Friday 30 August 2013

WHY COUPLES FALL OUT OF LOVE

In my relationship/marriage counseling, I frequently deal with couples/'couples to be' who’ve heard the dread phrase, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” How can it happen that a couple who were once thrilled with each other can fall out of love? It seems like a mystery, but it’s not. And, it’s frequently fixable.

Couples fall out of love for three main reasons:
• They don’t understand the difference between infatuation and love,
• They aren’t don’t understand how to grow their love for each other, and/or
• They don’t know what partnership is, or how to do it. Without partnership, there can be no lasting love.

Couples who become competitive and fight about who’s right or wrong can destroy the love they originally had for each other. The partnership way is to focus on cooperatively fixing the problem. What makes love last is an attitude of “I want both you and me to get what we want, and we can fix it together” in this relationship.

The quickest way to destroy love is to hold on to resentment. Allowing old hurts and grudges to go unresolved is corrosive and destructive. Resentment is like rust that eats away at the bonds of your relationship and cankerworm that eats up your invested years of growing up this beautiful fruitful plant. It’s important to learn to clear up resentment by first recognizing it in yourself, then confessing it and learning to solve the problems that caused it. We should learn to dissociate our challenges from our personalities.

Men and women have different reasons for falling out of love. Husbands often disconnect from their wives when they don't feel the wives are interested in them anymore. Because men often have a difficult time with intimacy, someone at work who is sympathetic and doesn't make demands can be very tempting.

Wives disconnect because they feel unloved or taken for granted. They complain for a while, then withdraw. Once she gives up on getting caring from her partner, a masseur or boss/colleague in the office who is attentive can make her feel wanted.

Either spouse will be tempted to cheat if the marriage is disconnected, or has sunk into friendship—affection without sex. To mend the relationship, both spouses need to be willing to make it work, to talk openly about what went wrong, to take responsibility for what they did or didn't do to make the marriage work. This takes emotional maturity, which is the ability to rise above your immediate wants and emotional reactions in order to have a reasonable discussion rather than a fight. Married couples also need support for their marriage—other couples who can help them through rough times.

Love also changes over time, and if you don’t understand the change, it can be scary. It's easy to feel romantic when you live separately and date each other, because every moment spent together is special. From the moment you begin to live together, such romantic moments are no longer automatic. Instead, much of your time together is spent on more mundane things: doing laundry, washing dishes, paying bills, and going to work. Although this can be new, exciting and fun at first, as soon as the initial newness of living together wears off, such everyday things cease to feel exciting and romantic, and you may find yourself feeling worried that your partner no longer cares as much or is as excited to be with you. I once counselled a couple who where having a distance relatiobship because of study leave to Europe, they always had nice relationship while away but anytime they spend more time physically together they discovered that they become uneasy to each other.
They would have damaged their relationship beyond repair if they have not corrected and still react negatively to the changes instead of handling them.LET US ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT WHATEVER WE PUT OR INVEST INTO OUR MARRIAGES IS WHAT WE GET IN RETURN....

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