On Tenderness: Love the Little in All of Us

I was visiting New York recently and it was cold. Standing in a store to get my coffee I noticed an older man wearing a thick winter jacket holding a little doggy in a coat. It was a small dog, about 10 pounds, held close to this man’s breast. The animal’s little head was shaking.

I asked the man the name of his puppy, and in a second his hardness in his face turned into a little boy as his eyes softened and he said in the sweetest voice, “Sprinkles.” My heart felt his heart. I could feel his sincere devotion to his little dog. It was like a melody of a beautiful song the way he spoke of his pup, sweet, pure, wonderful.

When we meet our special person, most of us fall into believing that since we have found them, that’s all we need. Everything will be right from here on out because we are with our perfect mate. Most of us start our relationships this way. And then we realize that the perfect person is not enough to sustain our happiness.

And believe it or not, this is normal. It happens in almost all relationships. So what do we have to do to make our relationship last, even though sometimes we don’t always feel great about it? I believe we need to grow our relationship muscles.

All of us carry around a lot of feelings all the time. That’s just a characteristic of being human. Many of us carry around some deep love for our partners yet we don’t tell them about it. I am sometimes amazed during counseling sessions, when I will ask a man if he loves his girlfriend or wife and he’ll say, “Of course I do,” and then look over at her and say, “She knows that.”

He doesn’t tell her he loves her. He tells me he does and that she knows it. He accepts the fact that she already got his love declarations and assumes that’s all she needs. He already told her this and so it will always exist.

Well…

When we get into a scrape with the person we love we often wind up in a difficult place. We sometimes hurt and feel unloved. Maybe we get mad at our mate and sulk or lash out. These are very common positions that many couples engage in. No one likes them. They are difficult and unpleasant.

As a couples specialist I am always trying to understand how to explain relationships in the simplest ways so people can improve how they interact with the person they love. And as I was thinking about this concept it occurred to me that there are really two places we end up occupying after a fight. We are either doing something about our partners or we are doing something about ourselves.

There are probably lots of people in your life you say you love; parents, cousins, siblings, children, friends, neighbors. If we think about our community, we might feel close and loving toward many people. But if you look closely, they don’t all feel the same.

I was talking with my cousin’s husband the other day and I felt myself wanting to stress a point from my experience. It was a memory from my history that was really important to me, yet he was talking about something that was equally important to him; it was not in agreement with, and different from my story.

It felt like we were getting ready to disagree about parts of the story when I realized how important we as humans feel about our particular memories. It’s as if the way we think about things is so vital to our way of presenting ourselves in the world and to each other. This moment gave me some insight as to how we as partners in a relationship might want to argue to the death with our mate over memories that we perceive as not remembered correctly.

Being confident takes practice. But building confidence in ourselves and then applying it to our partner might just get us some great results.

Let’s talk about honesty in relationships.

When I think about honesty in relationships, I am talking about expressing our emotional truth. When I see this in a counseling session I always feel something, like I am sharing a moment that is very special and pure.

I had the pleasure of helping a couple recently. It’s clear they love each other, but they were both exhausted trying to get love from each other. They were angry and were extremely unhappy too.

Figuring out how to communicate with your spouse and feel heard in times of conflict can be challenging. Passions run high and you probably both know exactly how to press one another’s buttons. But do you know how to hear each other and bring the conflict to a close?

When I work with couples I often help them to really listen to what their mate is saying. We all know how to talk, so it might sound funny that a couple would need a professional to help them hear, but that is sometimes what is needed.

Dealing with anger in a relationship can be difficult. Anger can push us away from our partner, so learning how to control anger’s influence on our lives and partner is incredibly important. Many of us don’t develop effective tools for dealing with anger until later in life, if ever. If you’re reading this, maybe you could use a helping hand.

If you get angry at your mate, you are not alone. If you get really mad and yell or do other things to your partner when you get upset… again, you are not alone. Anger is pretty common in relationships. And this is not an article about how terrible it is. This is a message about what to do about it.

Tag Archives: feelings

On Tenderness: Love the Little in All of Us

Hurt Feelings and Growth in Your Relationship

Does My Boyfriend Love Me? How Can I Tell?

Conflict in Relationships: Help Make Peace, Not War

Why Love Can Feel Different

Why Our Experiences Are So Important

How Building Confidence Gets Results in Relationships

Honesty in Relationships Helps Couples Connect

How to Communicate with Your Spouse and FEEL HEARD

Dealing with Anger in a Relationship