How much does your partner resemble the person you met and fell in love with? And how easy does your relationship feel now compared to what it was like before?
Really take a moment to think about how things “used to be” between the two of you.
Have things changed?
Do you have the same warm-and-fuzzy feelings about them, or are there more than a few things you wish he or she would work on?
Do the two of you seem to relish just being in each other’s company, or has your time together become littered with bickering, tension, and fighting?
And how secure do you each feel in your relationship? Does one of you get jealous sometimes? Do you argue about how often you should be intimate together, or how much time should be devoted to people and activities outside the relationship?
Whether you’re experiencing one of these scenarios or something similar, you might be asking yourself whether the person you’re with is truly right for you. After all, why would these problems exist in a healthy relationship? Isn’t there supposed to be mutual acceptance, harmony, and security?
Aren’t you supposed to feel in love?
How Falling in Love Makes You Scared To Death
What if I told you that the very nature of an intimate relationship creates the perfect conditions for you to experience conflict and negative feelings? In other words, there’s nothing like the vulnerability and intimacy of a close relationship to bring out the very worst in you and your partner!
Why? Because the experience of being so closely involved with someone offers the opportunity to be completely known, you are naked, in every sense of the word. This person will get to know everything about you, yes everything, and that can be downright scary!
When you’re just getting to know someone, you’re on your best behaviour. You’re putting your best you forward and sometimes the person you think they want to see. You can only keep that going for so long and therefore sooner or later, your “best you” slips into the real you with all your quirks and patterns.
And you know it is going to happen. Your partner knows it is going to happen too.
At the beginning of your relationship, you’re both subconsciously secretly wondering, “When he or she finds out this about me – when they know the real me – will they still love me and want me?”
As your relationship progresses and you become closer, this fear of being “found out” actually becomes more intense, and it creates an underlying discomfort within you. Instead of settling into the relationship and feeling secure, your subconscious invokes a series of “tests” to find out if, indeed, your partner truly accepts you. Sadly, these tests can actually create the very outcome you don’t want, which is why love often triggers the very actions that destroy a relationship.
Let’s look at some of these actions:
Destructive Action No1: Fault-Finding
When you first meet your partner, you might think to yourself, ” Where have you been all my life?”
As time goes on, you start finding little annoying habits and huge character flaws in them and you wonder how you’ll ever be able to live with them.
Did you fall in love with your partner’s spontaneity…but now you can’t stand it that they won’t plan anything beyond this weekend?
“Going with the flow was fun then,” you tell yourself, “But it’s just not practical in the long term.”
When we’re afraid of not being truly loved for who we are, we often become critical of our partners. Why? Because it’s much easier to pick out what’s wrong in someone else than to own what needs loving attention in ourselves.
Destructive Action No2: Picking Fights
Provoking upset is one of the more obvious ways partners test each other as you are trying to see how far you can push each other and still maintain a connection.
Here’s an example: you have spent a great day together, the kind where you felt really in tune with each other, when all of a sudden you catch a glimpse of a dirty spot in the kitchen (they made breakfast for you this morning), and you can’t help but point it out. From one minute to the next, the entire mood of the day changes.
They feel criticised and you feel as though you’re always doing everything around the house.
The bigger problem is that a relationship can only withstand so much negative interaction as a pattern of constant fighting and making up inevitably takes its toll, leaving both of you feeling even less secure with each other.
Destructive Action No3: Pulling Away/Pushing For More
All of us enter into relationships with two opposing fears: the need to be close, and the need to develop and express our individuality.
In a relationship, partners often push each other’s boundaries on both ends of the spectrum: one partner wants more time together, while the other seems to get wrapped up in things outside the relationship. The more one pushes, the more the other pulls away.
In either case, each person is testing to see how far they can go without completely pushing the other away. If they can’t find a comfortable balance, the smothering/distancing behaviours can dangerously drain away positive feelings.
If you’re not aware of how certain fears are operating under the surface for you, you’ll continue to repeat destructive patterns from relationship to relationship. You’ll think you keep choosing the wrong partner or are somehow doomed to remain unhappy in love.
That’s why I created The P.E.O.P.L.E Programme, to help you identify how hidden fears and beliefs are undermining your relationships, causing you unnecessary struggle. With it you will start to understand why your relationships have played out as they have, and how your subconscious fears can trick you into thinking the only way out of the fear of pain is to push your partner away. You will also see how by changing this creates a relationship balance that allows you to feel deeply connected and individually fulfilled, so there’s no pushing/pulling at all.
Here is the interesting truth: there is nothing that any one person can say or do to convince you of their love. The real test is how you feel about yourself.
When you don’t love yourself, it’s impossible to believe that someone else can love all of you, too. When you don’t embrace all the qualities and traits that make you who you are, you will always be haunted by the worry that the person you are with will fall out of love with you or do something to hurt you.
As long as you don’t accept yourself, you will continue to test and push your partner’s love to the limit, and are likely create the outcome you don’t want, but what your subconscious fear is pushing for.
Fill out the contact box on my website for your free consultation and we can discuss how coaching can help you in your life and experience the relationships that you truly deserve.
Much love
John