Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something. They’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take. - Anthony Robbins

I am trying to think how do we get all so mixed up in our relationships which start with so many potentials. We meet someone, we like this person, we find many things in common. We get excited, we fall in love. We want this good feeling to last forever. We are happy.

The mistakes many of us make is that we want this relationship so much. We want this relationship more than anything else in our lives. We want to be happy. We want our partner to be happy. We want to please our partner. We think that a relationship will make us happy.

We think we are in love. Unconsciously out of love for our partner we start little by little to abandon the wishes and the needs of our inner child. We start to ignore our own boundaries. It starts very innocent. Maybe we are doing something and our partner wants to do something different. Because we want to please our partner we stop doing what we intended to do and instead do what our partner wants to do. We are both happy. But what happens if a similar situation repeats itself over and over again? Did our partner expected us to give ourselves up? Most of the time not. We do that voluntarily. Out of love. So we think. But is it really out of love? Isn’t there a little control involved, an unconscious expectation attached to our love? Expectation that the favor will be returned? Unconditional love doesn’t have strings attached. Our love does. We do this dance for one year, and another year maybe for the next ten or twenty years. Our partner has no clue that that is what we are doing. He doesn’t know that we unconsciously are abandoning ourselves to please. Our partner takes whatever is offered. Why shouldn’t he? After awhile our partner gets used to our abandoning. After awhile that is how he begins to see us. He sees us as someone we are not. He sees us as someone we pretended to be all those years. Someone who doesn’t mind loosing ourselves. Our partner doesn’t know that there is an expectation attached to our love. He doesn’t understand why we get angry, upset, complaining, why we are not satisfied or are withdrawing our love.

What happens when our partner doesn’t return our favor? Once, twice, many times? How do we feel?

 After years of abandoning our true self, our needs and wishes, after years of unfulfilled expectations we get angry with/at our partner. We see our partner as the villain. We see ourselves as a victim. We don’t like that our partner got used to our way of abandoning ourselves. We can’t stand it anymore. We blame our partner for the pain and unhappiness our self-abandoning brought to us. We want our partner to take care of our pain. Of our inner child. We want our partner to change so our pain can go away. We close our hearts when our partner refuses take care of our inner child and to change.

Most likely our partner as a reaction to our unhappy controlling behavior starts to react in his own wounded way. Gets angry, preachy, explaining, defending, etc. He also starts abandoning him/herself in his/her own way.

All those years together we are building our relationship unconsciously on many false beliefs. On many unconscious lies. We build our relationship by not honoring our inner child. We build our relationship on handling our inner child to our partner to take care of him/her instead taking responsibility to do it ourselves. The foundation of this kind of relationship must be very shaky and very unstable.

Than one day we woke up and we realize we don’t know who we are. We feel we lost ourselves, our authenticity. We don’t know anymore what it is that make us excited anymore because we buried our inner child deep, deep down. We can’t stand the way our partner changed by abandoning his/her own inner child and by reacting to us from his wounded part of himself. We realize that we can’t live this way anymore. With all these lies. We are very tired of pretending. We are tired of being taken for granted. After years of giving love to get love we can’t do it anymore. We stop seeing the wonderful essence of each other. The very reason we fell in love with each other.  All the good qualities of who we really are. They are still there!! Only they are all buried deep down and covered by layers and layers of wounded behaviors and reactions to each other.

Whose fault is it? Our own? Our partner’s?

Can we prevent falling out of love in our future relationship?

Can we forgive and start from the beginning in the relationship we are in?

Can we have compassion for the wounded parts we all have?

Is it possible to recover from years of accumulated pain?

Is it possible to love another unconditionally?

Is it possible to start to see all the wonderful reasons we fell in love with our partner? And fall in love again?

Is it possible?

Is it worth it?

Do we want to?