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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Some people believe there is no such thing. They say that as long as people themselves cannot be true, there can be no true love. Sure, most of these cynics have fallen head-over-heels in love, just like everyone else. But as often as not, after love fails, people decide that maybe it was all an illusion, a hormonal hiccup, a biological itch that had to be scratched. A passing fancy after some fancy passes. Love comes, the skeptics say, and then it goes. It’s simply too good to last.
The passage of time changes nearly everything in its path. Including love.
The power of love is not some mysterious extra-human emotional force whose mysteries and staying power are beyond our control. It is no simple itch that needs scratching. (Can you think of any “itch” that can wound us so deeply—or that feels so good when we scratch it right?) No, what I discovered is a journey that I began to call the LovePath. Every single one of us has the opportunity to travel this road of self-understanding, interpersonal bonding, and ultimate gratification. Best of all, it’s a way of living that we intentionally and proactively choose, rather than passively gain and lose.
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Brief description of the LovePath.
Intimacy is being transparent, building trust, and allowing another to look deep into your soul.
Intimacy is truly knowing one another or, taking the very sound of the word, into-me-see. Intimacy is being transparent, building trust, and allowing another to look deep into your soul. Intimacy means giving respect, developing deep friendship, and connecting on a level that words never reach.
Without intimacy, true love cannot exist. Yet intimacy is one of the most difficult things to master because to achieve it, two individuals must allow their souls to go naked before each other, ensuring that their love is for the real person—not a picture the person has painted.
Soul mate, you say? No. That phrase is too trite. A truly intimate relationship is one that exists in the deepest regions of our being, one that is essential to our innermost sense of worth and to our need for security in an insecure world. It is not just a friendship. It reaches the depths. It is oneness. It is the purest form of love.
Sexual passion subsides with the length of relationship, but passion can grow throughout a lifetime. It’s the emotion you feel when you experience something wonderful—maybe a gorgeous sunset or an exciting event—and the first thought that springs to mind is the wish that your lover were with you to share it. This passion keeps love not only alive but also dynamic, and is even better when older than when young.
Commitment is the bedrock of love. It is the decision to continue a relationship, to love someone, and maintain the love. It constitutes a measurement of how strongly we value our relationship. When one is committed to another, it means that we will always be there with the other person—no matter what—and for the other person.
In a truly loving relationship, we have an unalterable need within us for absolute confidence that we both are committed to maintaining our relationship.
We need to be certain that our love for each other will last for the rest of our lives, and that our relationship will be stable. We need to know that each feels responsibility for the other. Moreover, that neither considers the possibility of the relationship ever ending.
Romantic love without commitment is like leaping from an airplane without a parachute. You may experience the most intense physical sensations and maximum emotions of your life, but it will end badly. Very, very badly.
Even if your marriage has entered dangerous territory, you are going to find that miracles still occur—and that there is no reason one cannot happen for you.
The most important thing to know about finding true love is that you must first love yourself.
To be attractive, you must first believe you are so, and then you must work on all the areas where you believe you are not.
falling in love is a process. When people follow that process in the right way, they fall in love, whether they mean to or not. When they vacate or violate that process, they fall out of love, whether they mean to or not.
There are situations, particularly those involving abuse, which must be left behind. But in other cases, miracles still occur. People simply come to a clearer understanding of themselves, their spouses, and their love relationships—and everything changes. It’s like standing atop a hill so that they can see, from above, the path they’ve walked from attraction to acceptance to attachment to aspiration (the basic components of the LovePath). They can understand where they left the path and got lost. In addition, they can see the way to begin the attraction process again and walk together in a
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At the point of acceptance, we learn how honest we can be with another person and whether we’ll still be accepted when we tell our secrets and reveal our flaws. Acceptance is about caring.
Because these aspirations are sometimes subconscious, couples seldom share them with each other before they commit to marriage. Even when they are conscious, an amazing number of couples still do not talk about them, each simply expecting or assuming the other has or supports the same aspirations. More often, couples’ unspoken dreams compete, which means either one or both cannot achieve his or her dreams.
In a marriage that grows—I like to think of it as continually spiraling upward—each person works to help the other reach his or her aspirations, even when they seem contradictory to one’s own.
The key word in a marriage that spirals upward is cooperation. The key word in a marriage that spirals downward to destruction is control.
It may seem like common sense—and there is research to back it up—but the more deeply you fall in love with another person, the more physically attractive you tend to find that person to be.
Keep growing your mind, and you will be ever attractive to yourself and others.
What are we looking for in the emotional realm? It ranges from laughter to security to feeling truly understood. In general we want a relationship with a person who makes us feel the way we wish to feel, who evokes emotions within us that we enjoy.
We also want a person who understands us. So much of life is about how we feel. It is important, then, to find someone who cares about our emotions.
How is this spiritual element different from the emotional one? We want someone to understand us, but we also want someone to inspire us. Most of us are in search of someone who makes us feel, “I want to be like you on the inside, and I want my children to be like you.”
Even the secular researchers are writing that for a marriage relationship to reach its highest levels of fulfillment, there must be a shared spiritual component. That means shared meaning for life, purpose, values, morals, and deep beliefs. Ignore this dimension of attraction and it will come back to bite you later. Your spiritual beliefs make you who you are and guide you through life.
To make yourself the most attractive you can possibly be, take care of your body, stimulate your mind, find peace and happiness in your heart, and provide for your soul.
And never forget to believe in yourself! The more attractive you believe you are—not just physically, but in all four areas—the more your confidence makes you attractive.
It is never too late to become a more pleasant, impressive, and magnetic person who is physically dynamic, intellectually compelling, emotionally accessible, and spiritually profound. Such a person will love and be loved on the path to a life of fulfillment.
You cannot genuinely love someone if you do not accept him or her for who he or she is—even if that someone is you.
True love means accepting a person as he or she truly is. If you put any conditions on a person for them to receive your love, it is not that person you love; it is the picture you want that person to paint for you. Your love exists as long as they pretend to be what you wish, and fades if they cease to be the imaginary person into which you have made them.
healthy self-love is being able to accept who you are now rather than who you were in the past or will be in the future. It means loving yourself as you are rather than loving a picture you paint for anyone.
accepting another as he or she truly is has the power to lead him or her to fall in love with you.
Perhaps you seldom let one or both parents see who you really were because whenever they perceived you were not as they wished you to be, they hurt you. It may not have been a physical hurt, but emotional, mental, and spiritual hurt can be just as devastating and just as scarring, even if others cannot readily see those scars. Criticism, contempt, and emotional abandonment can be powerful weapons to coerce behavior or thinking. Therefore, we learn how to dress to gain acceptance from the folks with whom we wish to fit in, how to talk their language, how to mimic their ideas or beliefs, and how
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As we draw closer to sharing our genuine selves, and as we stay connected despite our imperfections, we move into the acceptance phase. Attraction is about moving closer, and acceptance is about caring for the authentic human being we find behind the picture.
Quite often, problems arise because of what we think was communicated or promised, only to find it hasn’t come true.
“I thought getting married was all about continuing to do what you already enjoyed, only with the one person you’ve chosen. I thought you knew who I was and what I enjoyed.”
Conflicting goals must be met head on, but there are often strategies for working them out.
It is a healthy exercise for any couple to talk about expectations as clearly—and as early—as possible. If you did not do so before you were married, or if you did not do so as thoroughly as you could have, it is never too late.
Our emotions, of course, say much more about who we are than do the facts of our lives. All of us have deep-rooted feelings about things from politics to morality, from spirituality to sexuality and the nature of a family. Our beliefs and values, life experiences, upbringing, and our own personal development have helped form our feelings. We reveal them as we become comfortable enough to do so. And that happens, most often, when we sense that we will be accepted for who we are.
Fear of rejection can make liars of us all. There are many issues people are afraid to share because of that fear, that terrible possibility of not being accepted. In a perfect relationship, of course, we can tell each other everything.
Most of us tend to be truthful until we are punished for it. The punishment may come in various forms, from ridicule to rejection to abandonment. When we confess something we have done—or confess an opinion or an emotion—and we are punished in some way, the message we receive is that it’s not safe to tell the truth. Consequently, couples teach each other to lie.
our desire to show someone the whole person, good and bad, brave and afraid, spiritual and scarred, never comes true until we trust another human being to love us in spite of everything.
Honesty in a relationship begins with giving each other permission to be truthful. This sounds easy when, in fact, it takes a great deal of courage and can be discouraged by even a token of rejection.
Rejection is the ultimate disconnection. Therefore, every time you fail to give me acceptance, I will redouble my efforts to avoid experiencing rejection again. I will begin painting the picture I believe you want, the one that pleases you. What I may not understand yet is how miserable I am going to be as I confine myself within this prison of dishonesty.
We teach our partners how to lie.
Therefore, you can accept the fact that your spouse no longer feels deep love for you, and you can even accept the fact that they feel love for someone other than you. You accept feelings because for the person having those feelings, the feelings are always true, even if you do not want them to be. But it does not mean that you should accept your spouse committing adultery, or even spending time with the other person by phone or face to face. The key here is to separate thoughts, feelings, and actions. Accepting a person’s thoughts, views, understandings, emotions, and the like means accepting
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If your spouse has forgiven you for something terrible, then truth, honesty, and transparency are crucial to restoring that relationship.
I cannot begin to tell you the number of times a marriage has gotten better after a crisis where one violated the other’s trust. It was not the violation that made the marriage stronger, but the courage finally to tell the truth. That caused pain, without doubt, but as the couple worked through it, they reached a level of intimacy they’d never had before. Why? Because now their relationship has true acceptance of the people themselves—with all their blemishes and scars—rather than of the pictures projected.
The LovePath is the way of genuine love. It is our map to building a healthy life of romantic attachment. Limerence is not long-lasting love. It may be a part of the love experience, but it is fickle and treacherous. If unchecked, it can set in at the wrong place and the wrong time.
