We are often told that successful interpersonal relationships are one of the most important aspect of one’s life and the biggest source of happiness for human beings.
Even though one can argue against this claim and enumerate countless of other sources of meaning and happiness in one’s life, human relationships can still greatly affect us, and because of this, getting equipped with the knowledge and skills to understand what makes successful relationships and what doesn’t, and learn how to build and develop healthy ones can be a good investment in our long term emotional stability.
Let’s try and look at two key development phases of a relationship and understand the best course of actions that maximizes the chances of a successful relationship.
Falling in Love
The first phase in many modern relationships is the romantic love – chemistry – intense feelings phase, commonly known as falling in love.
In this phase, you might feel as if love will last forever and is flowing constantly: You have strong feelings of excitement and passion for your partner, you want to know everything about them, and you basically feel something burning inside of you.
During this time, especially if you let yourself act on your emotions, everything looks easy and beautiful, working and building a relationship happens automatically, you don’t even think about it, it’s spontaneous and feels natural.
This is because your intense emotions and passion are leading the way, and since you are acting according to your feelings, you will act on that love, and work hard on the relationship without even seeing it as hard work.
“That’s great – so where is the twist here?” you might ask.
The problem is that whether you like or not, in time, these intense feelings will start to fade away. This is just how feelings and emotions work, they are fickle, mostly outside of our direct control, and there could be a thousand reasons why these exciting romantic love feelings start to fleet, ranging from potential natural evolution causes (that these feelings were just nature’s trick to have partners mate and ensure survival), to relationship issues to absence of novelty to whatever.
The point is, there would come a time when romantic and passionate love will begin to fade away, and there’s probably nothing you could do to prevent it.
Post-Romantic Love
Once you start falling out of romantic love, you will find yourself with the relationship that you built based on your passion.
What you choose to do at this moment is of crucial importance and a determining factor for the future of your intimate relationship.
Choice 1: End the relationship
You just think that since those exciting romantic feelings started to fade away, it can only mean that it’s the end of the relationship. You tell yourself: “Why be with someone if you can’t feel that passion rush anymore every second of your life”.
You end the relationship, and you move on to chasing your next emotional roller coaster, your next dopamine kick.
Whether you are aware of it or not, you might be only there for the good feelings, and once these intense emotions are gone, you are gone with it. You may or may not lie to yourself thinking that the next one will be the one, that you will find that person with whom you will constantly feel deeply passionately in love until death do you part, but the result is always the same: You end up not settling with anyone in your life, because simply that free lifetime supply of romantic and passionate emotions is nothing but a Fantasy.
Choice 2: Holding on to the past
With this course of action, you keep on holding to an imaginary “romantic love” and refuse to see the real world as it is. You hold on to an ideal of romantic love and think that it will solve your everyday relationship problems, while your relationship is sinking.
Holding on to the past means that you will keep relying on the fuel of intense and passionate romantic feelings to continue building your relationship. And since in reality, the passion tank is empty, you will then not be working on the relationship (even if you tell yourself that you are), it will become stagnant, and eventually break apart.
Choice 3: Moving on to the next Stage of your Relationship
We’ve seen from the previous two choices that if you keep on behaving according to your feelings at this crucial time, things will go downhill with your relationship.
This is when you need to change the fuel you are using for initiating action from the fuel of emotions and passionate love to the fuel of reason and values.
Do you value that relationship? ( e.g do you genuinely appreciate the company of the other person? do you believe you are compatible and that you could be life partners? )
Then commit to work on it, irrespective of how you feel, full stop.
Because that commitment is your ticket to the world of Companionate Love: a form of love that lasts through time and is characterized by deep feelings of affection, intimacy, trust, and commitment between partners. Companionate Love is that type of love that results from a daily choice you make to love your partner.
Love is not imposed on you anymore in the same way that it was during romantic love, but becomes a conscious decision and a commitment that you make every second to show up for your relationship and work on it.
I can hear you asking: “This sounds like a lot of work – Why bother?”
Well, because from that moment onward, all the love, happiness and positive emotions that you will ever experience within the couple will only be generated through working hard on the relationship. Even the romance and passion that you once experienced with your partner can now only be rebuilt through conscious effort and planning. You can’t expect Love and happiness to keep on falling on your head without working for it: all these positive feelings become now by-products of the amount of work that you put on the relationship.
This might look like a huge blow for the romantics between us, but this is really how the world works, nothing more, nothing less. Everything meaningful in life is achieved through hard work and commitment to the process, and Relationships are not excluded from this principle.
You need to consciously choose to commit on working hard on the relationship if you want to achieve long lasting love and fulfillment with your partner.
It might be a bitter to swallow for some, but there won’t ever be a “happily ever after”. Relationships are always a work in progress: The day you stop, is the day it starts to fall apart.
But the days you work on it are the core source of a deeper form of love, a profound sense of belonging and fulfillment in your relationship that outweighs the efforts you put in.
The days you work on it are the days when you and your partner can proudly look back at the artwork you’ve made out of your relationship, hold hands, and appreciate the beauty of the fireworks.
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Hey great weblog, just looking about some blogs, appears a pretty nice platform youre making use of. Im currently using WordPress for a couple of of my web sites but looking to change 1 of them more than to a platform comparable to yours as being a trial run. Anything in specific youd recommend about it?
Hi – Thank you for the comment.
I’m also just using WordPress with the default 2019 theme. There are many tweaks that can be done with it.
Good luck with your websites!