As a marriage counselor, one of the most difficult questions facing couples when they consider the idea of a lifelong commitment to their partner is, “Will I always be loved the way I am now?” and “Will I always love this person with whom I am presently in love?”
I can fully understand people’s hesitancy to commit. How bad would it be to commit yourself to a partner for life only to find that after a while, you no longer love them or vice versa? If we could be absolutely sure that the answer to both questions was “Yes”, committing to another person would be a lot easier. Unfortunately, we all have experienced the off and on nature of love.
Often, we feel tremendous love for a person and yet at other times, we can feel the opposite. Yet other times, we may feel almost nothing for them, a kind of indifference. Oddly, these changes can happen quickly, too. If love is synonymous with a feeling, then the idea that we would always feel a certain way towards someone seems unrealistic. There is no one who feels exactly the same way all the time about anybody, is there? Normally, you feel what you feel when you feel it. Thus, what can anyone promise their mate if not that they will always love them?
It helps if you think of love as a way of being and something you do, not just something you feel. While you can’t promise your partner that you will always feel love for them, you can promise your partner that you will always be loving. Your behavior is one of the things that you do have control over.
A remarkable thing happens when you decide to be loving and begin to do loving things for your partner. You end up feeling love for them and you most likely will like them more, too. I’m not exactly sure why this happens. It may have something to do with a theory, called cognitive dissonance, which states that human beings have a hard time holding two or more contradictory thoughts or beliefs in their head at the same time. For instance, if you think, “I don’t feel very loving towards my partner” combined with “I just did something particularly loving for them,” you will experience cognitive dissonance. The mind tends to resolve the dissonance by either changing the behavior or the contradictory belief. What usually happens is that you will change your thinking about your partner. Having just done something kind for them, you will change your belief to, “Actually, I do love them.”
Early in the morning, before I leave the bedroom, even if I’m in a hurry, I walk over to my sleeping wife and kiss her gently on the lips. She smiles. I whisper, “I love you” and then I leave for work. As a marriage counselor, I practice what I preach. I know she likes this, but I also know that doing it (being loving) puts me in touch with how much I love her. As I say this to her, I can feel that these words are true for me. It is not just a perfunctory gesture. That loving behavior, that way of being is something I can always achieve if I want to and it does a lot to alleviate any concerns I might have had about losing that loving feeling.
Everybody who is in a committed relationship has wondered at some point whether their partner will always love them. Dr. Jim Goldstein, who is an a professional marriage counselor, provides some valuable suggestions regarding making your relationship prosper. This suggestions should be helpful for all relationships.
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