Change your life: Part 5: Falling in love again

Having a great partnership whether in your personal life or your professional life is easy, to begin with. However longer term it can be harder. It doesn’t have to be this way at all.

In this article I will show you a really simple trick to stay in love with your partner, your job, your kids, your education, any area of your life. When we do something there has to be a payoff at the end. For example going to work everyday, the payoff is the money which is deposited into your bank account every month or every week. You may not like it but you still do it as the rewards are greater than the pleasure of staying in bed. You may not like going to the gym but you do it as the rewards are greater than being a bit flabby or downright fat. There is a payoff for everything we do in life. Think about it for a minute, I challenge you to think of something you do which doesn’t have a payoff; you go to the toilet to relieve your bladder and to stop feeling uncomfortable, you eat to stop the hunger, you make love to produce endorphins in your body and make you feel good, you go to work to get paid, you take the dog for a walk so he doesn’t make the house messy….everything has a payoff.

The payoff

What most of us do though is make the payoff the primary goal. Would you go to work if you didn’t get paid? For most of us that would be NO! NO! NO! So your primary goal, in this example, is go to work and get some money. My aim when I go to work is to try and make the payoff less important. Yeah right! You might be saying as if that could happen. I
do like my job, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t get paid but I still like it and I enjoy what I do. My job is a path to what I really want to be doing in my life and that is changing people’s lives, it is my first step to that outcome.

What do I do to make the payoff less important than the actual work I do? Change my perspective on my work. My main job is to help prevent and to help sustain tenancies for persons who have previously been homeless. Now, I could , do the minimum, complain about the large caseload I have and the amount of time to do an effective job but I try and look at my job in a different way. I have the chance to change a person’s life for the better, I have the chance to help them stay in a house or a flat and possibly help them to become the person they want to be. Once they are in their flat or house I still work with them to try and maintain it, and to help them find employment or help with their health needs.

I cannot help people who do not want to be helped and there are a lot of people like that in my line of work. However once in a while someone extends their hand for help and that hand is met with a multitude of hands willing to help and I have a chance to be a part of a life changing process starting with helping to put a roof over someone’s head. That’s the bigger payoff, the money is a good thing, it pays the mortgage but spiritually I get the better payoff.

Falling in love again

What the hell has all this got to do with staying in love with your partner? Everything! You have a payoff by being I love, you have a payoff by loving your kids, you have a payoff by loving life but it’s a two way process you love and adore your kids, they will get love, affection time and attention from you and you get happy, loving, responsible children.

But what happens when the kids are being a pain in the arse, what happens when your partner has two sets of love handles, what happens when you hate your job?

• Start falling in love with what you originally fell in love with!
• Take a moment to think of 5 reasons why you love your children
• Take a moment to think of 5 things you love about your partner
• Take a moment to think of 5 things you love about your job (and there will
  be some)
• Take a moment to think of 5 reasons you love going to university

When doing this exercise you have to put your heart and soul into it. Don’t just say it out loud, feel it, see it, look at your partner and see those beautiful eyes you adore, hear the voice that gets you excited, feel their heart, think back to when you felt all those things. Do it with everything that may be dying in your life. You have to re-acquaint yourself with those feelings as those feelings can go if we don’t notice it going.

Feeling the love

Some people think ‘I don’t think I love my partner anymore, what happened?’ take time to get acquainted with them again. I am not saying your relationship will change overnight however, if you start to think about your partner all over again your partner will see the changes in you, they will feel a different vibe from you and they will respond. We have
to feel the feelings we felt when we first fell in love and that keeps us going. We are not meant to just drift along hoping that the feelings will stay. That’s what it means when people say you have to work hard at a marriage, you have to work hard to feel the love for you partner.

It’s true for anything in your life. Just re acquaint yourself with what you felt when you first started on the thing in your life and you can get the feelings back and subsequently the love back.

Feel the hate

Incidentally you can do this in reverse. If you don’t want to like something anymore, chocolate for example. Think of 5 reasons why you really hate it makes you fat (see yourself being fat, see yourself being ridiculed, see yourself naked in the mirror as a fat person), it clogs your arteries (see your blood vessels being blocked, see yourself being out of breath,). You get the picture. If you can really put emotion into this and do it often it is a very powerful tool for change in your life.