If feelings aren’t appropriately fueled, they die. My mentor told us that, the love it took to start the relationship is not necessarily the love that will see the relationship to the end of life. He said, everything in life gets depleted with use and would need to be replenished from time to time. Love is also not an exemption to this principle of renewal. Unfortunately, few know how to feed their feelings and replenish their love lives. Here are a few practical tips:
CLARIFY YOUR FEELINGS. You must choose to deal with your decline in feelings by exploring your memory of each other. If you look back and think back, you will realize that this is the same person you were so in love with at the beginning. Their context might have changed over the years, but it is the same person, essentially. You must then be sincere in identifying what qualities that your original love was based upon. You might discover that those qualities are still there, buried beneath the rubles of day to day pressures, conflicts and challenges. The greatest impetus for the discovery of what you once felt for your lover, is realizing that this is the same person-the s-a-m-e person you once loved.
ATTEND TO YOUR FEELINGS. The mystery of affection is rooted in attention. The more you give your attention to a thing or a person the more your affection grows. The loss of affection is primarily a result of the loss of attention. The source of all our famine of feelings is that we allowed other things to steal away our attention, from the one who used to be the primary object of our affections. This displacement of attention and affection could be created by children, a career, friends, and all sorts of other things. To feed our feelings and regain our affection, we must deliberately give our lover first place on our scale of attention once again.
QUARANTINE YOUR FEELINGS. In an earlier article, I wrote about the challenge of the diffusion of emotions, which takes place, when we have too many emotional outlets in our lives. To develop emotional intensity, one would have to close all such leakages. One way this can be done is by ending all external affairs which serve as emotional crutches. In an overpopulated home, this quarantine can be accomplished by letting all squatters go, so that the husband and wife will be forced to communicate with each other and get in touch with what they once felt. Another way this can be done is by going for an extensive and isolated vacation. The merits of such strategies in rekindling lost passions are inestimable.
AFFIRM YOUR FEELINGS. Affections cannot grow in an atmosphere of denial. One of the ways we all cope with hurts from our loved ones is by faking denial. Our denial is also one of the ways we seek to get back at those who hurt us. If our feelings are to grow, each partner is to subscribe to a policy of constant affirmation. Affirmation is simply saying to your lover without, what you feel within. It is one of the oldest recipes for growing our feelings known to man.
CONFIRM YOUR FEELINGS. This is the climax of all our initiatives towards the restoration of what we once felt. At this stage, you back up your loving affirmations, with massive, loving, actions directed at your lover. At this point, you deliberately treat your lover, like you have always wanted to be treated by a lover, for as long as it takes, until loving feelings overwhelm both of you again. You also might reach back into your love archives and begin to treat your lover like when you first fell in love. The dramatic resurgence of a once dying love, like the blooming of a dead rose, is one of the greatest joys of the human spirit.
Lest I forget, all of the above should be carried out in a spirit of intense prayers and intercession, because without the intervention of our love designated creator, success might not be guaranteed. I can hear someone ask; What if my feelings are tied to someone it shouldn’t be tied to? I must acknowledge that happens at times. All you have to do is to reverse all the processes recommended above, deliberately and extensively and the sanity of your emotions will be restored.
THE GREATEST IS LOVE