Beginning of Love

There is no high like falling in love with another person -- it’s incomparable to any other human phenomenon. You will never feel as good as you do when you’re in love.

Life will never seem as beautiful as it does when you’re in love. And you will never be happier than when you’re in love. You’ll also never feel more pain than when you find yourself in love.

Being in love is the climax of life; it embodies everything it means to be alive to the fullest.

Today’s post will focus on the foundation of all emotionally connected relationships.

Love begins with effective, authentic, transparent communication.

Simply put, listening is essential for emotional or empathetic connection to become established and, once established, to deepen.

Whether you’re single seeking love or trying to make a committed romantic partnership ‘work’, improving your listening skills is critical to your long-term success.

Why this is so.

Intimate relationships of all types (between lovers, close family members, friends, colleagues and so on) require a deep level of emotional connection.

The basis of emotional connection is empathy.

Empathy is essentially the capacity to put ourselves in other people’s shoes – to get a glimpse of the world as seen through their eyes – to feel what they are feeling.

All humans, with the possible exception of true sociopaths, have a deep capacity for empathy.

In order to connect with, and develop your empathetic or emotional connection capacities you must develop your capacity to truly listen to others.

Listening without judgment

Falling in love isn’t just starting a new chapter in your life.

It’s starting a new life entirely. What people often fail to realize is that the moment you fall in love is the moment you stop being the person that you were. You change. Think about what makes you, you.

Sure, you have all the physical attributes. But more importantly, what makes you the person you are, is the way that you experience and interpret the world around you.

What makes you the unique individual you are isn’t just your looks or your abilities. It isn’t even only the experiences you’ve had and the things you’ve seen.

What makes you the person that you are right now is the way you experience the world and how you interpret that which you experience.

That which you give most importance to and that which you find to be trivial are the two things that define the person that you are.

Falling in love causes you to shift your entire perspective. It changes you because it changes the entire way that you see the world.

Love isn’t just blinding. It’s also revealing.

It reveals you to yourself. Falling in love feels like a new beginning because that’s exactly what it is. When you fall in love for the first time, you get to meet yourself for the first time in your life.

You experience emotions and thoughts that you never before could believe existed inside you. You see your vulnerability and your need for having a particular person in your life. The moment you fall in love is the moment you realize you aren’t enough.

In our fast paced,…You experience emotions and thoughts that you never before could believe existed inside you. You see your vulnerability and your need for having a particular person in your life. The moment you fall in love is the moment you realize you aren’t enough.

We all “know” that people need other people in their lives in order to be happy, but not until you fall in love do you realize how deep that need goes. Nor do you realize how far you will go to get the person you desire.

Falling in love makes us do things, say things and believe things we never expected we’d be capable of doing, saying, believing. It pushes us to extremes we may not have even thought we were capable of. It can, and often does, also introduce us to a much darker side of the soul.

While it is important to be ‘decisive’, it is equally important to be absolutely certain that we received the message that the person speaking intended to send.

Unfortunately, many folks (myself included) have developed at least some tendency to react and go into ‘judgment mode’ before the person speaking has even finished communicating.

Then we run off and take action based on incomplete information and unintentionally create a mess that we then have to clean up.

Disclaimer: The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensue discussion or debate.

 Thank you …Listening to yourself

Authentic connection with others also requires being fully present with your own feelings and needs.

If love was all good feelings and happiness then -- let’s be honest -- we wouldn’t find it nearly as intriguing as we do. It’s because we know the dark path that loving often leads us on that we find ourselves so entranced. Just as love reveals all the good in you, it also reveals all the bad..

We all have that darkness inside us -- we just aren’t familiar with it until we’ve loved. We find ourselves fighting this inner struggle of selfishness and selflessness, a fight that more often than not leads to everyone losing and no one winning.

We try to both be independent and at the same time a part of a bigger whole. We get confused. Find ourselves lost and questioning the new reality that falling in love has created for us.

 Is it real?

Or is it all just an illusion?

The dance is to stay in touch with ourselves while not becoming obsessed with ourselves and our own little dramas.

In this context, it is important to give yourself full permission to be who you are; to recognize negative patterns of self-judgment, and let them go.

Want to add word or two?

We are all a work in progress.

We often fall short of being true to ourselves simply because we don’t take the time to check in with ourselves or, worse yet, dismiss obvious ‘red flags’ out of expediency or just plain laziness.

Your comment ….?

Imagine… falling in love builds you an entirely new world, an entirely new reality, a new truth. Then, down the line when things get more complicated and less black and white, we begin to lose sight of that novel reality. It all begins to get fuzzy and our uncertainty punishes us; it hurts.

It hurts to think that the love of you life, your world, isn’t what you believed it to be. It hurts to even think that everything that you’ve believed to be true may have all been in your imagination. The life you’ve just begun is about to end and a newer, darker version of you begins to take form.

I cannot tell you how many men and women have told me, “If only I had listened to my ‘inner voice’,

If during a conversation you experience ‘a funny feeling’, ‘doubts’, or just don’t ‘feel comfortable’ with something, do yourself a huge favour and make the time to fully explore your feelings and needs.

While it is not healthy or adaptive to be overly focused on ourselves, we have to remember to ’bring ourselves with us’ on our journey through life.

Before you commit to anything be sure that you are really ‘ok’ with it.

Every time we fall in love, we start a cycle of beginning and ending, of rebirth and death.

The person you are changes as the way you perceive your love changes. As the way you look at your lover changes over the years, so does the person that you’ve become.

Falling in love teaches you that without one, you can’t have the other. This is what makes relationships so damn complicated. Yet, it’s also what makes welcome to my connect s falling in love so perfect.

I invite you to go look in the mirror and celebrate the wonderful human being that you are.

I sincerely hope that you found this post inspiring and useful.