Keeping Love Alive: It's Easier Said tha Done!

Keeping love alive, when so much of the outside world threatens to overwhelm it, quickly becomes one of the most difficult challenges we will ever face in our relationships.

You might be thinking, "How in the world can that be? If you're really in love with each other, keeping love alive between you shouldn't be a hard thing to do at all."

I wish I could say this is true, but unfortunately - at least in terms of the number of years I have spent intuitively perceiving romantic relationships in the cards - falling in love is relatively easy. Keeping love alive is, realistically, one of the most difficult things we will ever do.

Consider for a moment those beautiful, wondrous first days of being "in love." Everything about the experience seems practically perfect.

You find yourselves meshing in ways you never thought possible. Your hopes and dreams seem so compatible it's as if you were born to be together. You feel such ecstasy and find such completeness in that loving, passionate embrace, you're convinced you have finally found The One.

But will that "in love" feeling last?

Sadly, the answer is no - not unless we are willing to put a tremendous amount of time and energy into it.

Remember, being "in love" is that magical first step involved in loving. It's basically an overwhelming desire between two people to simply be together and share pleasurable life experiences.

But love - real love - changes and grows as we ourselves do all the time. Every single day that love requires tending and nurturing and only with time does it become strong and resilient.

This is the love that develops into a bond between two people and has the power to carry them into the future together, at times, surviving what may seem to be nearly insurmountable odds.

When we are in love, what we feel is characterized in readings as if it were a young, innocent child. That "in love-ness" needs a tremendous amount of protection and guidance as it matures and moves toward the future.

Without that protection and guidance, this "child" - this love -simply flounders, having no idea where it should go.

In reality, far too many of us are so "in love" with the love we feel for each other in the present that we rarely, if ever, stop to consider the hardships we may inevitably face as couples in the future.

For instance, financial problems. The stress of raising children. Then there are conflicts with relatives, career changes, illness or addiction issiues. Not to mention outside temptations.

What we fail to realize is that the experience of falling "in love" is only a first step toward truly loving. It's what comes after, in the form of hardships and challenges the future brings and how we successfully overcome them, that actually gives depth and substance to the love we feel.

Unfortunately, many of us are so in love with "being in love" that we never give ourselves the chance to advance beyond that first step.

Take a good, hard look at the divorce rate among us these days.
More than 50 percent of all marriages today end in divorce.

Why? Simply because couples can't keep their love alive.
One thing or another manages somehow to draw these couples apart.

Too many problems are often cited. Or there is simply too much boredom poisoning the relationship.

Sometimes even too much personal growth on the part of one spouse and not enough on the part of the other can be the culprit.

And yet, I can't imagine that a single person in this world ever marries expecting at some future time to get divorced.

Divorce is perceived in the cards as an unnatural breakdown in the process of loving. It means one, or both, partners involved has somehow allowed him/herself to lose focus in the relationship: they've lost faith, and they're essentially looking beyond the commitment in that relationship in order to achieve personal happiness for themselves.

On the intuitive level, commitment is perceived as a conscious agreement between partners to be together. But the bond that exists between them is something that runs far deeper.

When two people are not truly "bonded" to each other, which takes a considerable amount of time and effort by both partners to achieve, it doesn't matter how "committed" they may outwardly profess to be.

Intuitively speaking, their relationship is essentially doomed practically from its beginning. Without that strong, solid emotional bond between them, keeping love alive will be literally impossible.

How do we achieve such a bond?

We start by waking up every morning and seeing our relationships as genuinely living, growing things and we care for them accordingly.

We realize that being "in love" is mainly an initial experience of passion and attraction, and we strive to build a much more meaningful foundation of hope and trust on both with the passing of time.

We exercise a tremendous amount of understanding and forgiveness in our relationships, because we are aware that Today is not Yesterday in terms of those relationships. But, with the right care and handling, Today will certainly become a more enriched, far more fulfilling Tomorrow because we have been able to love unconditionally.

We do everything we can to stay "in love" by continuing to be the individuals we were at the start of these relationships.

In other words, she still makes an effort to dress "for him" when they go out to dinner. He still serves breakfast in bed "for her" the way he used to do when they were engaged.

They continue to romance each other and be attentive to each other's needs, even when the dishes aren't done or the lawn hasn't been mowed. They essentially look for ways in the midst of everyday living to celebrate their love for one another - nto literally keep their love for one another alive.

This may not be possible all the time, but enough of the time. Often enough, to let partners know that even when times are troubled or if circumstances aren't quite what we'd like them to be, we are still very much "in love" in spirit.

You can keep love alive in your relationships, but it's up to you and your partner to make it happen.

Plainly speaking, there is nothing effortless about love. In fact, genuinely loving our partners can be one of the toughest commitments we ever make in life. But the rewards to be reaped are enormous when we are sincerely committed to investing enough time and effort - enough of ourselves - into developing a loving bond that can truly last a lifetime.