Quickest Way to Work on Your Love Life

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The quickest and most effective way to “work on your love life” is to make a positive change in the following two areas:

1. How you feel about yourself.

2. How close you can let yourself be to somebody you love or care about.

Let me explain. How you feel about yourself is the “foundation” of your love life. I include it in your love life because if you think about it, we all have a relationship with ourselves. That relationship can be positive or negative, loving or hateful, respectful or negligent, etc.

If you improve the relationship you have with you in any way you can, you not only feel better about you but you naturally transmit that feeing to others. It is impossible not to. If you are already in a love relationship, the person you love will naturally respond with more love to the more love you are showing yourself. (If he or she does not, you have a certain kind relationship problem I’ll have to talk about in another post).

Quite frankly, you should get into the habit of thinking about yourself as someone you are in a relationship with. The quality and health of that relationship you have with you will determine the quality of your love life, pure and simple. Think about it, it is impossible to have a healthy love relationship if you have negative feelings about yourself. Rebuilding your relationship with you is your first step in improving your love life.

How about, the closeness you let yourself experience with someone you love or care about? That’s the second way you can upgrade your love life. Think of it this way, the level of intimacy you have in your love relationships (all the relationships in your life where love is involved) will be a measure of the health of those relationships.

What is intimacy? Intimacy is the reciprocal giving and receiving of love that goes on in a relationship. It’s a two way street. You don’t  have to earn intimacy, it is given freely when it’s real. The beauty of intimacy is it gets us past the childhood types of love that unhealthy love relationships get stuck on, and intimacy keeps love healthy by balancing giving and receiving. Nobody starves in an intimate adult relationship. I feed you and you feed me, if you get my meaning.

So the question is, how do I ramp up the intimacy I am experiencing in a love relationship? Think of what you’d like to do to bring you and the person you love closer? Communicate your feelings? Extend a greater amount of trust? Be yourself and see if he or she likes it? Forgive and forget some past misdeed? Apologize for something you did and got defensive about?

The best part is you get to decide how to get closer. Be creative. The idea is to do something new and better than what you’re used to (and perhaps the person you love is used to too). Remember, we can only work on the “relationships” we have with the people we love. Love itself is unpredictable and uncontrollable.

Comments? Welcome. Dr. Tom Jordan

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Dr. Jordan

Dr. Thomas Jordan is a clinical psychologist, certified interpersonal psychoanalyst, author, professor, and love life researcher.

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