There are a lot of misconceptions about love. Society tells us everyone has a soul mate. In every fairy tale, the princess falls in love with Prince Charming. They then run off together and live happily ever after.
But if we're being realistic, these ideals of love lack one major message: having a healthy and happy relationship takes effort. It doesn't happen overnight, and there is no magic potion to bring the love you want.
Dr. Tammy Nelson, Imago Institute's Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, Tony Victor LCPC, Sue Butler LMFT, and Certified Therapist Kimberly Anderson get into the nitty-gritty of the perfect relationship and what it takes to make things work.
People who follow these eight steps will quickly find their soulmate:
1. Stop complaining and start reflecting on yourself
Many of us get into relationships without having the right mindset. We have a mental checklist of everything we are looking for in a partner, and when a good one comes along, we pick the relationship apart, looking for all of the flaws.
Most couples complain about their partner, and it has a lot to do with how they feel about themselves. The issue is they don't accept who they are and think their partner will fill the void. But in reality, they don't like or love who they are, so it'll be very difficult to love somebody else.
Ideal love is a big myth in our society, and we expect somebody else to complete us, as shown by a study in the Contemporary Family Therapy Journal. All our contextual culture tells us we need somebody else to feel loved or fulfilled, so it's important to examine ourselves.
2. Explore all of who you are
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Accepting where you came from allows you to come to terms with your past and develop into feeling better and more fulfilled about yourself. Then, as research published in the Journal of Happiness Studies supports, you can expect somebody to share your happiness rather than be the source of your happiness.
3. Commit to giving the love you want
We put so much expectation on the other person and forget to simply give them the love we want. Your commitment to the relationship is to try to be the love you want, and your partner also makes the same commitment to the relationship.
4. Lose the myth of love
Another myth of love in our culture is you can love yourself into being a loving person. However, we're discovering when couples move into a relational model of understanding human beings and out of the individual model, they experience it neurochemically, as demonstrated by research from the National Healthy Marriage Research Center.
You begin to be aware of what you do to other people. When you love them, you experience the feeling of love. If you hate them, you experience the hate. So, in that way, to love yourself is to love another person unconditionally.
5. Understand the chemistry
Studies of the neural basis of unconditional love published in the Psychiatry Research Journal explain that when you love unconditionally, your neurochemistry changes, and you begin to truly feel love because there's a part of the brain that is not object-related, and it's only self-related, but it receives the cortical energy as if it were directed at the self.
6. Know how self-love arises out of loving another
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We carry the hurt of the past and struggle with the present, but as a couple, you can imagine the future and know the present isn't perfect. If we can co-create a future together, it moves us into a different way of relating.
It becomes a partnership to help a couple move into getting the love they want. It's the intentionality piece that's often missing. As a society, we put way too much stock in the notion of easy love without acknowledging the hard work to maintain the goodwill, positive regard, and respect a couple achieves with one another.
7. Realize like is more important than love
You need to become more interested in if you like each other rather than if you love each other. Explore how you treat each other. Do you look forward to seeing each other? Do you think each other is an interesting person?
This is more relevant on a day-to-day basis than whether you love someone because you place love as an ideal. Love means different things to me than it does to you.
So, find out what's important to each other. What are your values? What's meaningful to you? Those are the ingredients that help couples connect.
8. Take it one conversation at a time
You can change your relationship one conversation at a time, and all of us can change the world one relationship ship at a time.
The key to getting out of a relationship conundrum is to embrace the one common denominator found in all of your relationships: You. The hard truth is no matter what your relationship success or failure rate is, every relationship you're in starts with you.
The bottom line is you can't find genuine love if you don't love yourself.
Trust us: connecting with yourself will make a major difference in your love and personal life. Science from the National Center for Biotechnology Information supports the idea that there is a direct correlation between relationship satisfaction and self-esteem.
After surveying 885 couples over 12 years, their study found that "the development of self-esteem in both partners of a couple contributes in a meaningful way to the development of the partners' common satisfaction with their relationship."
This further proves that how you view yourself impacts your relationship. So, if you want a shot at a happy ending, you must put in the work yourself to get one.
The YourTango Experts team includes licensed therapists, dating and life coaches, matchmakers, and more professionals committed to offering you the tools and guidance for a happier and more rewarding life.
