In Love
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| August 6, 2010 Present |
Being in love is hard work. Believe when I say , 7 years and two kids later, being in love is HARD WORK, but EXTREMELY REWARDING! You know that phase when you’re in
a relationship and you’re doing everything in your power to stay looking fly
and just showing them all the best sides of you? It’s very similar to the
honeymoon phase of marriage. You see in the honeymoon phase it’s all you are my world, there is no one more perfect than this person …
right… until you have to deal with real problems. Let’s be honest a lot of us
haven’t really seen what healthy relationships should look like. We have this made-up
idea based on movies, t.v. shows and ads. You see everything around us tells us
that sex is love and that your outer appearance is the only thing that will
keep the one you love around. The world around us tells us to quite on the relationship
when things are going exactly how you want them and to never really get to
close to a person because you will only get hurt. Being in love is not supposed to be easy.
Being in love is supposed to be challenging and with it comes some heart break,
success and failure but more importantly really understanding what being in
love is really like. Some of the top
reasons why relationships fail are: communication, finances, and sex. The
number one that affects everything like money and sex is COMMUNICATION! When
your communication isn’t on unison than everything else falls apart. For
instance, let’s say you got mad at your spouse because you wanted them to do a
task around the house that is more obvious to you like taking out the trash. So
you’ve set yourself up to believe that your spouse would noticed that and take
care of it because after all you do it all the time. Now your spouse been home
for 3 hours and the trash is not taking out and you just get really pissed off
and snapped out on them because how could they not see or smell that the trash
needed to be taken out. Now your spouse feels disrespected and belittled
because you talking to them sideways and don’t want to hear how you feeling or thinking
now because you didn’t come to them correctly. So now you all are just arguing
and literally about two different things, one about the trash and the other
about respect and then it just all blows up! Now what could have easily solved
this problem at the beginning was the spouse who normally takes out the trash
to ask their spouse to take out the trash instead of assuming that they are
going to because it’s full and smells. Assuming that one knows what’s going on
and what should be done can cause a lot of conflict because it’s just an
assumption. Even if something is very obvious, like the trash being full and
smelly, doesn’t mean that someone else is thinking the same way you are. The
spouse that was home for 3 hours could have had a horrible day at work and just
wanted to unwind as soon as they got home. That doesn’t mean they were being
careless about the trash, it simply means they had their own priorities and if
you don’t communicate what you need from your spouse than you will assume they
don’t care. Any who I can on and on about this. Two books that played a big
role in our communicating and simply trying to learn more about one another are
Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerichs and The Five Love Languages by Gary
Chapman I strongly suggest you and your spouse read these books because they
will make a huge difference in your relationship. We also took some counseling
to because it never hurts to have a NON-BIAS ear. Counseling would also be good
for looking back into your past to see how things than affect you now. You’ll
be surprised with how your past has everything to do with your current and your
future relationships. These books helped our communication skills greatly which
only helped our finances and sex life. We have grown so much because of reading
these and getting counseling. Even though these books are phenomenal, the real
work starts with you. There is simply no point of reading them if you’re not
actually going to apply them and work the principles into your life. You can’t
say you want to be counselor, basketball player, or a teacher without putting
in the work. You can’t say you want a better marriage or relationship if you’re
not going to put in the work. Without out the work means no outcome nor change,
which eventually leads to divorce and breaking up. Believe me when I say it is
worth putting the work. It may be hard at first but it gets easier because you’ll
be working together and that may friend is being IN love! Below are links to
the books. I suggest getting the workbooks with them as well.
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