around you.
They are about awareness of what’s going on inside you. The central question that must drive one’s experience of love, be it young love or love well-seasoned, is, How does this make me feel? What’s going on inside me? Thus, anything that causes me pain, distress, distrust, sadness, or anything else unpleasurable is not okay and must be addressed, both by confronting the other person and by exploring it in my self-work.
See, happiness in your relationships, be they friendships, family, impassioned love, or some other is determined, in the end, by how you feel and how that person feels. That’s it.
The problem for young Billy is that he’s incapable, in his present iteration, of feeling what actually hurts. All he can feel is what did or didn’t hurt the parents who hurt each other or what tiny amounts he allowed himself to feel as a child because he was so numbed by the sh*t storm swirling around him. Again, his pain meter is broken.
Being Able to Feel What Hurts in Love
The pain meter, the feeling meter, is what tells a person that this situation is not good. Young Billy is, quite literally, incapable of sensing, or feeling, that something is off here and that something is important.
Driven to tolerate pain, even if it wasn’t in the form of abuse, Billy cannot sense what would be the jumping of the needle on a normal-functioning meter. Thus, all of these red flags start whipping by. And he’s missing every single one of them, or missing half and ignoring the other half because the good drug feels so damn good, and he’s never experienced it before.
Further, if the pain is not independent of the love meter, the love, sex, affection, and kind words can infect and override the pain meter readings.
Even in Non-Abusive and Loving Homes
As mentioned, this conditioning to override pains can happen just as easily happen in non-abusive and even loving homes.
I grew up in a large family with unequivocally loving parents. There were no raised voices, no criticism, and there was lots of love given by both parents to each other. Thus, it would seem that my five siblings and I would be all set for terrific love later. And we were…and weren’t, at least not me.
See, I was conditioned with two very powerful things:
One, the inevitable fight in big families to get my love cup filled with positive attention, which is no small feat when you’re competing with five siblings and a father who, while a very good man, had high attention needs and
Two, an adored and respected mother who gave and gave and gave and gave and gave to her kids, spouse, and just about everyone else.
High Need for Attention + Pre-Conditioned Drive to Give
So, I went into teen and adult dating with a high need for attention and a pre-conditioned drive to give and give. If I was given love, I’d go out of my way to serve and serve the one I loved. And that giving of love is actually a great model for how to exist in love and in the world, IFF the lover you’re interacting with is a giver, as well.
But, as far too often happens in life, a giver found a taker, a person conditioned by her own pain to vacuum up as much attention, giving, and service she could because, well, her love cup had a hole in the bottom, just like mine.
Whose hole was bigger is irrelevant. All that mattered, as I discovered only years after the divorce was my inability or unwillingness to acknowledge and act on the myriad ways pain was being inflicted on me – lack of apologies and forgiveness, near-constant finger-pointing, and blatantly obvious verbal and physical abuse from her (which, as a large man who was a wrestler and football player, didn’t register as physically painful and thus didn’t register on the pain meter of disrespect and soul pain) – meant they would only continue unchecked and increase.
Normalizing Misbegotten Forms of Love
You see, the normalization of misbegotten forms of love can emit from even seemingly normal and good homes. Thus, a past that is not fully deconstructed and reconstructed in new forms can destroy both love and the individuals in that love.
What should be red flags – i.e., that which hurts me – are missed, ignored, or wished away because love is so craved and pain meters broken or zeroed out at unhealthily high levels.
So, problems exist in new love, which can perpetuate loooong into old love, that have nothing to do with the proverbial communication, which everyone says is the key to success in love. The impact of the past on the present when it comes to love really has nothing to do with communication with your partner and is more about communication with your own damn self.
But even that communication with the messages of your own soul isn’t so much about communicating but courage – the courage to go into it all, face it, and begin to do the work of healing it.
Next, the Present and Future of Love
But, even if past imprints of what is and isn’t love are sorted out, there is a normal bumping against each other’s experiences of and wants from love.
What I want to have, do, or feel in love inevitably knocks into or rubs against what you want for love. Hence, conflict arises.
If you both have a well-tuned and independently-functioning pain meter and love meter, then you can articulate what you are feeling and what you want. Then, disappointments and bruised egos can be discussed and sorted out, as can wants and needs. This is where communication comes in, specifically, communication with the lover based on internal communication with one’s own pain and love meters, as felt on the skin, in the gut and heart, and in the peace or unrest of the mind.
Similarly, long-term visions for love and the relationship create challenges and hardships in the present, either because one person (or both) is withholding what they really want, or don’t want, for their own future, or because one (or both) person isn’t fully clear. The lack of clarity is driven by someone who simply isn’t fully formed yet and, resultingly, doesn’t know who they truly are. Thus, they may commit to things they later discover they don’t really want, or vice-versa.
Interestingly, the person who withholds what they really want, or outright lies about it, is not fully formed either, as evidenced by the fact that they lack the courage and integration of self to simply be on the outside who they really are on the inside. That is the mark of someone who either doesn’t know their authentic self or is terrified to be it, both of which are signs of someone who is not living fully authentically.
Tragically, sooooo many marriages are built on two individuals who are not fully formed, not living fully authentically, or just plain unhealed from a past of trauma or just unmet love needs. So, they are building a relationship based on adapted versions of their authentic self or just an outright version of themselves that is nowhere near their authentic self.
Couples Counseling: Helping Individuals Become Most Authentic Selves
This is why, in my counseling of couples, I am never about saving the relationship and never bring the couple together in session until I’ve done extensive counseling of each individual. I’m about helping two individuals each become their most authentic selves and then – and only then – decide, Do I want to spend my life with this person I can now clearly see?
If two individuals are not brought to a state of authenticity before deciding on the relationship, they will only continue to build or destroy a relationship based on pre-conditioned and ultimately false and unhappy versions of themselves.
Failure in the form of misery is all but inevitable.
How Important Is Dating and New Love in the Life of a Relationship?
One of the most eye-opening things I’ve learned over the last 30 years of counseling people when it comes to love is the supreme importance of the beginning. I used to view it as an almost insignificant prelude to the real show. But it’s so much more than that. Hell, in some ways, it’s so much more important.
Values and wants are established, yes. But, perhaps most importantly, patterns get set in place. Little red flags, little offenses, little hurts are either tolerated/allowed or called out and rectified, now in the moment.
Little Things Become Big Things
If there’s one thing I’ve seen clearly when it comes to crap in long-term relationships, it’s that little things become big things. Always.
If a person is pre-conditioned to miss or just allow red flags to pass by, pre-conditioned to not call it out when they have been hurt or felt criticized or minimized, their inaction teaches the other person that that behavior that hurt is okay. So, without the ‘no’ from the hurt person, the one who caused the pain has a green light to do it again. And, why wouldn’t they do it again? They have no reason to believe they ought not.
But, if the hurt one does, in fact, stand up, identify the act and pain, and insist on an apology, but the other denies it, deflects, dodges, or defends the action, that too is a gift, odd as it may sound. The one who caused the pain is conveying very clearly the message that you don’t matter, your needs, your wants, and your feelings. What a wonderful opportunity to see this person clearly and act decisively on walking away, now.
Alas, we often don’t do that, though.
We either don’t allow ourselves to feel the pain, don’t acknowledge it when we do see it, don’t act on it, or do act on it but then back down when they do the denial, defense, dodge, or deflection. We let it go when they push back. This too green lights them doing it again. But, worse, it teaches them that they can steamroll you. You can be bullied. And, since little things become big things, those early moments of bullying will, inevitably, metastasize into bigger and bigger bullying moments, spells, periods, years, and decades.
Far too often, when tracking origins with a client in a bad marriage, we will drill down to discover that the frustrations and misery being experienced today don’t just trackback 10 or 17 years, but with increased digging can be seen, more often than not, in things happening not only before the marriage but in the very earliest moments of the relationship!
No exaggeration. Little things become big things.
This only highlights the importance of doing as much self-work as possible before diving into relationships. Encouraging young people to do self-work when young, even as early as teen years, will reap benefits when it comes to inevitable relationship-building, whether in love, friendships, or career.
What's the Difference Between Love and Infatuation?
I’ve often thought of this question as generally offensive and condescending, as it is regularly used by the old to shame the young and their experiences, or by the bitter to hurt to those in the beginnings of what could be love.
Oh, so you admit, Sven, by saying “what could be love” that infatuation is not love.
Yes, because we generally think of love, at least when it’s set next to infatuation, as older or more developed. But, I do not extend the definition of infatuation to include ‘less important’ than love. I see one as the unavoidable forerunner to love.
But, Sven, speaking of words and their roots, as you did earlier, the origin of the very word ‘infatuation’ is, in Latin, ‘foolish.’ So, isn’t it hard to construct an argument that infatuation is even in the same discussion of significance when it comes to love?
No, I really don’t. In fact, I think authentic love, whether in its nascent or most advanced and wizened states, is impossible without foolishness. And, I’m not just talking about a daily silliness. I think that even the very highest forms of love, even agape, come with an innate foolishness, at the very least in the abnegation of self.
In terms of survival and fitness, how does it benefit the self to give away power, energy, time, resources/money, etc, to another, just to feel the joy of giving that love and seeing the other filled with love? From a practical level, it serves no purpose. For, if it did serve a purpose (say, of securing something in return), it would be considered transactional, which could be argued then undermines the argument it is love at all.
Love is Beautifully Stupid
Part of the beauty of love is how f*cking stupid it is.
We risk for those we love.
We maybe even endanger self or self-security for another.
We sacrifice for this person, or to be with this person.
And it’s madness. It’s loss of seemingly practical senses, and occasionally willingness to let go of control, which is rarely more than a mechanism of self-protection. Thus, to let go of control is to remove myself from the center of the universe. It is to put the love there, which is an act of beautiful foolishness.
The truth is that infatuation is a step on the journey to more developed love as well as an ongoing aspect of well-tended love. For no one ever claimed love is always rational and always practical. Or, anyone who ever did sure sounded like a clueless or rigid puke when they did.
The heart has its reasons
That reason cannot know.
-Blaise Pascal
Infatuation Will Morph Into Love…
Infatuation will naturally morph into love as long as it is kept in check by a well-calibrated and watched pain meter.
The mistake in the early phases of love/infatuation is that the individual, be they 20 or 50, is only watching the actively hopping needle on the love/excitement meter, sometimes when the pain meter is just as lively. The infatuated relationship only turns into a tornado when pains cannot be ignored and start flying about, shredding everything in their path.
Thus, the foolishness and madness of infatuation only become problematic when they are pursued for their own pursuit.
Thus, really, the difference between infatuation and love is that the former neither sees nor gives credence to what’s happening on the pain meter, but the latter does. The latter considers it equally important that the love meter dance and the pain meter be listened to. Too often, the infatuated see the mad movement of a hopping pain meter as necessary for, or even defining true love.
And, as a point of fact, if someone wants to define love that way, they can. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as they’re not hurting another person. But it’s not anything that weaves into a long-term definition of happiness. Pain at that level will rip someone to pieces, perhaps even turning them bitter, if they don’t do the work to heal the pain and pieces. I’ve seen people in their 40s or 50s still believing that a pain-ignoring (at least until it gets too big) version of love is what they really want. So, it’s not just the realm of the young.
Why Do We Call it the ‘L-word’?
I’ve seen this thing, particularly, say, in the last 30 years-ish, where in a new relationship saying, “I love you,” is held off and held off, like a lover trying to hold off an orgasm for as long as possible before the impending climax.
People avoid saying ‘love’ for any number of reasons, and it has become such a phenomenon that it is treated as a swear word, “the L-word,” something to remain unspoken or only spoken when it comes with some guarantee, it seems.
People fear investing too much of their heart too soon, for fear of getting hurt.
Others fear looking stupid by saying they’re in love if they’re not certain the other feels the same way.
Some even always wait for the other to say it first, which is fear poorly masking as self-control.
Still others just won’t say it, whether early or ever, perhaps because they dislike how it makes them feel by doing so (uncomfortable, weak, or vulnerable) or for the position it puts them in because now they can be hurt by this other person.
The verbal expression of love is an opening of the heart, which invariably means you can now hurt me, whether by leaving me or somehow taking advantage of this opening, this softness, I’m showing. And that is a risk too great, too scary, too potentially painful.
So, they demonize the word, if not the entire concept of love itself.
Or, they hide behind the notion that real love is solely actions. And, truth be told, love is action. But, especially for men who’ve classically had their very sense of self defined by action, as men have always had, saying action is love, or love is action, is too easy. It doesn’t require a stretching of self, an opening of the heart.
But words, when words perhaps don’t come easily, have greater impact. Opening the heart and expressing what’s in it in some way other than ways that come easily (action) is an indicator of greater love because a person is willing to do more and risk more, rather than just self-protect.
Is There a Downside to Using the Word ‘Love’?
Yes, and it has only been in my fifties that I realize I was guilty of it, in younger decades.
I was so verbally expressive as a person, always, that to say I loved biking, loved working out, loved pretty flowers, or loved a woman came without thought. That is to say, I was expressing what I felt in the moment.
I did, in fact, feel strong love for the person, if I said it, even if it was weeks into a relationship. It’s not that there was an absence of feeeeelings behind the words. And I even equated that with wanting to be with that person forever, which I did want. And the truth is, a whole lot of people know in weeks or a few months they want to be with someone forever, and then go on to do precisely that.
I recall once sitting around the dinner table after some family event, all six of us siblings and our six spouses, and I asked the question of all 11 of them,
“When did you know that this was the person you wanted to be with forever?”
Every single person at the table stated that it was in a month or less that they knew. Every single one.
Today, 6 of the 12 people are still married to the person they were with that evening, 25 years later.
The problem, I think, for me was that I didn’t have a fully developed sense of self to speak that love with the ability and knowledge to follow through with it tomorrow or ten years from now.
Or the other person wasn’t able to follow up with the same. In other words, while I or we indeed had the feelings, our lives, values, and futures were not in sync, in no small part because we were not each fully formed. So, the feeling of love was based on a limited data set, rather than encompassing things like the ability to date now, living situations, plans, etc.
Further, some people, such as I did, speak of love in that state of high feeling, not aware that the other person hearing that same word might interpret it very differently than how I intended it. As one example, Sven saying it in a state of heightened feeling, which may even last months or years, may be received by a woman as a statement of commitment when I might’ve not implied that, or at least not yet.
Love, Laden with Implied and Inferred Meanings and Nuances
So, yes, ‘love’ is a word laden with so many meanings and nuances, both implied and inferred, that its usage can be as dangerous to the soul as it is beautiful to the ear and heart.
So, some measure of judiciousness is wise in using the word. But treating it as a full-blown untouchable is way too far in that direction because love is vulnerability and demands an opening of the soul for it to flourish.
How Do You Know If You Have a Good Love Relationship & When Do You Leave?
I don’t mean to sound trite, but a good relationship ultimately feels good, on the whole. I had a very dear old man and woman who mentored me when I was in my late teens and living away from home. This man had on his business card,
A bad day of fishing
Is still better than a good day at work.
Why he had that on his business card, I have no idea. But it underscores a point here when it comes to assessing the value, or ‘good’-ness of a relationship.
I like to say about my girlfriend of ten years, “A bad month, or season, with her is still better than a good month, or season, with anybody else.” And that’s how I know it is a good relationship for me. We have fought loudly, lost immediate family members to death and disease, had problems with our shared adult children, gone through major career changes, enjoyed successes, and hurt each other in various ways big and small. But, even amid those seasons, there was still no one I wanted more to be with or more to take the next season with.
Does this relationship, on the whole, over time, feel good? Not just today or this week, but on the whole.
If you think in terms of a chart that is tracking the movement of a company on the stock market, there will be days or weeks, or perhaps months, where the stock is tracking dipping or even temporarily tracking down, but the overall, long term trajectory of the stock is upward. That’s a good relationship. It may be morphing into new forms and new growth, not always in the same form it was. But the new forms feel generally good. And the forecast looks good, too.
You Need Fully Operational and Monitored Pain & Love Meters
But, all of this fishing and market tracking can only be done with operational and fully monitored pain and love meters. Absent that, there is no way of accurately measuring the value of the relationship.
If you cannot feel the movements and messages of your own soul, and if you do not have the courage to act on them, you’ll too long stay in a relationship that has been tracking down, down, and down.
Or, just as bad, you’ll read as overly bad something that may be quite good.
The relationship needs to be left when the stock has not only been trending down for a long time but the prognosis is similar.
To put it in the simplest terms, leave when it no longer feeds your soul, or when you’re grasping at straws and strings. Of course, if you’re in such a state of disconnection from your own soul that you’ve let it get so bad for so long, it stands to reason that you fear leaving as much as you previously feared standing up for yourself when being hurt, and demanding that things change.
That fear of doing the hard thing of breaking up, fear of perhaps looking like the bad guy, and fear of being alone and all the attacking voices that rise up from within will contribute to someone staying in well past the freshness date printed on the back of the relationship.
The F*ck-it Point in a Love Relationship
But, in a way, you really never need to know some rules for when to quit a relationship. For, there is one inevitable and unavoidable rule. It’s what I call, “The F*ck-it Point.”
If the relationship is painful, eventually the pain will get so bad that it will drive you to take action that been considered previously avoidable or unwanted. Eventually, we reach a point where we just say, “F*ck it! I don’t even care anymore. I’m so done.”
It may hit you in the produce aisle at the grocery store, when on the jobsite, or walking to the restroom in the middle of the night. The moment of absolute clarity will come. In that moment on that day, you will have the clarity you lacked, just yesterday; and you will have the strength that, yesterday, you lacked, as well.
And if you need it to get that bad, then that’s okay.
But, when we get on the path of serious soul work, we don’t need it to get to that point. We trust our voice more and more and act on it when it is speaking clearly, rather than rejecting its calling because we have so much fear or stored-up past pain.
I was in session with a fella, recently. He said he 80% knows he wants to leave the woman he’s in a long-term relationship with. However, he went on to say, he never quits anything in life until he has done every last thing to make it work, be it a career or a business choice.
And, the truth is, there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, one of the things that makes it so effortless to walk away from a relationship is when you know you’ve done absolutely everything you can to make it work. There’s great certainty that comes with that course of action. And, it was certainty this man sought. He said he didn’t want to be lying in bed the night after breaking up, wondering if he made a mistake.
Fear. Of Making a Mistake, of Not Having Exhausted All Options and Paths, Such That Regret Might Come Later. Fear.
Again, nothing wrong with using that as a means for navigating decisions. However, what it fundamentally indicates is someone who doesn’t just trust the voice of their own soul. He knows his soul is calling him out of this relationship. He’s just afraid of making a mistake. His fear outweighs his trust. He doesn’t trust his own inner voice. His fear of being wrong causes him to distrust what his own inner voice already knows.
Thus, needing to exhaust all paths and options before leaving indicates a person who does not have an intimate relationship and trust in his or her own self, certainly not enough to outweigh his or her fears of being wrong or perhaps what other people might say, including the person being broken up from.
When fear is driving action, it more often than not indicates a person’s partial disconnect from their own self.
The more we grow, trust, and act on that voice or vibe rising up from within, the sooner we detect and act on knowing that something is bad and ain’t changing, the more we live in flow, the more we live in ease and happiness, not to mention a whole lot more peace.
Recommendations for a Healthy, Loving Relationship
It’s almost cliché to say but the big, obvious things most needed for relationships to flourish are time, energy, and focus. What we give those things to flourishes.
In the beginning, it is easy and pleasurable to give attention and time to a relationship. But as that new love settles into lovely new patterns, what so easily slides is the same commitment to nurturing that relationship, especially as other factors begin to play in – careers, kids, and families, to name a few. If the relationship is not kept as a priority, it will wither slowly.
Time, Energy, and Focus on the Relationship
This is the underlying mentality behind the proverbial ‘date night’ for married couples.
It’s about the deliberateness necessary to sustain and grow the relationship amid all the other pulls and chaos of life. Healthy, loving relationships require deliberateness. Doing together, dreaming together, reading relationship books together, and the like all work to keep the relationship from stagnating and/or to keep one (or both) people from stagnating inside a relationship that appears to function fine.
However, that deliberateness is never more important for a relationship than when applied to the single biggest destroyer of relationships. It ain’t sex or money. Nah, the real relationship killer is unhealed sh*t from one/both person’s upbringing.
Address the Unhealed Stuff from your upbringing
As I discuss in There’s a Hole in My Love Cup, all problems in a relationship, in one way or another, pre-date that relationship.
The power of parental imprinting is so enormous that it injects viruses inside the operating system of a person’s personality and values that become so baked in that they are indistinguishable from the bearer. Those play out in every decision, small and large, in a relationship.
Additionally, past loves can skew how we enter new relationships and interact in them, to the point of flat-out ruining them.
And it can be so easy to blame the other person unless we are aware that this time it may be my own sh*t that is causing me to act this way because the person in front of me now has done nothing to prove that they are anything but trustworthy, kind, and loving.
Love Allows Both Individuals to Grow
Hence, a healthy and loving relationship is one where two individuals have an individual life, in which each is constantly growing, morphing and becoming; and where there is support and encouragement to do so from the other.
My girlfriend and I have made this very clear in our relationship of 10 years. My highest aim in our relationship is to help her become the fullest expression of herself, even if it one day leads her away from me.
Her aim is the same for me, and she states so. Like trees with new and growing branches, we each change and expand to our greatest fulfillment. In doing so, the joy of being encouraged to do so by the other only expands.
(Note that winds cause sound fluctuations in this next video.)
Love Means Both Individuals Living Authentically
The human animal has a natural soul desire to expand, grow, and fly at full wingspan. And, the very best relationships are those that encourage that natural movement toward greater satisfaction. The best relationships pick us up and hold our soul when we’ve been knocked low, as is inevitable in life.
The happiest and healthiest relationships are those in which each person owns – truly owns! – their mistakes and times they’ve hurt the other, and moves to improve and hurt less.
The very best relationships are those that are founded on two individuals living authentically as individuals within the context of a supportive, kind, strong, and deliberate union.
Love is f**king awesome!
Happy Valentine’s Month!
Thanks for reading!
*** For plenty more videos on love, relationships, breakups, and healing self to make better relationships, go to the Badass Counseling page on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, and X. However, the simplest way is to go to the page on TikTok, because TT allows creators to catalog videos by subject matter rather than requiring you to scroll through hundreds to find the ones that apply to a given topic.***
***Also, you’ll find many episodes of the “The Badass Counseling Show” podcast that address love, passion, dating, and the like. Go check ‘em out on Spotify, YouTube, Audible, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your favorite podcasts.***
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-- Sven Erlandson, MDiv, Is The Author Of Seven Books, Including 'Badass Jesus: The Serious Athlete And A Life Of Noble Purpose' And 'I Steal Wives: A Serial Adulterer Reveals The REAL Reasons More And More Happily Married Women Are Cheating.' He Has Been Called The Father Of The Spiritual But Not Religious Movement After His Seminal Book 'Spiritual But Not Religious' Came Out 15 Years Ago, Long Before The Phrase Became Part Of Common Parlance And Even Longer Before The Movement Hit Critical Mass. He Is Former Military, Clergy, And NCAA Head Coach For Strength And Conditioning; And Has A Global Counseling/Consulting Practice with offices In NYC, NJ, And Stamford, CT: BadassCounseling.Com
