When romance is alive, each lover is eager to please the other for no other reason than to make him or her happy. Snickering, sarcasm, bickering, pouting, competing, complaining, and blaming are gone. The woman is able to focus on her man's happiness because she knows that he is watching out for her interests, so she doesn't have to worry about them. The man similarly doesn't feel like he has to compete for his interests because she is eagerly concerned with them. Such a goal is not unrealistic. Although no romance is perfect, many couples have come close enough to the ideal of "one heart" that they can go for months with no arguments, smiling cheerfully at each other each evening, and cherishing their time together. They have achieved this state of marital bliss because each partner began conscientiously striving to meet each of the relationship needs of the other. As relationship needs were met, mutual good will and appreciation began to replace resentment and self-concern, until each could trust the good faith of the other sufficiently to pull together as one instead of competing. Your feelings of caring for a person, and his or her feelings of attraction for you, increase as you make efforts to meet his or her relationship needs. This is the formula for marital bliss. As Leo Tolstoy said, "Happy families are all alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way."
Love is an action verb. A happy marriage is built and sustained by daily acts of love and respect that will produce feelings of tender affection in the giver as well as the receiver and provide a garden in which the romantic potential of each spouse may develop.
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