Many books have been written on love.  The famous family therapist Virginia Satir spoke about love for self and being authentic in our communication with others.  She taught that love was a powerful healing element that could reshape individuals and families. Her main focus was to empower individuals and families to take full responsibility for all that they saw, heard and felt. As she empowered people to embrace their authentic self, this assisted her clients to create change. She produced results that appeared to others to be miracles, and it also appeared that she was responsible for creating change in others.  This is not entirely accurate because she did not really do anything other than create an environment whereby others could understand that their perceptions of reality was not reality.  She would explain that the constructs of imagination, and our thoughts either empower or dis-empower.

Other authors have likewise had much to write on the subject to love. Many books today speak about the 5 languages.  The premise of understanding love languages, is to assist those in relationships to identify the dominant love languages of ourselves and others. I have heard people erroneously declare that this or that person, “does not know what love is”.  In reality, this person may simply have a different love language.  We can all learn to communicate love, not through our love language, but using the love language of the other person.  Meeting the needs of others is paramount to phenomenal relationships.

These love languages are. 1/ gifts. 2/ words of affirmation.  3/ physical touch.  4/ quality time. 5/ acts of service.

In another blog I spoke about filling the needs of a man, and filling the needs of a woman.  One of the needs of a man is to feel respected. One of the needs of a woman is to feel loved.

How does a woman help her man to feel respected?  His need for respect is satisfied by learning his love language, and ensuring that she communicates in a way he understands. How does a man help a woman feel loved?  That is done by learning the woman’s love language, and then ensuring that love is communicated in this way.

Every relationship has a period of adjustment.  There are three stages and they are ‘the spark’ attraction and attachment.

When a man and a woman first meet and are into each other, ‘the spark’ is activated.  ‘The spark’ causes us to feel desire to learn about this person.  ‘The spark’ causes immediate reaction in men and women I which strong feeling move throughout the body. These feeling can fill one or both with desire.  This can be so strong that both men and woman can feel immediate sexual responses occurring in their body.

The second stage that is moved into is attraction.  In this stage both begin to learn about the other and chemicals begin to work on both men and women. Adrenaline creates excitement and the ability to remain awake for long hours soaking up ever little detail about the other person. This chemical makes everything fun and interesting, and the need for sleep seem all but gone.  Next is serotonin. This chemical causes a feeling of euphoria and happiness. Finally there is dopamine.  This is why when two people are together they only have eyes for each other. It is because they are literally on drugs.

These chemicals that enable us to ‘fall in love’ last from between 1 and three years. This is enough time to establish and solidify the relationship. This is enough time to form habits around the relationship that will support the relationship long term.  It is time to set boundaries and to create the foundation of a healthy happy relationship.

The final stage is attachment. In this stage deeper connections are formed and the couple becomes a unified team.  This is the stage wherein long term commitment is given, and a deeper level of love is achieved.  Challenges of family, financial pressures, religious differences, and the ‘pulls’ and ‘tugs’ of life serve to strengthen and deepen friendships and solidify the union indefinitely.

There are still many couples who are deeply in love even after 30, 40 of 50 years.  Their secret is their desire to look after the needs of  their lover.  I talk about masculine and feminine needs in another blog.