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Table of Contents
How We Can Invite Love Back
Why Love Can Feel Like It’s Gone Away
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Hi, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, a psychotherapist, the author of the book Deeper Dating, the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a new way for single people to meet, and the host of this podcast. Today, I’m going to talk about how love can come back. Every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process. Because the skills of dating really just the skills of love and the skills of love are the greatest and most important skills of all so that we can have the lives we want. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, and learn about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey, as well as finding transcripts of every episode. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice. If you feel you’re experiencing some serious psychological or psychiatric conditions, please seek professional help. If you like what you’re learning here, it would be wonderful if you could leave me a review on iTunes or elsewhere. Thank you so much for that. I’m going to dive right in. I think one of the many painful and harmful myths that we are taught about love is that if there’s a steady, solid love, we are supposed to experience that love steadily. To me, that is just not how love works. Love goes subterranean. Sometimes we don’t even notice it when we love someone really deeply. We don’t feel it when we’re annoyed at them. We don’t feel it when we’re in the middle of mundane tasks, but in then certain situations, our heart swells with a feeling of love for that person, even though at other times, we don’t think of that person or we’re with them and we feel almost nothing. We might wonder, “Do I not love deeply enough?” or we’re with the other person and they seem to be in a kind of mundane place and we’re feeling filled with love?A Few Caveats
We wonder, “Do they love me enough?” The truth is that love is so deep and so profound that it can’t be held in the hands of our cognition. It’s too vast and too profound for that and its language is one that we spend our whole lives learning and it bewilders us. It tricks us, it plays hide and seek with us and on some level, we just need to kind of make peace with that reality. Today, I’m going to talk about the ways that we can experience love coming back – because love can surprise us in the ways that it comes back, can, and does. I also just want to say that some of you might be thinking now, “Oh, boy. I don’t want to hear about how love comes back. I tried so hard to end an unhealthy relationship with a narcissist.” It was brutal. I don’t want to think about love coming back. I just want to say that I truly understand that and, in many cases, it’s best for love not to come back. It’s best not to do all the work that it takes to make that love come back. It’s best to stay away. I just want to give some examples of those kinds of situations because maybe your heart is aching to have love come back, but you know it’s not good for you. I don’t want to step on that. I want to honor that. I know that that’s one of the hardest things of all. If there is any kind of serious addiction, you’re at risk in the relationship. If there’s a serious addiction and the person doesn’t want to change or get better, that risk is more profound. Love is so deep and so profound that it can't be held in the hands of our cognition. Click To Tweet We all need to make personal choices about what we’re going to do in that case of being in a relationship with someone who is actively addicted to something and that’s a very personal choice. In the case of addiction, many of the things that I say about love coming back just won’t be true or won’t be able to stick. Those are just not safe situations. If there’s serious psychiatric conditions or mental illness that are not risks, that are not stabilized,that includes major depression, really serious depression, where they’re not stabilized and the person is not getting help or not getting enough help. Those are problem situations too. Again, it’s an existential and personal choice who we’re going to stay with and who we’re not but I’m just saying that these are situations where if your gut tells you to leave, if you have to work to not keep trying to make love come back, I want to honor that. A person who is not willing to do the work in a relationship – that’s another area where there’s going to be real problems. Even if the feeling of love comes back briefly if both of you are not willing to do the hard work, it really may not be worth it if the other person is a serious narcissist. My friend Hara Marano, who is the Advice Columnist for Psychology Today says, and I repeat this all the time, “There are three C’s in making a choice about who we want to be with and those are character, character, and character.” If you’re with someone who doesn’t have deep and essential integrity, who’s not willing to do the work, who lies to you, who is abusive to you, who cheats on you, these are situations where you really may want to get out.When Love Goes Subterranean
In any situation where you or your children or loved ones are in any serious danger, those are situations where you need to get out but don’t do it in a way that is rash. Do it with the help of a professional expert, because those can be really risky situations. Those were kind of like caveats that I needed to say. Now I want to talk about love coming back in situations where that’s a really good thing. A magical thing about love and it doesn’t feel so magical often is that it can go subterranean. It can feel like it’s disappeared and a kind of adult understanding of love lets us know that it may feel like it’s disappeared, but it probably hasn’t disappeared. This is a story I often tell about an ex of mine who was a very wise person. I looked at him during a really difficult time and I asked him, “Do you still love me?” He said, “Of course, I do.” He said, “It’s like the moon or the sun in an eclipse. I don’t see it now. I don’t feel it now, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not there.” This was so wise and so beautiful and something I really held onto. Maybe we feel our love diminishing. Maybe we feel our partner’s love diminishing and then all of a sudden, you go on vacation or your partner does something really brave or really wonderful or really kind and you see the beautiful parts of them where that happens for them toward you and then the feelings kind of come pouring back. These in and out experiences with love are supposed to happen but our job is to live and relate in such a way that we do the continuous work of rediscovering love, and it is work. It’s almost like, if you ever dug a hole at the beach when the waves were coming, you had to dig fast enough that the hole wouldn’t keep being completely covered up. You had to dig faster than the wave. In day-to-day life and in day-to-day difficulties, there is a trend toward numbness, a trend toward rushing, a trend toward insensitivity, a trend toward getting too accustomed to each other, a kind of familiarity that’s not a loving one. All those trends exist and we have to do ongoing tasks of digging in the sand so that we keep uncovering the love that can go subterranean. We do that at a pace that’s faster than the numbing pace of life that moves us away from these deeper experiences of love.The Love Within You
I wanted to share these rich and beautiful stories but now I want to say something else too because I think that a question is, and this is a rich, rich question for all of us, “what shuts us down so we don’t feel those deeper streams of love?” What makes us numb to love? When do we get numb to love? How do we behave when we’re numb to love? These are such rich questions and then here’s another really rich question. What do you do that puts you into a zone where you can feel the ripples and the eddies and the pulls and the movements of love deep within you? What are those things that you do because those things are gold and I believe they’re not optional because our hearts harden with, most of our hearts, harden without help? These skills, the skills that I try to teach in this podcast, the things that you know of that help you soften your heart, these are gold and these are the path that we need to keep doing and keep staying in so that love can surprise us. Grant Shepherd, is someone who ia decades-long meditator and a teacher of Tantra, taught me and my husband the most beautiful practice, that’s a practice that helps us do this and I want to share it with you and you can find out more about Grant by going to ConsciousPathways.net. It’s just what he calls a Tantric Hug, which is at any time of the day, we put our feet super close together, we hug each other, but it’s not like a one-second hug or a peck. It’s like a holding so that as much of our bodies as possible touch. We hold each other like that and sink into the love. We put our foreheads together and just hold our foreheads together and then end with hugging again. We do this all the time because it brings us to magic land. A magic land that a moment before we might not have felt or recognized or known was even there or so close to the surface. There’s such richness here. There’s such hope here, and there’s such mystery in how feelings of love play hide and seek, and how steady love is never experienced in some ways as truly steady. Thank you for listening to this episode and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.Watch the episode here:
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- ConsciousPathways.net
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