We can read many very big books about relationships and which problems can occur within them. When we read all those big books, we would not have time for a romantic relationship and never experience the difficulties of dealing with the annoying behavior of our partner. In this way, reading big books are very helpful. But if you didn’t know this yet and ended up in a relationship anyway, maybe I can share an insight with you that can open your eyes and can help you and your partner to bring more love inside your relationship.
One of the biggest reasons why people struggle in their relationships is because the relationship is not oriented enough on the exchange of love. Both partners are together because of each other’s needs. They need their partner to fulfill these needs. In other words, they need someone to take care of them. You will ask yourself, what is so wrong about that? Taking care of your partner is good right? Yes, of course, it’s good, but the purpose of a romantic relationship is to share love and taking care of each other should not be the priority. When our relationship becomes oriented on caregiving, we automatically end up in a game of micro-manipulation where we try to take advantage in the balance of power and slowly the real love fades away. This maybe sounds a little dramatic, but it is actually happening very subtlely and spreads over a long span of time.
In this article, I want to go deeper into this matter and explain to you the difference between caring and loving and what those terms actually mean. This should give you some powerful insights about yourself, your partner and your relationship. When you can have open communication with your partner and contemplate together about your relationship, you can find out if love or care is really the foundation of your relationship. By being open together and creating a safe space of communication where you both can share your feelings without judgment, you are able to make love the priority of your bond… and to live long and happily ever after.
How high is love on your checklist?
The human being is a complex machine. You need to be a good manager in order to be able to operate such a strange thing as a human. There are so many different things it needs, from very basic to very subtle and refined. We need to constantly make choices, only our feelings and thoughts to help us make them. Like when you are hungry you feel you need to eat, but often you need to give priorities to other tasks you need to do to help your human. You better not cancel the appointment with your doctor who is following up on your chronic diarrhea, because you are a little hungry. As a good manager, you know your health is more important than having your lunch break on time. We need to be well aware of what is a priority on our human checklist, so we can make ourselves as satisfied and functional as possible.
Our strongest need is, of course, to feel safe and feel in control of our survival. Our survival is always the highest item on our checklist. When our survival is at stake, it is normal that we give it all our attention and prioritize it. We, humans, are real specialists at surviving. We are a result of millions of years of evolution, constantly adapting to a hostile environment. We are fully equipped to deal with any threat and make sure we can live another day. But the question is: “when can we relax a bit?”. When do we feel safe enough to let go of our survival mode and give some attention to our other needs, to higher and more refined needs? Is it possible for us to be strong enough and have the right amount of faith in ourselves, so we can relax a little about our own primitive needs for survival and prioritize for example… love?
The longing for love is very subtle and does not feel so urgent and strong as our yearning to feel safe and stay alive. But even if its voice is subtle and soft, love is as important as life itself. We can fool ourselves and only focus to make our life safer and safer. We can get lost in this desire until we live in a big palace with our own security crew existing of a crossbreed of highly intelligent gorillas and velociraptors. But our heart keeps feeling empty. Our heart will keep missing the satisfaction it needs until we can make the click. When we realize we are strong enough and we can take good care of ourselves as the good managers we are, we can relax about our safety and give priority to fill the emptiness in our hearts with love.
When we decide to have a romantic relationship, the success of this bond will depend on how much we are able to make love our priority. When we get stuck in survival mode, our relationship has a big chance to become dysfunctional. Since both partners will use each other for fulfilling their needs of being taken care of, they’ll become codependent of each other. When we are unable to prioritize love in our relationship because we don’t feel safe and confident enough yet, we will use our relationship as a tool to guarantee our survival. With survival, I don’t mean necessarily matters of life or death, but rather our personal feeling of our own capability to be in control of our life and be without worry. If we don’t have enough courage and don’t feel safe enough with our situation, we can’t prioritize love in our relationship. We will be needy and we need our partner to take care of us. But caring is not loving. Of course, it is important to take care of each other when it’s necessary. But when care becomes the purpose of the relationship, it will start to drain us from our energy while we need love to replenish our battery.
Caring is hard work
Caring is a feeling. It is a feeling you get from an energetical connection with something or someone. The reason why you care is because you believe the current condition of that something or someone has an impact on you. The moment you care about someone, you believe you share the faith of that person too, whether it is true or not. Too often we don’t make a difference between caring and loving, while there is actually a huge difference. Caring is a feeling that comes directly or indirectly from our own neediness, while love is general and unconditional. Care actually comes from fear, while love is the opposite of fear. Caring is the opposite of loving, did you see this coming? Probably you don’t agree at all. That’s alright, I don’t care. But I invite you to observe your own feelings drastically and contemplate them. Why do you care about your partner? Can you think about it entirely through? When you dive deep, you always come to fear. Maybe the fear your partner might leave you in some way or another. He or she might break up with you or get sick and die. Sorry for the heaviness of this subject by the way, but for this human you are managing… life is serious.
When you care about someone, actually it is all about you. You care about your partner because of personal reasons. Caring is part of our human toolbox, it is a survival strategy to help us keep ourselves safe. Because we care, we can do something about it. Care is a feeling that triggers us to change the situation to a better one for ourselves. It is an important tool in our human toolbox we can use, as the good managers we are, to keep ourselves thriving and moving forward. Caring is hard work. The feelings of care give us a strong urgency to start acting upon it.
There is such a huge misconception going on that caring and loving share the same underpants, but maybe that’s because we don’t know what love really is. Love is hard to understand because it is so subtle and precious, not easy to hold in your hand. But that’s for later on in this article. Let’s zoom in more on caring for now. In a relationship, we can both care or get care. We can care about and being taken care of by our partner. Both giving care and receiving care are originated from a fear, the fear of being alone. In order to be very good at surviving, our human is armed with a very big fear of being alone. This fear gives us a strong urgency to be with other people because together we are stronger and we are more prone to survive. Thanks to our ways of getting care and giving care in relationships with others, we make sure nobody wanders off and gets eaten by a horde of saber tooth tigers. Caring is there to help us, both as an individual and as a group of people.
Giving care
There are several possibilities why you are in the role of the one who cares and gives care in your relationship. There is always a reason why you start caring about something and it is very interesting to recognize these reasons within yourself. By understanding “why” you care, you can decide yourself if it’s actually necessary to care or not. It is also interesting to find out how your partner often intuitively feels how he or she can make you care. If your partner has a lot of needs, I’m sure he or she knows exactly how to give you a reason to care about it and of course fulfill those needy needs. Let us discuss four reasons which can trigger our feelings of caring.
Feeling guilty
Can you recognize a situation where your partner tried to get something done from you by making you feel guilty? Giving someone guilty feelings is an extremely powerful technique to make someone care about your agenda and even fulfill your needs. Whether consciously or unconsciously, I’m sure we all have used a little manipulation in our relationship and bring forth the necessary arguments in a discussion to make our partner start feeling guilty so he or she can fulfill our needs. Feeling guilty is not fun at all and makes us care even against our will. Whether we want it or not, we start caring about what our partner needs… just to get rid of these annoying guilty feelings.
From when we are young child our parents teach us how to feel guilty because it is such a powerful technique to change someone’s behavior and to have some power over someone. Feeling guilty if we did something bad is normal. Sometimes we make mistakes and thanks to the feelings of remorse, we get triggered to learn from our errors. But we have to be careful that this helpful feeling is not used against us. It is necessary to adopt the right morals and belief systems and not to feel bad whenever someone else wants us to. You should care about something when you choose it yourself. Don’t let for example your partner decide when you should care and let him or her give you guilty feelings like you did something bad. The moment you adopt the beliefs and morals of others, then they can make you feel guilty about them. That’s why its important to believe in what you think is right or wrong. Your parents already made you adopt that it is wrong to poo on the carpet, so they could make you feel guilty about it every time you did it. So don’t adopt also all the morals and beliefs of your partner. The more rules you absorb, the more you can be held accountable for.
Duty and responsibility
The next reason why you care is out of duty and responsibility. Actually this is close to caring because of the guilt feeling. The difference is that this time you choose yourself to care because you believe you should, whether it is justified or not. You believe that it is your duty to care and fulfill the needs of your partner. Your partner is not “making” you care by giving you guilty feelings or putting him or herself in a victim position, but you follow your own rules and you feel it is the right thing to do.
But how did you come to believe the ideas that are the base of your call for duty? If you believe that it is your job to do all the chores in the housekeeping… did you come up with this yourself? Maybe you think it is your responsibility to do all the work in the house and clean after your partner because your mom or dad did the same? Maybe you take up too many responsibilities and you feel a heavy load on your shoulders. But it’s your duty, so you have to keep going. It’s your duty to take care of your partner even if he or she is very demanding and has the highest of needs and expectations. When you feel this heavy weight on your shoulders, maybe it’s time to reconsider what you believe in, so you can be less strict on yourself… and give your partner some opportunities to grow and take care of him or herself.
Empathy
Caring triggered by a feeling of empathy is different. While the two above are more on a mental level, empathy is energetically. Empathy means that you literally “feel” something when your partner has needs. When your partner feels sad, you feel sad. When your partner is stressed, you get stressed. You care because “you” feel it. In order to get rid of the stress, your partner needs to feel peaceful first. Unless you can shield yourself off very well in your personal happy place, everyone has feelings of empathy. But some people are more sensitive than others. Some people put on them all the problems of the world because they immediately feel empathy. Empathy means also that you make a problem “yours”. When you watch the news and something bad happens in a country far away, it can become “your problem” if you allow yourself to “feel” it. Thanks to very empathetic people who feel pain when the rainforest burns off, wars happen in the middle east, animals get beaten to death for their fur,… these problems get attention.
Feeling empathy for your partner definitely does the job to start caring and also doing something about it. Whether your partner’s feelings are justified or not, you will care since you feel them too. If your partner is scared of spiders, you will feel stress in your solar plexus and every day you are going to search the whole house for spiders so your partner has nothing to worry about. When you feel your partner’s peace of mind, you can have peace of mind too and have a good night’s rest without the possibility of spiders crawling in your nose. It is so nice of you to share the feelings of your partner and therefore try to be the savior, but maybe it is a bigger help if you care less so your partner can become strong and be his or her own hero.
Compassion
Compassion is a special case since it is a feeling completely grounded in love and doesn’t come out of fear or personal needs. While empathy is an energetical take-over from your partner’s feelings, compassion comes purely out of love for your partner. When your partner is afraid of spiders, you don’t get a painful knot in your belly. Instead, you feel nothing but love for him or her. The adversity of your partner brings you to your heart and you feel the need to give him or her love. I can only describe compassion as a beautiful sadness for the suffering of everyone and everything.
When you are compassionate you will not exterminate the spiders in the house like a bloodthirsty maniac fed by the stress and anger your partner’s fear triggered in you. When you will meet that innocent spider, you get tears in your eyes and you help it on a piece of paper and put it on a pretty flower in the garden with his friends. Then you give your partner a hug and you let him or her share your love for everything. Compassion is unconditional and general and doesn’t ask for any of your effort and energy. When you act from compassion, you feel good and replenished and you can make your partner feel the same. Like you can have a happy kind of love for what is good, compassion is a love for what is going wrong in this world. Compassion makes you care with love. But further in this article, we’ll talk more about this!
Receiving care
When you let your partner take care of you, you give your personal power away to the other. This means you become dependent on that person, which puts you in a weak position. In order not to lose your source of care you are dependent on, you have to find a way to maintain the balance of power in the relationship. You will need to use some clever skills to keep being in control. A good strategy is to give your partner guilty feelings or other forms of manipulation so he or she keeps caring a lot about fulfilling your needs. So maybe it looks like you are in control, but the truth is you gave away your personal power to your partner because you are afraid. Driven by your fears you force your partner to take care of you, whether consciously or unconsciously. As long the main purpose in your relationship is to fulfill your personal needs and you use your partner to do the work for you, there is not enough place for love. Let’s discuss a few reasons why a person can’t let go of their neediness and is, therefore, unable to put love higher on the human checklist.
Health problems
The most logical reason for needing the care of your partner is when you have health problems, that’s evident. When you have a little cold it is very nice to be taken care of, you deserve it! But when you have serious health problems in the long term, it’s important you find a way to cope with it without sacrificing your relationship. How difficult it can be to struggle with severe health problems, it is important that it doesn’t weigh too much on your relationship. When coping with your health problem gets most of the attention in your relationship, your partner becomes a full-time caregiver instead of a full-time lover.
When you are a representative for a chainsaw producer, accidents can happen during the free demo. When you come home without legs, of course, you will need to rely on your partner to reach the cookie jar. It is normal that many fears start kicking in. Imagine your partner would abandon you and you will never have a cookie again? Even though you will have to face many difficulties in your life caused by your health problems, keep on having love be the purpose of your relationship and not your disability. Even if you are in a wheelchair and your partner needs to do all the work, you can overload your companion with love. Don’t let your fear and neediness take over your relationship even if you are heavily disabled, because there is always so much love you can give: kind words, a big smile, support and advice, humor, hugs,… Even if you need a lot of care, love can still be a priority if you are not giving in to fears!
Material and financial stability
In most places in the world, every individual has enough opportunities to make a good living for their selves, no matter your intrinsic capabilities. Even if you have no talent at all, you can make yourself useful and make good money in politics. But still, there are too many people not getting enough opportunities to make a good living and have no economic stability. it is often necessary to rely on your partner for having enough food on the table. As we saw above, our survival and having our primary needs met is always a top priority. If we depend fully on our partner for taking care of our food, water, housing, clothing,etc.… it is an extra big challenge for us to keep calm and have faith. When we get lost in our fears of starving on the streets, we can’t be a loving spouse. We will be too focused making sure our partner takes care of us and our material needs will be always prioritized over love. Fearing of being or becoming poor will not make your relationship better.
Needing your partner for your material needs can be objective but also subjective. Maybe you are very well capable to take care of a good living but there are certain reasons you rather depend on your partner for this. Maybe you don’t believe in yourself, you are afraid to fail at your job, you are too busy with other activities or maybe you rather be lazy and watch television all day. Actually, it doesn’t matter at all if you go working or not or whether or not you take care of your own living. What matters is that you believe you can if you had to. If your partner takes care of the money and you take care of the house and the children, that’s perfectly fine. What is important is that you are not afraid of having no material and financial stability. What is important is that you can let go of this fear so you can let your relationship be about love. You have faith that whatever happens, you’ll be alright. You deeply trust you’ll get food in your belly somehow.
Low self-confidence
Having the need of being taken care of by your partner is often caused by not believing enough in yourself. Maybe you noticed, we shall go a little deeper to the root of the problem. If you don’t believe you are able to take care of yourself and take matters in your own hands if you need to, you will automatically depend on your partner for this. This goes beyond being able to take care of your material and financial stability, but this is about a general trust in yourself. When we don’t believe we can satisfy our needs and meet our goals, it is very easy to let our partners do the work for us. We maybe get even a little too comfortable in this situation. We might more and more convince ourselves that “we can’t do it”. Whenever we face difficulty, we look with sweet puppy eyes and a pouting lip and convince our partner to buy the hemorrhoid cream in the pharmacy. We can actually do it our selves too, but it’s so easy to have low self-confidence.
An extra problem is that when you become dependent on your partner for all your needs, you miss out on the opportunity to find out how strong and capable you really are. When you decide to stay in your comfort zone and let your partner take care of your needs, you never get the opportunities to evolve as a person. We evolve through trial and error. When we have the courage to face our obstacles and we are not afraid to fail a few hundred times before we finally succeed, we grow as persons and we boost our self-confidence. The more strongly we feel as a person, the more capable we are to put love as a priority in our relationship.
Fear of being alone
We now got to the core of the smelly onion. If we think everything through down to the deepest layer, we come out to a fear we all have as humans: the fear of being alone. We are all programmed to stay in the company of others because together we are strong and have a bigger chance to survive than being by ourselves. Therefore we sometimes tend to put our claws in our partner’s skin and never let go. We need our partner, otherwise, we are all alone with me, myself and I. The idea of ending up all alone is a huge fear. With most of us, this fear operates unconsciously but with some of us, it is very present and actively dominating their lives.
The fear of being alone can be very active when somehow in our lives it was triggered, otherwise, it stays dormant and acts very subtle. For example, when one of your parents left your family when you were a child, for sure this fear came up to help prevent you from being all by yourself. Once this fear did his job in life, it never really goes away again unless you deal with it heads on… which is in most of the cases, it’s unlikely. In a romantic relationship, this fear can play out by becoming very needy and dependent on your partner. You very quickly feel afraid to be abandoned and you do everything it takes to make sure your partner keeps taking care of you even if it’s suffocating.
When the fear of being alone is very present in you, it is important to become very aware of this and identify it together with your partner. Become your own observer and be mindful every time your fear gets triggered so you can convince yourself that everything is just fine. And definitely include your partner when it comes to coping with your fear of abandonment. He or she can help convince you that everything is alright and you are loved very much. Even if your fears are strong and sometimes taking over you, your awareness is always bigger. When you are aware of what is going on, you can identify it’s your fear needing some of your attention right now and you can calm it down together with your partner. The solution for fear is love. So if you have a lot of fears, make sure there is even more love in your relationship to deal with it.
Codependency in relationships
You probably already heard of the term ‘codependency’ in relationships. You are in a codependent relationship when you and your partner need each other so much that you became dependent on each other to a dysfunctional degree. You are both the caregiver and the one being taken care of at the same time. You don’t feel strong enough to deal with your own life without your partner and the other way around. For everything you want to do, you need each other to help or you will feel lost and afraid. It is maybe beautiful to have your lives completely entangled but not all that glitters is gold.
In a codependent relationship, you claim your partner to always be ready to fulfill your needs to the extent your partner can’t be him or herself anymore. Instead of being entangled in each other’s love, you are entangled in each other’s fear. Neediness is the fuel for the continuation of the relation. Even if this kind of relationship provides the regular fights and discussions, it keeps on going until the bomb explodes.
This kind of relationship blocks the process of individual growth. It stops both partners from evolving and becoming strong people who are in control of their own life and not afraid to face the normal obstacles people face in life. We keep ourselves stuck in our own fears and needs and thanks to our partner who takes care of us, we don’t need to do anything to change our way of living. Instead of working on ourselves and gaining courage from every obstacle we personally go through, we use subtle manipulation to make sure our partner does the work for us. We can put ourselves in a victim position, give our partner guilty feelings, get emotional and many more other clever tactics in order to make our partner fulfill our needs so we can stay safely in our comfort zone.
Of course, it is very human to rely on our partner and even use a little manipulation to get things done from each other. But in a codependent relationship, this takes place to a dysfunctional degree. Love is not the priority anymore in this relationship, because we give more significance to the satisfaction of our personal needs. Our fears and needs keep us from experiencing real love in our relationship. After the period of being madly in love slowly fades, we put our personal needs first and driven by our fear of ending up alone and the belief, we are not strong enough to take matters in our own hands. Both partners miss out on real love and stay with a hole in their hearts. Because they are too busy trying to find satisfaction for their needs, they are often not conscious of the fact that love is less and less present in their relationship. Mostly when one of the partners becomes conscious of the lack of love in the relationship and of the lack of freedom to be themselves and express themselves, the relationship ends.
So the information in this article can maybe be helpful to become conscious in time and save your relationship before it escalates. Together with your partner, you can have the courage and honesty to realize personal needs and allow love to become the purpose in the relationship. Together you can communicate about this openly without pointing fingers. Just see things the way they are without putting the blaming the other. Blaming is, after all, another manipulation technique to protect yourself and use your partner as a shield to stay safe. In order to bring love in the relationship, it is necessary to become vulnerable and let go of all your defense mechanisms. Have both the courage to objectively analyze your relationship without jousting. If you can both do this, you put the doors wide open for love and you can save your relationship! So let’s leave our battle station now and talk about love…
Love flows effortlessly
In physics, scientists state there are four fundamental forces in nature: electromagnetism, weak interaction, strong interaction and gravity. While the first three powers are very impressive and don’t need further explication for the sake of this article, gravity is very subtle. Just take a jump and you already defeated its power for a second. The power of gravity is easy to control since even birds can lift off and fly. But on the other hand, it is gravity that holds the whole galaxy together. While gravity is very subtle, it is the most important force. And what is even more special about it: it is completely invisible. They call the gravity particles ‘gravitons’, but so far no scientist has observed one yet.
Love is exactly the same as gravity. While gravity is a physical force, we can see love as a spiritual force. Love is an energetical power that keeps us all together. It is an invisible glue that makes sure we can’t wander off and feel alone. Since it is invisible and energetical, you can not really define ‘what’ it is. Like with the gravitational force you can only observe what it does, but not what it is. To me personally, love makes me recognize in the other, that everything that this person is, I am that as well… whether it is good or bad. The more love I feel, the fewer differences there is between me and other people seem to exist. I’m sure that when we would feel a whole bunch of love, boundaries between people would fade and we would feel as ‘one’. But I recommend you to contemplate about this yourself.
Just like gravity, love is always there. It is independent of us. When we take care of someone, we get tired… but you can never get tired of giving love. Taking care of someone drains energy, but when we love, we don’t use the energy of our own. We channel a power that is already there and there is an infinite amount of it. All we need to do is to relax our body, open our heart and let love replenish us. Those exact feelings of responsibility and duty that puts so much weight on our shoulders, the energetical pathways to our heart gets blocked. When we have too many responsibilities and duties to take care of others, we burn out energy instead of getting replenishing it.
The energy of love flows effortlessly. Loving someone is easy. A romantic relationship is supposed to be easy. The purpose is to come home to your partner after a day of draining your energy at work and to replenish each other with love. You never need to be cheap on giving love to your partner. As long you are open and relaxed enough, the moment you give love to others, new love comes your way in return from the infinite source or by others.
The importance of relationships
It is one of our natural instincts to be in relationships with other people and/or to belonging to a group. When you are together with others, you are stronger and you have bigger chances of survival. Love is, of course, important in every kind of relationship or social activity, but a romantic relationship is special. This kind of relationship needs love as its priority to be successful and the satisfaction of other needs should be a bit lower ranked on our checklist.
Taking care of each other is a very important part of being human. We can never be one hundred percent independent and fulfill all our needs, just by ourselves. We are social beings and our survival and happiness depend a lot from what we get from our relationships with others. It is normal that most of our relationships don’t have love as their priority. Most of our relationships are there to satisfy each other’s needs, even if love is not entirely absent… like our relationship with friends and coworkers. We need other people for countless services. To make money, to be healthy, to have fun, to win a sports game, to water your plants if you are on holiday. Humans are very complex beings, we have a lot of needs to satisfy and therefore it is super nice we can rely on other people.
Nonetheless, most of our relationships can be energy-draining, certainly if we have to give more than we can get back. For example, if you have to take care of old and sick family members or you have to work very hard to satisfy your clients at work. That’s why it’s so important we can also have a relationship where love is the purpose and not the satisfaction of other needs. A romantic relationship is perfect for this. In such a relationship, you can let love be the centerpiece, so you can replenish your partner with love and the other way around. But in order to do this, you have to be able to muster the courage to park your ego and don’t let your needs and fears take over the subtle energy that love really is.
Get ready for love
Love can only be the foundation of your relationship if both partners are ready for it. When we worry too much about our individual safety and let ourselves be carried away too much by our fears and needs, it is difficult to put love first. Love is the opposite of fear. In order to love, we need courage. We don’t need to be the strongest or most gifted person in order to love our partner. We just need to have the courage and the faith to decide and realize we are actually ‘safe’. In order to love our partner and go beyond caring, we need to realize our basic needs are satisfied for now. We are in control of what we give attention to or priority to on our human checklist. So all we need is a little awareness of our inner mechanisms and start getting in control of them. So we can consciously put love on top of our checklist and feel strong enough to leave our basic needs and instincts for a while.
We just need some training as the manager of our human. Self-development is nothing more than observing your own behavior, contemplating it and getting the right conclusions from it. It is about becoming aware of all your mechanisms and taking more control of them. You don’t undergo your life, but you start using your talents, capabilities and all your other human skills to make the best of your life. By observing yourself, you can become aware every time you give priority to your survival mechanisms which are based on your needs and fears. On the other hand, you can also become aware of the hole in your heart and slowly start appreciating the importance of love, which is maybe now still such a vague and abstract concept. Once you have enough faith in yourself and in your own manager-ship, you can park your fears and needs once and a while and also give yourself the love your human needs. When you believe in yourself, your body will automatically follow its ‘manager’ and become less scared and needy.
Love transforms care into compassion
When you already in a romantic relationship you can, together with your partner, get ready for love together. Become aware every time you are using your partner to take care of you and slowly work on your skills as your own manager. Nevertheless, of course, it’s perfectly OK to take good care of each other as long love stays the foundation of your relationship. Caring for each other with love and letting the love constantly replenish you when taking care of your partner asks for your energy. As long as love in your relationship is the dominant factor, the energy of taking care of each other’s needs can be easily compensated and your romantic relationship can stay very healthy and functional.
And now it is about time to re-introduce this very powerful concept: “compassion”. Love is an energy that can be combined with every act and can reconcile every contradiction. Being “loving” is being in the state of letting the energy of love come in you and giving it for example to your partner. Being loving is like a mood, it is a state of being. Being loving can happen when we decide to be in our hearts. When we have the courage to leave our battle stations for a moment and decide it’s safe enough to be vulnerable and open. We can descend from our heads to our hearts and follow our loving vibe instead of our mind. It is not always easy and it can take some time and patience to teach yourself to get in your heart by a conscious choice, but it is worth the effort!
Once we are together with our partner in our hearts, it is not care which makes us be there for each other, but compassion. When our partner needs help, we act from compassion… we help out of love and not out of care. Compassion is a feeling that doesn’t originate from fear but from love… it’s opposite. When we feel and act from a feeling of compassion, we don’t have our own agenda, but we help our partner authentically and unconditionally without needing something in return. When you act from compassion, love is doing all the work for you and you never get tired from it.
The blessing of a relationship
Being in a romantic relationship can be a true blessing. You can help each other to feel safe enough to be able to be vulnerable and get in this loving-mood the heart can provide. You have each other as support and guides through this process. If you can communicate openly together without judgment and there is no need to be defensive with each other, you can tell each other it is completely safe within this relationship to be yourself. When you can make each other feel completely safe, it is easier to leave the mind where your defense systems are located and drop your attention to the heart. With the help of each other, you can find a way to open your hearts and let love do its work.
A romantic relationship is special because it’s probably the only type of relationship where it is safe enough to leave other needs behind and prioritize love. So it’s important we take this opportunity and we treat our partner differently than our other connections and relationships. Let’s have the courage to be very vulnerable and loving together and feel strong and safe enough to put our needs a bit more down on our checklist… and help and support each other in this process. Instead of using your partner to fulfill your needs and force him or her to take care of you, fill the heart of each other with love and when in need… your love channeled in compassion will do all the work for you.
