Falling in Love: Easy. Staying in Love?

In the most recent post “To Fall in Love,” I wrote about a pathway to falling in love. It includes asking and answering 36 questions with a partner, sitting face to face, then finding a quiet spot and looking into each others eyes for 4 minutes.

Key ingredients: A willing partner, willingness to Listen, willingness to Share, a quiet environment, sitting face to face, authenticity.

When you try this, are you going to fall in love?  It is easy to fall in love.  Harder to Stay in love.  Falling in love, within this context, is actually the decision to open oneself to receive another person.  Opening oneself to show one’s authentic self to another person.  The questions are designed to offer deepening authenticity; designed to offer opportunities to receive a level of truthful communication from another.  These things create the platform on which love and connection can thrive.

We humans crave attainment of a state and hope to live there as if we have scaled a vertical cliff and reached the mesa at the top.  Stasis, however, is not a viable option.  To stay in love requires effort.  It requires us to continue to risk with our partner.  To continue to be willing to be seen clearly, to risk being disappointed, to risk living in intimacy.  This can be a terrifying state of affairs…at the very least, exhausting.

My willingness to continue to ask questions, your willingness to live with my answers when I give them has everything to do with connection and attunement, those experiences that deepen love.  We humans often move in and out of states of awareness with each other and in our day to day worlds.

Loving on Life’s Terms is avoiding tuning out, finding that balance between connection with an Other while living life as it needs to be lived today.