Wednesday 23 January 2013

How To Fall in Love (or fall in love with your partner all over again!)

Those of you who are familiar with my website and articles will know that I offer a variety of ways to both understand and solve relationship problems. However, over the years I have come to realise that everything I suggest boils down to one key principle - and it is this principle that I want to discuss in this blog.  If you can apply what I am describing wholeheartedly, I promise you that you will fall in love and become extremely happy. If you are already in a relationship, applying these ideas will bring back the love that you had when you first met your partner.

I often use the experience of falling in love to explain how relationships work and I am going to do the same here. Think back to the last time you fell in love or experienced intense feelings of love for your partner or for anyone or anything else for that matter. As you remember that experience notice that something was absent from the relationship at that moment. That something was judgment. You fell in love (or re-discovered love) when you removed judgment from your partner (or, putting it the other way round, you totally accepted them).

To understand why this is you will need to remember that love is not an emotion - it is a permanent state that exists between you and your partner. Love is always present, even when you are not feeling it! When you were first attracted to your partner you stopped judging them - their looks and their behaviour. Instead you saw all their beauty and gifts and over-looked anything that seemed negative about them . This is the non-judgment bit. They would have sensed that you weren't judging them and would have bathed in your acceptance of them. This would make them feel great and they would have started liking you because they felt good in your presence. They then stopped judging you and the process of falling in love became a self-reinforcing positive cycle as each of you accepted each other more and more. The removal of judgment allowed you both to feel innocent and perfect and that is when your hearts opened and love showed up.  Of course this dynamic of non-judgment happened simultaneously as the two of you fell head over-heals in love!

So far, so good. The next question then is why you might fall out of love again. Well the answer is again judgement. As time goes by you begin to notice little annoying habits and things about your partner that you would like to change. You have already started judging them  - they no longer seem so perfect. And they feel this immediately. Feeling judged reminds them of how much they dislike and judge themselves and this makes them feel insecure. Rather than feel into this pain they project it onto you and start judging your behaviour (if they haven't already started doing so!). You then feel judged and the cycle spirals downwards towards the power struggle (see my website for more on this stage of a relationship). The bottom line is that you have fallen out of love and those heady early days of the relationship seem a distant memory.

Naturally you want to get back to those feelings, so here are some suggestions about how to do this. The key is to STOP JUDGING your partner. You can do this in the short term by appreciating them rather than wanting to find fault with them or change them. Notice all the wonderful things about them that you love and let them know. Pour your love onto them at every opportunity without becoming needy. If you can genuinely do this from the heart, you will fall back in love because you have brought non-judgment back to the relationship. This will work, but you may notice that you slip back very easily into judgment. This is because you probably  judge yourself both consciously and subconsciously. This means that you are continually projecting this out onto the people around you, including your partner. You will not notice you are doing this, but it will be picked up by your partner and they will then be tempted to judge you!

The way forward is to let go of the self-judgment. This requires changing the beliefs you have about yourself, particularly any guilt and feelings of failure you have stored away in your life. For more help with this have a look at my website or read my book which contains a detailed description of how self-judgment develops and how to work to change those negative beliefs and bring back the love.


As you heal self-judgment you will start accepting your life and everything in it. You will automatically reveal the love that has always been available to you and which you have caught glimpses of as you fell in love or slipped back into love at various times in your life. You can extend these periods of happiness indefinitely, simply by ending judgment. The unavoidable truth is that judgment hides love. Acceptance reveals it again. If only we could remember this and apply it to ourselves and our relationships, then our problems would cease and life would become blissful.

Bye for now, Peter

PS My new book is available on Amazon as a Kindle download or Paperback

 

Click image to learn more about the book

The No. 1 Relationship Problem-Solving Tip


My website www.iloveyouloveme.com provides help with the range of typical problems that can crop up in a relationship. There is however one issue that is common to all these problems, and in fact it’s the most important relationship principle there is. It is:




If your partner is behaving badly,
they are hurting inside

While this is a simple enough idea, it is incredibly difficult to accept in practice. When your partner is behaving in an unpleasant or hurtful way, the last thing you will feel like doing is to be kind and empathic towards them. And yet this emotionally mature response to bad behaviour is the key to solving your problems and having a much happier, love-filled relationship.

The way to work with this principle is to understand the underlying cause of all relationship problems. Our essential state is one of love and connection to the people and world around us. We suffer whenever we turn away from this state and start believing that we are separate and personally lacking in love. When we lose our connection to love, fear and pain immediately enters our mind. We try to ignore this pain by becoming dependent on the people around us to give us love, or by becoming independent so that we can pretend that we don’t need love. Both these strategies create a range of negative behaviours that push our partners away and hurts them.

So if your partner is driving you mad, under-valuing you, withdrawing from you, or acting in an untrustworthy way (or any number of other problematic ways), then they have lost touch with their natural state of love and connection. It doesn’t matter how confident and happy they seem on the surface, if you are not experiencing love from them, then they are hurting inside.


The way forward for any relationship problem is therefore to recognise bad behaviour as a call for love.  Avoid judging your partner for their behaviour and then open your heart so you can bring love back to yourself and your partner. This is an act of supreme leadership, but I promise you that it will always work. Do have a look at my online coaching module called Lovecoach for practical ways to solve a variety of relationship problems using the principle I have just described.

If you like this blog, why not subscribe to my regular issues? – and please tell your friends about the blog and website if you think that it would be useful to them.

If have just launched my new e-book - Bringing Back The Love. It explains all the principles I use in my website and blog in detail and provides lots of coaching exercises for you to work through to bring more love into your life. - if you are interested click this.

Bye for now.

Peter