(Madisyn Taylor)
One of the hardest things we will ever do in life is to be in a loving, committed relationship with another human. Arielle Ford has been working in the industry for over 30 years and wants both men and women to find love, keep love, and be loved.
Arielle Ford:
So many people think that love is just a feeling, and then they gauge whether or not they "love" someone based upon how they feel rather than what true, mature love is all about. On the days in which you don't "feel the love" for your partner, we must remember that loving them is a choice. It is a behaviour because as anyone who has been married knows, there will be days when you don't like or even hate your partner's actions, but it doesn't mean you don't love them. And this is totally normal.
You hear people say, "I still love him, but I am not in love with him anymore." Well, that is also true for most happily married couples. While there are certainly feelings that accompany love, they are different from "being in love," which is a fabulous feeling mash-up of oxytocin, dopamine, adrenalin, and other hormones and chemicals. Thus, it's critical to understand that loving your partner is making the daily, sometimes hourly, commitment to act lovingly toward them. This is what I mean that it is a choice and a behaviour.
For most of us, there's a desire to have more than just friends and pets to love. We're looking for someone to spend our life with. A soulmate. A best friend. Putting your spouse on your to-do list makes sense. Map out time each day to connect, communicate and appreciate them.
My Thoughts:
I think people who find their soulmate in this life are very lucky and if you do, then death takes them away from you it can be one of the hardest things to accept. Some are never able to move on, to love anyone else or to even be in a relationship at all with another person.
I was fortunate not to be one of the ones that gets stuck that way, but our relationship is different. Love is still the abiding factor, both ‘in-love’, he still does things that make my heart flutter like a love-sick kid, but there is a more sustainable element.
He is my best friend, however much some of his actions infuriate me. But he makes me laugh more times per day that I can count, we share a passion for many things and also have our own interests and we talk. We talk about anything and everything. Heated highbrow discussions to cabbages-and-kings and long may it continue.