Excerpt 4 'What I Want You To Understand'

When I have kids, one thing I want them to understand is that love is not a feeling but an action. The feeling of love comes from choosing to love. So, when a relationship feels like its dying, it’s because you have abandoned the love you had at first. Love, real love, doesn’t just go away. You stop doing things you did in the beginning. It is hard to avoid complacency in relationships but just like everything else in life you have to set goals. Try new things together, set goals together, don’t stop trying. Don’t go on autopilot. When two people start dating, they work hard to get to know each other and meet each other’s needs. Then because things may be working out well, they hit auto pilot and start to relax instead of focusing on each other. They pay more attention to their careers or get distracted by other things. Because the relationship seems to be coasting along just fine on auto pilot, you start to let go of the things you used to do that produced that “feeling” of love. Feeling in quotations. But what happens when it runs out of gas? That’s when the trouble starts. Because if you go on autopilot in any area of a relationship; communication, romance, or your spiritual lives, you begin to lose important skills. You neglect each other. You ignore things, you become unaware of the person. It puts you in a dangerous place, because that’s when people start getting bored. And we all know what happens when a person gets bored. I’ve heard that the devils new playground is boredom (I’m quoting Pusha T here, not the bible). No relationship can fly itself, every relationship requires human input. It takes two human beings working at a relationship in order for it to remain healthy. If you feel like it’s too late because you have been on autopilot for so long, take hold of the wheel. Disengage the auto pilot and go back to the things you use to do for the love to return. That’s what I want them to understand.