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W
hen you were sixteen, how did
you imagine love to be? Did you
picture someone who would
adore and understanD you? Someone who
you could share yourself with completely?
And did you believe, that you would love and
cherish your new partner, make them as
happy as they could possibly be and never do
anything to hurt them?
We all dream of perfect love. And many of
us experience it at the beginning of a
relationship. We adore, and we are adored,
and everything good seems destined to last
forever. Then we have our first argument, we
exchange our first hurtful words, and as the
years go on we fight a little more and make
love a little less. We experience the
disappointment that comes from good love
gone bad. So we either move on to the next
relationship, and all too often repeat the
same pattern, or we stay where we are and
reconcile ourselves to what we have. We all
dream of perfect love, and yet far too many of
us settle for something that is anything but.
In our society we are taught to dream big
dreams about love, but we are also taught
that long-term love is a compromise of
differing views and diminished passion.
When you've been married twenty years,
staid is apparently normal. We no longer stay
up all night talking, and we certainly don't
spend all day in bed, at least not together.
Gradually we forget our dreams of how love
could be, of how love used to be, and get used
to lower expectations. We settle for okay, and
console ourselves with the belief that that's
just how it is. But the fading of love is not an
inevitability. Passion and excitement do not
lessen with the years; in a good relationship
they increase.
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Love is like anything else in
life. It follows the physical laws that
determine that something either grows or it
dies.
Love either gets better and better, or it
gets worse and worse. So your long-term
relationship will either be considerably more
beautiful and fulfilling than it was in the
beginning, or it will be far more
disappointing and miserable. Passion
decreases because trust has been damaged,
and without trust love can't grow. If you
don't feel safe, cherished and taken care of in
your relationship you'll find it very hard to
keep on loving. When we don't trust our
partner, when we experience too many rows,
we can't possibly keep opening ourselves to
deeper experiences of love. But when your
relationship has a solid basis of trust, when
you treat your partner exactly as you would
love to be treated, when you take care of the
other and share yourself fully with them, you
will discover a level of passion and a depth of
love you didn't even dream of when you were
sixteen. Because reality can be a million times
more amazing than your dreams, if only
you'll allow it.
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