Russ Harris

The reality is, life involves pain. There’s no getting away from it. As human beings we are all faced with the fact that sooner or later we will grow infirm, get sick and die. Sooner or later we all will lose valued relationships through rejection, separation or death. Sooner or later we all will come face-to-face with a crisis, disappointment and failure. This means that in one form or another, we are all going to experience painful thoughts and feelings.

If you think of love as an ongoing process of letting go, opening up, valuing, and engaging, then it is always available to you—even when the feelings of love are absent.

L – Letting go

O – Opening up

V – Valuing

E – Engaging

You forget that he entered into this relationship for the very same reasons as you: to love and be loved, to care and be cared for, to enhance and enrich his life by sharing it with another. Neither of you entered into this relationship because you wanted to fight and quarrel and bicker and blame and judge and hurt and reject. So if you’re hurting, it’s guaranteed that your partner is hurting too.

Acknowledging your mutual pain is a vital step in moving from conflict to resolution. When you truly recognize that you both are hurting, you will find it easier to tune into caring and compassion, both of which are essential ingredients for restoring vitality and love to your relationship.

One of the greatest compliments you can pay another human being is to give them your full attention.

The fact is sometimes your partner will respond the way you want, and sometimes she won’t. Sometimes you’ll both see eye-to-eye on an issue, and sometimes you won’t. Sometimes you’ll reconcile your differences with a win-win outcome, and sometimes you won’t. When things go the way you want, you’ll feel good. And when they don’t, you’ll feel pretty lousy. Are you willing to make room for all of this? If not, you’re going to struggle with reality. And that’s a fight that reality always wins!

The great playwright George Bernard Shaw put it like this: “For every complex problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong.”

Keep in mind that you can’t control the feelings of trust; you can only control the actions. So if you want to trust your partner again, then begin with small actions: trust him in tiny little ways and see if he proves worthy.

Any activity can be a toward move or an away move, depending on the situation.