56/365 Refuse to Take Her/Him for Granted, EVER

THE QUOTE

"The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost."
—G. K. Chesterton

THE LOVE NOTE
K—
We live in a changing and uncertain world. Our kids keep growing and I as I embrace each new stage of their development I also grieve the one past. Because of that I try to be with them as much as I can. I refuse to be the father who looks back on his relationship with his kids and utters, "If only...".

Further,  I try to be a loving and appreciative husband to you because I know too well how easily people can be hurt, marriages can be damaged and relationships lost. I refuse to let that happen to us. I know you do, too, which is why you are so very good to me. I do realize that all the good I have can be lost through ignorance, carelessness and stupidity. As Chesterton said, I belive it is because of this awareness that I do not take you or them for granted and that I am fully able to love you and the children as we all deserve.
—J

THE GREAT RELATIONSHIP PRINCIPLE
Refuse to Take Her/Him for Granted, EVER. There's a STUPID old saying that says, "You always hurt the ones you love." While I understand how that happens, it seems like a cop-out and a lame one at that. Seems to me that if anyone on the planet deserves your best it is those you have sworn to honor, love and protect: Spouse and children.

We give our best to our customers, the store clerk, the neighbor, the friend, the stranger. That is good and right. Those people all deserve to be treated with respect, civility, kindness, and good manners. Of course, it's easier with those people because we don't live with those people day after day, year after year. Naturally, when we live so closely we get on each others nerves, get stressed, and snap at each other. However, rather than seeing that as an excuse for bad behavior it should provide us with all the more reason to be even on our better behaivor, to watch ourselves, to learn and practice the skills to master strong emotions and to discipline our behaviors.

What skills, what practices? Oh, man, there are so many great things available to us. Some of my personal and professional favorites have become the ones I teach the most: Mindfulness practices, Building Strong Families with ACCCTS principles and skills, Marketing the GREAT Relationship Brand in Your Relationships, and so many more (seminars and articles) Come learn them in private coaching or invite me to speak to your group or event.
 
The phrase "You always hurt the ones you love" is the pre-cursor to "You don't know what you've got til it's gone." Two tragic, and wholly avoidable, cliches that can be, and should be, stricken from our relationship lexicon.  Thus, Chesterton's quote is a simple key to preventing both of these lame cliches.

51/365 True Love Is Sacred

THE QUOTE

"I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love."—Henry Ward Beecher

THE LOVE NOTE
K—
I have been a "hopeless romantic" for as long as I can remember. However, I've never fully known love until I've paid the price to know it. That price has been commitment, dedication, devotion, sacrifice, forgiveness, compassion. Those are divine traits that this mortal son of God has tried to practice for your sake, for our children's sake and for my sake. Thus, it is only since I've learned to love that I've learned to fully worship my God—not in prayers and worship meetings alone but most importantly in daily practice of loving well His children according to their birthright: That you and the children deserve to be loved well. I hope that I love you well, baby. You deserve nothing less than the very best I can give.
—J

THE GREAT RELATIONSHIP PRINCIPLE
True love is sacred as it requires sacrifice. True sacrifice isn't easy, however, it is sacrfice that gives up the good for the greater. False, or empty sacrifice is when we give up the good and then only note that the good was given up. That is when we "count the cost" of our sacrifice. That sacrfice is not sacred.

That which is sacred is protected and reverenced. A temple is honored and treated with respect. It is considered holy. Treat your partner and your marriage the same. However, truth is it is much easier to reverence a sacred structure than it is a relationship. A structure is constant; people fluctuate. A structure is easily identifiable as sacred; an upset, impatient and imperfect partner is not. All the more reason why I believe that our greatest opportunities for spiritual growth are in our relationships. It is in our relationships that the things we say we believe are tested to their core. It is easy for me to be pious, high-minded and reverent in my place of worship. It is not easy for me to always be so in my relationships with my spouse and children. Thus it is in those relationships that my belief is fully tested and it is there where my true character shows itself—for good or ill. Thus, when I learn to love fully and well the people who are not always easy to love fully and well, then I have fully learned to worship the Divine.

Loving another, as imperfect as you are and as imperfect as the other is, allows us to taste perfection and to get in touch with the sacred, with the Divine. Sacred love requires that I sacrifice the hardest thing to sacrifice: Ego. Pay the price that sacred love requires: The price of commitment, dedication, devotion, sacrifice, forgiveness, and compassion. These are the traits of the Divine. We can only develop transcendent love when we transcend our ego that keeps us anchored to pride and self-centeredness. Instead we must willingly trade ego for other-centeredness, which frees us into true connection with the divine nature in self and others. It is through connecting with the Divine within us and in others that we are then connected with the Divine.

35/365 Get on, and stay on, the same page

THE QUOTE

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

THE LOVE NOTE
K—
This is the author of The Little Prince which is one of my all-time favorite books (I don't think this quote is from that book, though). While I enjoy gazing at you I get such peace and security knowing that we are looking and moving in the same direction throughout our life, which then assures that when I do turn to gaze at you I will know you are there beside me. That sounds like love to me.
—J

THE GREAT RELATIONSHIP PRINCIPLE
Get on, and stay on, the same page. Getting on the same page of "falling in love" is the easy part. Staying in love, though, not only takes some work it first requires making a decision to stay on the same page even when feelings come and go. Look forward together. This allows you to study where you are going, helps you know the territory, and keeps your eyes on the prize.

34/365 Make and Remake Love—Red Hen Style

THE QUOTE

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread, re-made all the time, made new.
—Ursula K. Le Guin

THE LOVE NOTE
K—
You are the Maker of Yummy Things. Every day you make our meals and our treats—the food that nourishes not only our bodies but also our souls. You make the stuff we need and want. You are a creator, a maker. I say frequently, "This is the best ________ you've ever made." And it's always true.
—J

THE GREAT RELATIONSHIP PRINCIPLE
Make and Remake Love. Bread nourishes. It keeps us alive. We make it and it makes us. This making is never completed, though. It must be made and remade. Love, too, is never done. It is a combination of ongoing work and ongoing enjoyment.

Consider the story of The Little Red Hen: Everyone in the story wanted the tasty results but none were willing to do the all the work required to help the hen make the bread. It is the same with relationship work. Everyone wants the GREAT Relationship, but few are willing to do the work required for the results. Be willing to do the work to get the results. Bon appetit!

33/365 Count the Ways

THE QUOTE

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need; by sun and candle—light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old grief's, and with my childhood's faith
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath.
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
[Picture: Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Source http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:410px-Elizabeth-Barrett-Browning,_Poetical_Works_engraving_flipped.png]

THE LOVE NOTE
K—
Well, I think these two blogs (this one, and The 52 Love Songs Project, both count as counting the ways I love you. So read and count on!
—J

THE GREAT RELATIONSHIP PRINCIPLE
Count the ways. Literally. Take out a sheet of paper, or type on the computer, a list of all the ways, big and small, silly and profound, you love your partner. Make this an ongoing list. Share it with your partner all at once and/or leave notes and phone messages, send emails and texts daily with the following, "I love you because ______________." Fill your mind and your partner's with all that is right instead of focusing on all that is wrong.

31/365 You Marry More than Your Partner

THE QUOTE

Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his friends. People fall in love with the most appalling people. Take a cool, appraising glance at his pals.
—Cynthia Heimel

THE LOVE NOTE
K—
Well, my friends were your friends, too, so you already knew what you were getting. And how blessed we are to have such true blue friends who have also proven their greatness through their love and devotion to their families. They are examples to me of how to be a good man myself. Just look at us back in college there in the "Dungeon." This is a great quote—one that our kids will do well to learn from as they make their choice for a partner.
—J

THE GREAT RELATIONSHIP PRINCIPLE
You marry more than your partner. People often "act" surprised or shocked by their spouses family and our friends behavior, mannerisms and attitudes. Then they act like victims of their in-laws and their partner's friends. Well, "look before you leap" may be cliché, but it's still wise counsel for those who are falling in love with someone to bear in mind you buy the whole package: Family, friends, associates—warts and all. If it's already "too late" for you, then stop acting victim (if you are) of your partner's friends and family and instead learn how to engage more effectively with them or to better manage your own side of it. Don't know how? No problem. Call me.

30/365 Life-long Romance is a Choice, Not a "Falling"

THE QUOTE

A true man does not need to romance a different girl every night, a true man romances the same girl for the rest of her life.
—Ana Alas
[Picture: Carl & Ellie from Pixar's Up]

THE LOVE NOTE
K—
There are two great loves in my life: 1. You. 2. Love. I am in love with you and I am in love with love. Loving you reminds me of how great love is and loving love reminds me to love you anyway when I may not quite feel like it.
—J

PS: Love #1 gave me the Four Treasures of My Life which are but subsets of the two great loves of my life. Thanks baby. Love #2 keeps me in check so I never run the tragically foolish risk of losing any of the above.

THE GREAT RELATIONSHIP PRINCIPLE
Life-long Romance is a Choice. "We fell in love... we fell out of love." Sounds like a lot of accidents happening around something as big and important as love and all that goes with it: Marriage, money, children, property. True men, who know how to love truly, romance their women daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and repeat for life. Create love by choice. Don't wait for it. Too many people base their behaviors on their feelings (and then defend it like it's normal):

"You need to treat each other as friends."

"Yeah, but I don't like him."

"So."

"How can I treat him well if I don't feel it? I'm not fake."

"Oh, so your sincere contempt, nitpicking, criticisms, snide comments, sarcastic remarks, and yelling are somehow ennobled because they aren't 'fake'?"

Here's the problem: Most relationships start with, "I feel loving so I act loving" and then as partners get to really know each other they get annoyed, irritated, hurt, upset, etc and then it is, "I don't feel loving so I won't act loving." People feel this is acting out of integrity. I say it's specious emotional reasoning. There's a point where your feelings matter. I'm a therapist, I get that. There's also a point where your feelings don't matter. Invalidation of emotions is bad. We know that. Overvalidation, though, is just as destructive.

The principle here is Correct Behavior GENERATES (over time) Desired Emotion. So the GR Work involves a LOT of learning to treat each other well in loving, compassionate, patient, rule-disciplined ways so that the stance now becomes: "I act in loving ways even when I hate you." This keeps us from trashing the relationship just because we don't feel good. Still skeptical? Okay, try emotion-driven behavior at work for a month and see how long you have a job. We behave well to get well. We behave good to get good.