LOVE: IN FAITH OR FEAR?

I talk to people about relationships and love every single day.

Recently, I noticed a theme emerging from these conversations over and over again. This theme is at the very heart of what prevents most people (including myself) from allowing ourselves to truly, deeply love and be loved. The issue is faith… or rather the absence of faith.

The faith I’m referring to doesn’t necessarily need to be rooted in religion. Rather, I’m referring to a more broad, yet deeply profound confidence, belief, and trust in someone or something that is completely uncertain. Our fear-mongering society has beaten faith out of us. The hope in humanity that this nation was build on has been chased out of us. We’re scared of terrorists, tyrannical government, and trans- fats. We’re scared of the hyper- religious, and atheists. We’re scared of kidnappers, cancer, and pit bulls. We’re scared of global warming, Hollywood, rapists, child molesters, and we’re scared of love. We’re terrified that love won’t last. We doubt whether we can remain faithful for a lifetime. We fear that our loving relationships will slowly turn into a passive aggressive grudge match, and arguments over taking out the trash, leaving dishes in the sink, and toenail clippings. We fear that things will change… and not for the best.

Every day someone asks me the question,

“Is it worth the risk to give someone your whole heart? What if they leave/change/become abusive/ take advantage of me/hurt me/cheat on me?

“Isn’t it easier to play it safe? I mean, you don’t have risk getting burned if you stay single. You can’t be emotionally destroyed if you hold back just a enough, and don’t fully open your heart.

“The person with the most power in a relationship is always the person who cares the least, right? I’d rather have control, safety, and certainty than be the one who gets burned.”

It’s conversations like this that make me realize how faithless our society has become. We have been trained not to have faith in each other. We know how easy it is for us to change our mind, and knowing that the love of your life can change their mind makes it easy to doubt love. The interesting thing about faith is that it cannot exist without doubt (faith without doubt is certainty), but if we allow that doubt to get a hold of our hearts, it can twist our uncertain reality into something it’s not. It will mutate into fear. Then we are faced with a choice, do we allow fear to take over and our faith to go right out the window? Or do we dispel the fear with a heavy dose of love and faith in others and in the world? Fear and faith cannot coexist. One will always dispel the other.

You must choose between certainty and love, emotional safety and deep connection, complete control and vulnerability.

You must have the courage to make the more difficult choice to experience the greater reward.

Faith in the face of uncertainty is at the very core of love.

Your views are most welcome...

HOW TO UNDERSTAND YOUR PARTNER BETTER AND AVOID MISUNDERSTANDING

UNDERSTANDING YOUR PARTNER DEMAND THE MEDIATING SKILL

Two essential tools of the mediation trade will help you become your own translator.

1. Mediators validate what their client is saying. In other words, they make sure they truly understand what the person is saying before moving on and responding. Teachers call this checking for understanding. Counselors call it reflective listening. Call it what you want. But don’t respond until you really feel like you understand what the other person is saying.

2. Mediators seek to clarify information. Rather than reacting to what someone is saying, especially if it seems confusing, illogical or frustrating, follow step #1 and validate, and then ask more questions to gain clarification. This step is like being a detective — you are drilling for information so you can be confident that you understand what is being said.

3. If you are still confused, rinse and repeat. Often, you can figure it out on your own with time and effort, and more than a pinch of patience. But it can be done. It’s hard to resolve conflict when you don’t have a clue what the other person is saying. Figuring out how to translate is the first step.

Written by Ben Stich

Your views are most welcome...

IF YOU HAVE A PARTNER WITH THESE DESIRES... YOU ARE A FAVOURED MAN!

You are wise if as a Lady you Desire All these:

I want to wear beautiful negligees... 

And make passionate love with you.

I want to listen to your heart...

To hear your deepest, most guarded feelings.

I want to reach out in the night and touch your arm, and know you are there.

I pray that someday I might carry your child, and watch your face as you love that child and father it.

I pray God might trust us with great causes for His honour and glory in the world...

And keep us brave and singlemindedness and uncontaminated by the compromises of the day...

So we can be beacons... Silently moving down our road... And touching everyone along the way.

I want to have a love relationship with your family... To enrich their worlds...

To have hours and hours to laugh and dream and feel hope.

Jesus is our abiding Peace and Joy... And you are my man for life.

If you have a girl with these dreams and desires... You are a FAVOURED man!

Your views are most welcome...

IMPROVE THAT RELATIONSHIP!

Here are half a dozen hacks for a thriving relationship… 1. Date Them Like They’re New To You In the beginning of a relationship, you are on your best behavior and put in a lot of effort. Then you feel like you’ve won them and you stop trying as hard. If you date them like they’re new to you at all stages of the relationship, it not only makes them feel more appreciated, it also makes you more attracted to them. Our minds have this cool little mechanism around commitment and consistency (and if you’ve ever studied sales psychology then you’ve likely heard of this little trick). Basically it states that whatever we do, our mind forces us to believe consistent thoughts with our actions. “You’re doing nice things for your girlfriend again? Well you must like her a lot!” *cue flood of happy brain chemicals* 2. Focus On Freeing Your Partner From Their Blocks Your goal throughout your entire relationship is to help your partner become as free, open, and unrestrained as possible. We all have blockages in our emotional lives. Life can be tough and no one gets through without a few bruises. Maybe your partner feels self- conscious about their body because society has told them that they aren’t tall/short/skinny/beautiful enough. Worship it. Love it. Kiss every inch of it until they can feel your desire for them dripping from the love and intensity of your gaze. If you and your partner mutually set the intention of focusing on helping the other person work through their blocks and become the most open version of themselves possible, you’ll both benefit. 3. Listen There is an endless barrage of things fighting for our attention these days. What do people miss the most amidst this disconnected cacophony of noise? Someone to make them feel heard, understood, and who misses them when they’re away. When you are with your partner, give them your full attention. Turn off your cell phone as often as possible. Have conversations more than you watch television (or you know, throw away your TV). Face them directly and give yourself to them completely. No relationship has ever ended because someone felt like their partner listened to them too much. 4. Express Your Scariest Thoughts And Desires You do your deepest healing in the context of an intimate relationship. Regularly take the time out of your day (or week) to listen to each other without judgment. Whether someone has an answer for you or not, just being able to say something that has been bothering you for years and having them receive it with an open heart is enough to remove the stigma you’ve attached to it. 5. Plan Spontaneity Predictability is death to attraction. And spontaneity is the antidote. Do you always rotate the same few date ideas over and over? Mix it up with something surprising and romantic (like laying on the hood of your car under where the airplanes land in your city). Or playful and ridiculous (like building a fort and drinking red wine from sippy cups). Do you remember the last time you left the city? Get out of town for the weekend. Do you remember the last time you planned a bad-ass romantic gesture? Write up three different date ideas in three different envelopes and have your date choose their own adventure (they only get to look at one). Everyone likes surprises. Take the initiative and create a story that you’ll be talking about for years. 6. Gratitude And Praise Couples that go the distance not only give each other praise, they do it in a very specific way. Imagine you come home from work and you tell your partner that you got the promotion that you had been after for a while. Scenario 1, they say: “That’s such great news! I’m so proud of you!” Scenario 2, they say: “That’s such great news! I’m not surprised at all that you got it… you’re so hard working and good at what you do, it’s about time they recognized the value you bring to the company.” Highly functioning couples praise each other while tying their successes to each others values and character. So next time you’re about to praise someone, ask yourself “Why”. Why did they make that dinner for me? Why did they get that promotion? Why did they lose that weight? They made dinner because they are thoughtful and caring. They got the job because they are creative and valuable. They lost the weight because they are disciplined and courageous. You get the drill. The First Step Into Your Thriving Relationship Every journey begins with one step. Pick one of your favorite tips from this list and commit to doing it within the next two days with your partner. Not sure which one to go with? Whichever one seems easiest. Just get the ball rolling so that the benefits will give you momentum to keep moving forwards and keep the relationship rocking. from goodmenproject.com Your views are most welcome...

MUST LOVE MAKE SENSE?

MUST LOVE MAKE SENSE? LET SEE FROM THIS WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE

Ever since we started dating, my life has gotten better. That’s not hyperbole, by the way. And yet, a big part of me knows that we almost missed each other. You see, I wasn’t her type and she wasn’t mine.

Years before LB and I got married, I’d dated a number of awesome women with impressive and contradictory creds. My list of desired qualities for my type could—and did—go on and on, and yet this list ultimately failed me. Yes, I met amazing women, but I didn’t fall in love the way I did with my wife. Not even close. Conventional wisdom encourages us to find people who are scrambled images of ourselves. The standard paradigm for relationships claims we date people who make us feel a certain way about ourselves. And popular culture pushes the construct of the “perfect partner.” Our type, that person who is supposedly hidden somewhere in the ether, waiting to unlock the latent happiness inside us with a mysterious skeleton key, is treated like our great savior. The perfect partner is supposed to save us from our drab, familiar life.

But this notion of the perfect partner, what we commonly refer to as our type, is actually a narcissistic invention of personal entitlement. When we say someone is our type, we’re not actually saying that person is gonna make us happy, we’re just articulating a specific set of qualities that we find uniquely attractive in the abstract. In fact, happiness is only implied in this articulation because we assume that we’ll be happy once we find the person we want. Counterintuitively, though, the people we seek out may not even be the people we fall in love with. They’re often just the people we think we deserve, the people we like the idea of. Our romantic instincts can mislead us even though everything about them makes sense. Maybe that’s the problem. When you get down to it, love doesn’t make any damn sense at all.

When people list all the reasons they love someone, they’re usually the reasons they like someone. With love, you find yourself loving things about that person you don’t even like in the abstract, things you don’t even want sometimes. Love is like a secret passageway that goes through places you’re completely familiar with and other places you’ve never seen before, some of which you’re afraid of and others you simply avoided. Like, on the other hand is like a browsing history of all the places you’ve already seen, all the pages you’ve read before, things you find comforting and reassuring because you know exactly where you are. There’s something intrinsically irrational about love. We can’t fake love or force love, we can’t persuade love or build a case for love. We can’t write out a big list and say: see, these are all the reasons you should love her. If you do love her, much of it has nothing to do with that list. And if you don’t love him, that list won’t make you change your mind either. Contrary to the false epistemology of social conservatives, people just love because they can’t fucking help it. Sometimes, we even love people we don’t wanna love, which shows that volition and reasoning can’t prevent or create love. Love is fluid and difficult to control. It’s hard to manipulate and even harder to predict. It’s no one’s fault that love is this way. At the same time, you’ll never bully love. It’s always the other way around.

In the alternative world of being in love, things that usually annoy the shit out of us suddenly delight us. Things we swore to our friends we would never do, we end up doing (often by accident) with the people we’re in love with, and even stranger, we’re happy doing them too because being crazy in love feels better than being cool (or just crazy). Of course, it’s extremely important for couples to have things in common with each other. It’s important for them to be able to share and communicate common interests and experiences together. That’s crucial.

But love is like a big, clumsy rocket detonating inside us without any warning. If my wife and I had joined OK Cupid or Match.com instead of signing up for MySpace (both of us were peer- pressurized, by the way), we would never have found each other. The truth is, we weren’t looking for each other, we were looking for people more like us, or at least, more like our type. In other words, we were both looking for people we wanted because we assumed the people we wanted would make us happy. But a big part of being human includes a deficient knowledge of true happiness, not because humans are delusional but because they can never be omniscient.

As humans, we know what we want, but what we want doesn’t necessarily make us happy.

Even though I would never have asked for these things, I love it when LB invents new words or combines two languages together. I love the way she yells at me in telenovela Spanish when she’s pissed off. I love the way she sighs in her sleep when I kiss her forehead. I love that when she’s stressed out, she asks me to play with her hair. I love the way she takes care of sick and wounded children at the hospital, risking her own health each and every day to make the world a better place. I love that she makes me dance to crappy top-40 music in our underwear, cry to sentimental love ballads in Spanish, and give her a million hugs a day. I love that I now watch TV shows I didn’t even know I liked (e.g. CSI, Bones, ANTM). I love that she eats arroz con palta between paychecks, gives me pathophysiology lectures against my will and always wants to “detangle” my shaved head and groom my eyebrows like I’m a bonobo. I love that sometimes we play Supermario Brothers together on our Wii and we’re both obsessed with traveling. I love that my wife went through a phase where she sent me videos of baby elephants for a whole month. I love that she brings me home beanie babies I don’t want, blueberry muffins I didn’t ask for and threatens me when I pretend to eat all the chocolate. I even love the fact she cleverly talked (bribed) me into leaving Argentina in 2009 because we ended up traveling through Western Europe and Morocco instead.

In so many ways, LB is different than what I was looking for and I know for a fact that she wasn’t looking for a hapa fiction writer with a shaved head and a Buddha tat. But instead of traveling to the emotional places we’ve already known, LB and I have opened up entirely new worlds to each other we didn’t even know we loved. For me, that’s what love is supposed to do, if in fact love is supposed to do anything at all.

Ultimately, joy isn’t an equation and love isn’t a set of rules. With LB, I found love in the last place I expected. And though our friendship is a crucial part of our love (always and forever), friendship and rationality aren’t a substitute for our madcrazybeautiful love. Friendship and rationality don’t even come close, man.

Written by Jackson Bliss

Your views are most welcome...