Learning Yourself as Half of a Whole ~ Adult Partnership
Affection = You Are Loved
Adult dating, hobbies, sports and your partner’s love languages are vital to the play, affection, fun, flirtatiousness and romance necessary for a romantic bond. As someone once said, “If you don’t know how to date, you aren’t ready for marriage.” Couples need a vocabulary for excitement which arouses us, yes, sexually, but also mentally, emotionally and spiritually to bond with each other. We must know and ‘speak’ each other’s love languages daily or the bond wilts and weakens.
Designing Your Partnership
The deep romantic bond exists only when we pay attention to keeping the connection with each other. This may be the most intense part of “the work” of keeping your marriage clean, energetic, enjoyable and strong. You two design and live your intimate partnership when you are trustworthy in your devotion to the relationship, in the way you use your money, through how you keep your privacy and how you succeed as a team doing domestic duties.
Intimacy Takes Trust
“The most important marriage skill is listening to your partner in a way that they can’t possibly doubt that you love them.”
-Diane Sollee, smartmarriages.com
We can lose or never really create a romantic bond by keeping protective barriers between ourselves and our lover. Dropping the privacy fences is seldom appropriate or respectful except when we find our True Love. Then, the intimate or romantic bond is created fully. We may know countless reasons to keep our independence and few which invite utter surrender. Some of us only drop our guard with small children and animals. Here’s where the walls must come tumbling down.
“What makes a relationship work is having things in common.
What makes a relationship passionate are our differences.”
-Phillippia Faust, RN
Romantic Bond ~ Real Romance is for Grown-Ups
Adult Roles Build Desire
Many influences keep us from developing as self-concept around taking on the role of manhood and womanhood in relationships. Starting boy/girl relationships too young fosters sibling dependency or neediness as other developmental aspects and obviated and undeveloped. Only the man and woman can choose to fill the role of husband and wife…they don’t need each other, they desire someone to love rather than to get love from…desire vs need.
Half of a Whole
When we individuate yet bond, we think independently yet with our care for our mate in our mind. When making a commitment with time, money, social events, those who have a romantic bond cannot make a final decision until consulting the other half of their partnership.
Your Favorite Style of Novelty
“Although research indicates that most men are even more romantic about relationships than women, there’s often still a lack of romance in long-term marriages. Thus the need for skill with romance, novelty, flirting, eroticism and emotional arousal.” -Pepper Schwartz
Keeping the romantic bond happy and enthusiastic requires that we plug into the connection everyday…like charging your cellphone! And your lover’s style of connecting is the one you want to use except you don’t want it to get stale or stuck in a rut. This may be the part which requires more than we can conjure. Especially when we’ve lived in the same city for many years, been in the relationship for a long time and have the same passion for the same activities, sports and arts. The romantic bond requires novelty…something new, a different kind of nourishment or ‘husbanding.’
This generation is pioneering the passion for keeping romance for life. That means that we don’t have many role models, professors or precedents as teachers. However, there are endless amounts of ideas when you look for them.
Is this all there is?