Where’s the love? Is it in you and your compromise?

Separating to come together and connect. I’m finding it strange to undergo differentiation to ultimately enhance the relationship. My interpretation of this concept is find yourself (again) while finding your boundaries and determining where you are willing to compromise while still feeling happy with one’s self.

Every relationship, marriage, and singlehood has its joys and conflicts but throughout it, all you will always have is you. The cliche to make sure you love yourself, or can at least live with yourself, is true. But what puts us in a position to love ourselves so we can love others? Happiness can be found in those things and moments we get so enveloped into that our worries and problems disappear for the moment being.

True happiness may have existed in the infanthood of your relationship, but true satisfaction will remain when you recognize and allow yourself to indulge in those things you used to take for granted before life’s demands. A strange irony.

It’s hard to say what keeps and initiates a spark in the self and between two people. But every once in a while in a relationship little glimpses can remind you of true love, rather it be a staring gaze from a loved one, or a habit that gets the noggin going. It might even be a light-bulb moment for you, when all of a sudden things start to click. These happenings are reminders of what still exists, and now effort must be brought back to bring happiness to self and possibly connection in love. It’s not a perfect science, but a methodology worth trying. Through strengthening self and and our convictions you can find there in lies the love. The prior beauty renewed, polished, and improved by life and experience. These tidbits are not absolute and far from guaranteed effectiveness. But they are steps in the right positive direction.

It’s a delicate dance, differentiation in relationships. What about those who are single? Is this their time to explore so they come into a relationship well-equipped and ready for love? The complexity of human relationships is beautiful and full of depth and intricacies one finds out as they go. Rather your goal is to understand what you want from life, or how you want to function with another… you learn day in and day out from months of momentous occasions, that love connection might not be exactly what you think. In fact the beauties are beyond comparison, and some of the sadness may go deeper than you originally thought possible. Somewhere in the mix could indeed be the answer to connecting through logical reasoning. But maybe what you don’t realize is the existence of a connected reality in the background as you sit trying to figure it all out…

This is a reflection after reading part of the book Passionate Marriage and trying to implement a perception of its message along with life experiences along the way.

Schnarch, David. Passionate Marriage. New York: W.W Norton & Company, 1997. Print.