Take your Time

5/20

I found this artical very interesting...

What you’re doing right now—reading a book—puts you in rare company. By reading this book, or any book, you vault yourself into the ranks of a dying breed of people who ponder and reflect, who actually do stop and think. Reading—or any activity requiring sustained mental effort—demands a level of prolonged attention that fewer and fewer people want to give, are willing to give, or are able to give. Without noticing it, we are losing our capacity to linger and savor the moment. Reflexive impatience makes us rush, even when there is no need to rush. When was the last time you lingered over coffee, or savored a conversation, or took your sweet time in a museum or a bookstore? Don’t you instead usually feel a compulsive inner pressure to hurry up?

But to love, you must slow down. You must pause. You must attend to the other person. Fast love is about as satisfying as fast food. For love to sustain you and give you the deep pleasures it can, pleasures that are unsurpassed in this life, you must linger over your love and savor it. What gives love its particular depth and flavor only comes through over time. The best love is aged love. The rest is infatuation. But to appreciate true love, love that does not alter when it alteration finds, you must take your time—not let it be taken from you. You must allow love to free you up from your worries and your hurry, at least for the moment.

To do so, you must pay close attention. You must look for the ever-so-slight change in expression in the person you’re with, the tilting of the head, the movement of the hands, the sound of surprise at the latest news. For love to be the kind of feeling that it can and ought to be, for love to make all of life’s pain worth enduring and to momentarily assuage that pain, you must let love engulf you like a luxurious, warm bath. Take your time with your love. Go slow. While you can.

Respect

When I meet couples, whether it’s in private practice or on television, seeing a lack of respect on either of their parts is the biggest red flag to me that they’re on the path to a breakup. In my mind it is the biggest single indicator that things are not going well, and failure is in their future. Why is it that we treat the people we profess to love most the worst? A grown up shouldn’t do that, and yet so many of us do. Sometimes we treat insignificant people — a clerk in a store that we’ll never see again — with more respect and good manners than we do our own mates! We need to flip this tendency. If you can treat someone who hardly matters well, then you can treat somebody who really matters better.


We are told from a very young age that love is all about accepting you for who you are. That you are allowed to unload on your significant other, because he is “safe” and has to love you no matter what. How many times have you heard somebody say, “Everybody loves him; they think he’s a great guy, but no one has any idea how horrible he is at home alone with me.” We are tacitly told in a million ways that it’s okay to treat the people we are closest to poorly, and we’re all guilty of it. We don’t elevate our partners to the proper level of their value in our lives, and I believe that’s the first step everyone should take to improve an intimate relationship, and it’s one of the most important items for you to insist on in your list of needs. If it isn’t on your list—go add it now! By the way, this detail of being treated at a high level of consideration falls under the category of respect, which I had you add earlier. But I want it listed separately because I also consider it an indication of adoration, which I personally think is the second-most-important factor to have in an intimate relationship. Doesn’t it sound wonderful to think of being respected and adored forever?


Plants need time and care, and yet the relationship that people give the least time and care to is the one they are closest to. If you are involved in an intimate relationship, do you spend time growing it, cultivating it, and maintaining it? Or are you too busy? That is where the idea of respect comes in. If everything you do is based on respect, wanting your partner to be happy while adoring him in the process, then you’ve done 60 percent of the work already. Naturally most people fall far short of even this. They stop trying. They put work first. Sports first. The kids’ needs. They scream and yell. They snipe or give the silent treatment. They argue over little things, when most of these things could be worked out if they love each other and are committed to the relationship.

Unfortunately, however, some change involves pain. Given the overwhelming tendency to head down the wrong path — meaning, fall in love with the “wrong” person — that we’ve all been guilty of at one time or another, what can we do about that now? This is where we have to walk the talk when it comes to being a fully loaded grown up. A grown up knows that the right thing to do is often the hardest thing to do! Whether this means walking away from a long marriage, giving up on an addicted boyfriend or girlfriend no matter how much the person loves you and begs you to stay, recognizing early on that your needs aren’t being met while you’re dating somebody and breaking up with them, and so forth. Yes, it’s painful and difficult. Yes, making this kind of informed decision is the downside to being a grown up. But in some cases there is simply no chance for mutually fulfilling lasting love, and that’s what this chapter is all about.