Love Is a Skill. Here's How to Master it

I think that romantic movies and social media are giving us an incorrect perception of what love should be.

The problem is that they are magnifying the part of falling in love and completely ignoring the actual long-term relationship.

Such a high emphasis on the beginning of a relationship makes perfect sense, as it is the most interesting and unpredictable part.

A story about falling in love, the first kiss, the arguments, jealousies, and miscommunications is very marketable. Nobody would watch a movie about a trip to Ikea or about a couple arguing about cleaning the kitchen.

This creates great entertainment but also a wrong expectation of what love is supposed to be.

As a consequence, everybody wants to fall in love, but nobody is ready to love.

Falling in love is easy. We rely on our feelings and intuition, get to know a small part of a person, and idealize the rest.

Loving is difficult. With time we get to know our partner and realize that it doesn’t fully match with the idealized version we created in our heads.

Love is a skill. It requires us to engage in deep introspection, embrace the imperfections of our partner, be both a teacher and a student, and consistently be patient, supportive, and selfless.

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Understand love

First, we need to understand why we love, what evokes our feelings, how we behave when we love, and what are our flaws and imperfections.

We often fall in love with what feels familiar to us. Having had a loving upbringing with caring parents is wonderful, but it can be more challenging when our early experiences involved toxic relationships, such as parents arguing or being emotionally distant.

Consequently, we end up looking for partners behaving similarly hoping to find long-lasting love and a happy ending to the sufferings we had to endure as children. This is very dangerous because we can’t fix people with toxic behaviors.

We accept the love we think we deserve

— The Perks of Being a Wallflower

We should practice self-love instead. Our past should not dictate our future, and if someone didn’t love us before, it doesn’t diminish our worthiness of love now.

We deserve a healthy relationship from the beginning, not someone toxic we need to fix.

Additionally, we should be aware of our coping mechanisms during a toxic childhood and avoid repeating them with our partner.

For example, completely shutting down our emotions with a distant parent may have been very helpful, but it doesn’t help us find long-lasting love.

If we learn to love ourselves we learn to deal with rejections and learn to love instead of running away from it.

We should understand what being loved means, and not be afraid of it. If we are looking for love and are willing to work for it, it means that we are good people and we deserve to find it.

Embrace imperfection

Just like we are flawed and are dealing with the scars from our past, so is everyone else. We have to accept that our idealized version of our partner is only in our heads and embrace all the imperfections of reality.

We should also not expect our partner to automatically understand our needs. Even if it is a very romantic concept, our partner isn’t a mind reader.

Nobody can fully understand us, not even ourselves.

So we shouldn’t strive for a perfect romantic love story, we should embrace a good enough real relationship instead.

We should learn to communicate and be patient in the process.

Creating an environment for good communication requires time, but is necessary.

We should learn to formulate our emotions, address our needs, and accept that it may take multiple attempts before we are understood.

At the same time, we need to listen to our partner to understand which needs have to be met from our side.

Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

— Alain de Botton

Grow together

Communication is key not only to meet our needs but also to grow together in a relationship.

Love doesn’t mean unconditionally loving everything from our partner. It means admiring each other’s strengths and mutually inspiring one another to reach our fullest potential.

Consequently, loving requires us to be good teachers and good students, learning to accept criticism and to give feedback nicely.

This can be hard at times, as the more we invest in a relationship the more we have to lose. Weaknesses we see in our partner are taken very personally, as they question the validity of our choices.

It becomes very difficult with so much at stake to give or receive constructive feedback. Arguing and letting the emotions flow is the easier but unproductive alternative.

To avoid this from happening we need to keep in mind the qualities and strengths of our partner and accept the limitations.

We should always strive for mutual improvement in a relationship, but this can only happen if we are happy already.

Otherwise, we will lack the patience and the emotional stability to be both a good teacher and a good student.

Be consistent

Growth happens in the long term through consistency and the same consistency is required to guarantee a long-lasting love.

Just as we take care of our health and give our best at work, we should do the same with our partner.

Open communication is hard to achieve but equally hard to maintain. We should never stop listening to the needs of our partner and doing our best to fulfill them.

Similarly, we should never disregard our own needs. We should strive to communicate them effectively and remain patient even if it takes multiple attempts.

We should never take our relationship for granted, we should always be curious about what our partner is experiencing and always be ready to learn something new.

Every day we need to be supportive, patient, and most importantly kind.

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The moment we accept, that love is something we have to work for and not something we are entitled to only because we follow our feelings, we have some chance for a long-lasting and fulfilling relationship.

Love may be a complicated skill to master, but working on it is one of the most rewarding experiences of our lives.

Finding love means feeling safe. We have a person we can go to whenever we need comfort and support during our growth journey.

Finding love means feeling worthy. Having someone who genuinely cares for us and embraces us for who we are is the highest demonstration that we are worthy of love.

Finding love means feeling understood. Maybe just at times, just for a few seconds, but that is enough to feel a bit less lonely and to know that we have someone to experience the mystery of life with.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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From The Good Men Project on Medium

What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean?

My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence

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