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…

All of us in relationships want to feel accepted and received by the person we love. It’s a longing we all share and impossible not to feel. We crave our person to see us and to remind us that we matter. We need to feel valued by the one we love and we hunger for these reassuring moments.

So the idea that we may NOT feel loved, necessary, or that we matter to our mate is, in my opinion, one of the worst things we can feel.

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.

The perfect relationship is something many of us aspire to have.

All humans dream. All of us have ideas and desires and dreams about being happy in a a perfect relationship. We all long for everything to work out just right, so we can be happy. This longing is how most of us are wired, and it’s a hard road to be on.

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.

If you are human, you have felt jealous. You might even have some early memories of really feeling the pain of jealousy when you were young. I like to think it’s pretty common for all of us as we grow up to experience the hurt associated with being jealous.

But why do we keep feeling it and how to do we deal with it when we grow up and are in what we consider an adult relationship? Why is it we often still get re-injured or we re-injure our mate and it always centers around jealousy?

As a couple counselor I work with people in relationships. Often the difficult issues surround feelings of jealousy. So let’s talk about it and understand what happens to us and our partner when we feel it.

By the time we are in a relationship most of us are pretty good at navigating life. We have probably achieved some sort of successes with school or jobs and just the ability to accomplish things in life.

So when we finally connect to the person we fall in love with, why is it that so many of us feel as if we can’t figure out how to fix simple things, like misunderstandings and disagreements? If we as humans are good at other things in our lives; taking care of people, working, going to class, why do we fail at simple things like getting along with another person?

Tag Archives: relationships

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?

My Husband Ignores Me. What Do I Do?

Why Love Can Feel Different

Why The Perfect Relationship May Not Be What You Think

Honesty in Relationships Helps Couples Connect

How to Communicate with Your Spouse and FEEL HEARD

How Jealousy in a Relationship Divides Us

It’s Never Too Late to Improve Your Relationship