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falling in love is easy. Avoiding those who would challenge your love is the hard part. As long as you are happy there are going to be people who try and make you unhappy.
Phases of a healthy relationship in my opinion:
initial attraction (can be physical or mental)
If mental, physical attraction can happen in time
If initially physical, mental attraction may or may not happen
if it doesn't and the relationship is purely physical, it is doomed to fail
Assuming things are moving along and love is mutual
the next 100% necessary "ingredient" is respect
without mutual respect, love will not endure
if someone doesn't respect you, your feeling for them will wane (unless you have self esteem issues. that's a entirely different matter)
A quote from Scrubs. One of DR Coxes better pieces
“Relationships don't work they way they do on television and in the movies. Will they? Won't they? And then they finally do, and they're happy forever. Gimme a break. Nine out of ten of them end because they weren't right for each other to begin with, and half of the ones who get married get divorced anyway, and I'm telling you right now, through all this stuff I have not become a cynic. I haven't. Yes, I do happen to believe that love is mainly about pushing chocolate covered candies and, y'know, in some cultures, a chicken. You can call me a sucker, I don't care, because I do believe in it. Bottom line: it's couples who are truly right for each other wade through the same crap as everybody else, but the big difference is they don't let it take them down. One of those two people will stand up and fight for that relationship every time. If it's right, and they're real lucky, one of them will say something “
After reading all of these responses, I've concluded that many of you have no clue what you are talking about. Here are my notes for just the first page of responses:
- You confuse "love" with "relationships". The relationship should come first. After being in a relationship for quite some time, you may finally realize that you love them. The word "love" is thrown around entirely too often. Once you tell a person that you love them, you are making a much bigger commitment to them than just going out on dates and having sex.
- Love is easy... when you really mean it.
- Finally someone who has the right idea: "if you are in a unhappy relationship then I say yes you need to move on." Why would someone purposely make themselves unhappy?
- Finding someone attractive with a lifestyle that you like isn't love, it's becoming interested in a date. Once you date them, you may find that this person is a complete *******... or a person you really get along with. Love will not come into play until after this happens.
- Commitment is easy when love is real.
- Love should not be made of "sighs" and "tears". Just because you can't read someone's personal description of love doesn't mean that they know what they are talking about. Anyone can bull**** sounding smart. Love isn't complex, men just want women to believe that so he can tell her that he doesn't love her without hurting her feelings.
- Love should be effortless. If it has been less than a year and you have to put forth effort to stay together, then you probably aren't good for each other. If your boyfriend makes it clear that he doesn't love you (i.e. dumping you), then you should not waste your time trying to continue making it work. If "one little argument" was the cause of the breakup, then obviously there were other problems and the boyfriend waited for a good time to finally break off the relationship. If you continue calling him after the break up, no man will ever think "maybe I was wrong." They will always think "why won't this psychotic ***** stop calling me?"
I believe it should be easy to want to love the person you are with and it should come as natural as anything else in your life you are dedicated to. That said, relationships are not easy by virtue of their own dynamics - no matter how much people try they will not think alike, agree on everything or see a relationship the same way.
Example, I love my dogs and it's easy to do because I have a dedication to them that is second nature. "Loving" them comes without any effort at all. However, when they go through the trash can or chew up my shoes - there's bound to be 'issues' and words such as "do it again and it's back to the pound with you." "Loving" them is easy - our "relationship" needs to be worked on constantly and is not so easy some days.
It's the same way when you put two people together - Loving them should be easy, but relationshps must be worked on constantly.
I think love is easy but a relationship is sometimes not. If that makes sense...
It's easy for my husband and I to love each other but it's not easy sometimes for us to come to an agreement on something or understand where the other is coming from on a specific issue.
So loving someone should not be work, but yes relationship issues and hard times do take work at times to get through.
edit: sorry just realized how old this thread is and that Thursday said the pretty much the exact same thing
I think that you can love someone until you can not love them anymore. That when there is so much hurt, that all you can do is move on. Eventually the pain goes away and you start to open yourself up to new beginings. I used to believe that if you loved someone enough that you fight for them. But who wants to fight that battle alone. If someone cheated on you once, and you let them back more than likely they will do it again. But what goes around comes around.
I'm the cause of the revival! I googled this question and saw the posts on the first page and thought that I could throw my opinion in there.
And yes, married relationships take work. If you live together and have kids, that takes a large quantity of cooperation by both parties.
If you are in high school and you have a boyfriend or girlfriend, then the relationship should be fairly effortless.
- Figuring out when and where to go on dates doesn't count as making an effort. And if planning a date is, in fact, very difficult, then maybe one or both people shouldn't be dating anyone since they're already dating their video games/sports/jobs etc.
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