MARRIAGE COUNSELING: THE POWER OF LOVE TO REBUILD YOUR CONNECTION

It is hard to talk about love without sounding cliche’. There are so many saying, so many quotes about love. Love is blind, love is madness. Love is what makes the world go around, and what love is, is different for everyone in every way they experience love. In my profession, love is what saves relationships in crisis. Love is what motivates couples to dig deep and do the emotional work to connect with their partners and to go through the pain until they find the love again.

If you do that work, the emotional work, the hard sometimes painful, work, you can get to that place where love between you two can become the most powerful force in the Universe. The transformation from disconnection to connection makes you almost superhuman. At least super loving!

The power of love that comes into play when two people are deeply in love and emotionally connected shows in their dedication to their relationship and to one another. They make the couple, their relationship the number one priority in their lives. Nothing is more important to them than their partner and keeping that connection strong.

When your relationship is right, when you’re emotionally connected and strong together, you can withstand any crisis, any challenge and whatever life may throw your way. Nothing can tear you apart because you’ve done everything to make sure that your connection, your love is ironclad.

Love is going to make you strong. When you’ve got that connection you know that your partner sees you as the most important person in their world. You see your partner the same way.  When life’s challenges hit you, you pull together and stand strong. You don’t let any outside circumstance or situation pull you apart. You never waver in the confidence and security that you’ve built with that one person in the world that loves you most.

If you’re reading this and saying to yourself, “That all sounds great, but I don’t have that connection with my partner.” We’ve had some relationship injuries and some pain and anger in our lives. I want to have this great love, but what do I do with this pain? Recovery from emotional pain and rebuilding our relationship is the goal. How do you get there? Can you even get there? Yes! 

First process the pain and work through all of the apologies and forgiveness requests. Forgiveness is so important.

Start with building your connection. Noticing and listening, respecting your partner. Seeing them, really seeing what they do every day. Acknowledging them for everything they do to make life better. What a great partner and parent they are. How hard working, how dedicated. Tell your partner that you see them. Really see them. That you appreciate them and show it!

Make those physical connections. Hug more, kiss more. Don’t always make it about sex. Make it about being close and connected. Non sexual touching is a way of strengthening your emotional connection. It becomes more fun and easier to connect in conversation, over issues you need to discuss, about problems and everything when you’re feeling close. Love is touch and staying beside each other.

I can guarantee you that if you sit in chairs on opposite sides of the room and stare at your phones or tablets and don’t engage in conversation, don’t touch each other and don’t talk to each other, the lack of connection that you’re experiencing will continue and expand until it becomes more and more difficult to find your way back together. Instead, sit in the loveseat, the oversized chair, next to each other on the sofa or snuggle on the bed together. Watch a movie with your head on his shoulder or his head in your lap. Touch. Hold hands; entwine your fingers, cross your legs. Feel each other’s warmth and energy. That human touch is something we all need and we crave it if we don’t have it. The way back to being connected is through touch. 

Give each other attention. Stop what you’re doing when your partner speaks to you. Don’t allow yourself to be distracted .Mute the television and look your partner in the eye. Don’t put them off; that will feel like a rejection. Instead, attend to them because they have something important to say. Even if it’s not important to you, and here’s the key: It’s important enough to them to want to share with you.

Make your couple’s relationship a priority. Spend time doing things with your partner as a couple. Do things together to make memories; to enjoy being together. These activities strengthen your friendship and give you memories to connect over. Remember when we went here? Well if you didn’t go, you wouldn’t have that to talk about would you?  A lot of couples begin to live separate lives and they stop hanging out and having fun together. It can’t just be all work, chores, shopping and kids. There has to be couple time to make those connections.  Love is also friendship. If you’re not married to your best friend, why aren’t you? They didn’t stop being your friend. I think you stopped working on the friendship.

Start by being more romantic with your partner. Love is romance. There’s fire and passion in your past, why not in your present and future.  There can be. It’s up to you to reignite that fire. It’s hard when you’ve been together a long time, and you’re not connecting the way you used to.  It’s important to remember that you’re the same two people who fell in love and couldn’t keep your hands off each other once upon a time. You can have that again. Mature love is just as sexy, even more so because it’s the person that you’ve chosen to be with that you love so much.

Love is having that relationship that’s strong enough and powerful enough to bind you together in all ways. The power of love is that it can grow stronger over time and be enduring and epic. I wish you all that kind of love.

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