Building Love in the Digital Media Age

How often have you heard people talk about looking for love and finding love? Those terms make it sound as if love is something you stumble over, full blown like a rose and ready to take home. In reality, love is not quite so simple. It is not something you find hidden in a corner or tucked away in your purse like a surprise five dollar bill. Rather, it is something you build, brick by brick and gesture by gesture.

If that makes love sound like hard work, you’re right – but it’s also joyous work. And it is no different now in the digital media age than it was in the days when your best chance at finding someone to love was asking your sister’s best friend to hook you up with her cousin. You still find someone to love by making connections, and you still build love one interaction at a time.

The biggest difference between love BC (before computers) and love today is that the range for finding a person with whom you can connect is much broader. The Internet has opened whole new worlds, and not just for ecommerce. Your own backyard now extends around the world, and you can easily “meet” someone who lives not just in a different time zone but in an entirely different day than you do. Social media has brought the whole world closer together – but it hasn’t made it any easier to connect with that special someone, nor to build a life and a lasting love with that person once you’ve connected.

So what exactly does it take to build a lasting love in a world where the next relationship is just an IM away, and ending a relationship is as easy as changing your Facebook status and blocking a screen name on your IM?

It takes the same things it has always taken, the same things that turned arranged marriages into solid, lasting, lifelong relationships: respect, trust, faith and honesty. It takes living each day together and working with your partner to create the life the two of you want to live. It means opening yourself up to intimacy and sharing your dreams, hopes and fears with that one special person. It means allowing that one special person into your life to collaborate with you, listening to their dreams and hopes and fears, and allowing them to influence and shape your dreams.

Are you still hoping to stumble across your true love and live happily ever after? As long as you expect to just find love, it will continue to elude you. If you truly want love that lasts a lifetime, you’ll need to change the way you think about relationships and prepare yourself to build a solid and lasting partnership based on trust, faith, honesty and respect.

Love in the Age of Social Media

Can true love flourish in the age of social media? It’s an interesting question to consider. Social media and digital media have produced rapid and profound changes on the ways that people interact with one another – but have they changed human nature itself? Not likely.

As little as ten years ago, the idea of finding love on the Internet was a punch line to a late-night comedian’s joke. Online relationships and meeting people through only services was rare, and if the media spoke of it at all, it was to warn people against it. Today, according to one study, one in five couples started their relationships online. In fact, online dating sites are among the biggest advertisers on social media, and many are among the largest ecommerce sites online. These online dating sites have taken the place of the matchmaker, but is there something missing when you turn the beginning of a relationship into a commercial transaction?

The rise of digital media and social media affect love and relationships in more ways than that, though. The ease of interacting with others from a distance gives rise to many behaviors that most people would never engage in if they were face to face. Couples who might otherwise spend time talking with each other might choose instead to insulate themselves from the relationship and its intimacy by immersing themselves in online communications or watching movies and videos online.

And yet, many couples who met online have gone on to fall in love and have rich, healthy relationships. Is there something special about these couples or people that overcomes the distance and impersonality of the online environment and allows love to flourish?

In fact, the very same factors that make healthy face to face relationships characterize healthy online relationships and can lead to deeper feelings and eventually falling in love. Those factors have everything to do with the integrity of the people involved in the relationship. They include honesty and openness, being trustworthy and being respectful of others and their feelings.

It’s important to recognize that social media is just another medium for communication, and to evaluate your interactions with others in the realm of the digital world by the same criteria you use to evaluate your interactions with those you see face to face. Avoid those who are disrespectful, or who abuse your trust by sharing intimate information with others. Be honest about yourself and expect honesty from others.

The digital world has opened many new opportunities, both personal and professional. Digital television offers the chance to tailor your entertainment to your own preferences. Pay per view events and movies allow you to support the artists and speakers you most trust. And social media is yet another avenue for meeting people and possibly finding love.

Cultivating Love Like Growing Flowers

No matter who tries to tell you different, love at first sight is a myth. Love is not something that just happens, and building relationships that last a lifetime takes work. They don’t just spring into being, but they do grow like flowers if you give them what they need.

Just as love lies in everyone’s heart, every seed contains the flower it may become when given the right conditions. For a flower, those conditions include water, oxygen, sunlight and nutrients. Give a seed the right proportion of sunlight and dark, the right amount of water and a nutrient-rich growing medium and you’ll be rewarded with a strong, healthy plant that flowers and sets more seed. A plant can grow without the optimal mix of those conditions, but a lack of any one of them will result in a stunted plant, or one that is all stem and no leaves or one that wilts without ever flowering.

Love is no different. It requires specific conditions to blossom and set seed. Those conditions include trust, faith, honesty and respect. If you don’t provide each of those conditions for your relationship, you’ll still have a relationship and you may have something resembling love. But just like a plant deprived of sunlight or water will grow stunted and crooked, so a relationship without faith and respect and trust will never fulfill its potential.

Of the four qualities that help nurture love, the most important is respect. Love cannot exist without respect. It’s a prerequisite. Relationships without respect are unhealthy and harmful to the persons involved in them. When you respect another, you listen to them and consider their needs and desires and work to earn their respect. All of those things are vital to growing health relationships.

Many people exist under the misconception that respect is something that must be earned. In fact, respect is something that should be given freely. Unless you are open to respect, you’ll be shutting out any possibility of allowing love to grow to its fullest potential. If you only respect those who have earned your respect, you could be closing out many possibilities for loving others.

Like love, trust, honesty and faith also depend upon respect to grow strong and health. These four pillars of love lean upon each other and together, they create an arbor on which love can climb and grow and flower.

If you want love to flower in your life, if you want to build relationships that last for a lifetime, practice respect. Learn to respect everyone around you for the simple fact that they are, like you, a person.

Four Requirements for True Love

If you want to grow a plant, you know that it has certain requirements – air, earth, water and sunlight. Growing true love is no different. Just as plants require those four elements to grow strong and healthy, so love has its own four requirements for healthy growth. Each of the four elements of love relies upon the others, and when all four are present, they combine to create a strong framework upon which love can flourish and flower for a lifetime.

The four requirements for true love are respect, trust, honesty and faith. Learning to recognize them will help you nourish and enrich your relationships, but sometimes it’s easier to recognize when they are lacking than it is to see their presence. These signs can help you recognize relationships that are true, loving partnerships.

You Can Express Your Opinion without Fear.

In a loving relationship, you can speak the truth without fearing that it will anger your partner or cause him to abandon you. You know that your partner will listen to you with respect and respond to you with honesty. If you fear being ridiculed or belittled by your partner, something is lacking in your relationship. It may be a failure of trust on your part or respect on the part of your partner.

You Can Confide Your Deepest Thoughts to Your Partner.

A loving relationship is built on intimacy, and intimacy relies on being able to communicate with each other honestly. That means you must both feel safe to express your thoughts to each other. You can trust that your partner will keep your confidence and not share what you tell her with others in a way that hurts you. You know in your heart that she will not laugh at you or betray your trust.

You Share Common Goals and Beliefs.

Shared faith is a vital part of a loving and evolving relationship. You put your faith in each other and in the commitment you make to each other. You believe in the same principles and work together toward a common goal, and you believe that together, you are strong enough to reach the goals you set.

Love may spring up on its own, but only when its seeds fall on fertile ground. If you want to find true love, you must cultivate the conditions under which it can flourish. When you strive to be honest and open with others and to be respectful of everyone in your life, you are cultivating the garden in which love can grow.

Are You Ready for Love to Enter Your Life?

Are you ready to welcome love into your life? I’m not talking about falling in love. Falling in love – the stage in a relationship that psychologists call “limerence” – is easy. The initial attraction to another person is a necessary part of developing relationships; but healthy love relationships progress beyond limerence and develop into true, committed and often life-long relationships. How do you tell the difference between the two?

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term limerence in her 1979 book “Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love.” It refers to the heady early days of a relationship when bliss, euphoria and the newness of love seem to make the world a brighter and warmer place. As relationships develop, one of three things happens to limerence: it bursts when something about the love object disappoints or disillusions you; it grows stronger, becoming an unhealthy obsession; or it transforms into real love, becoming the cornerstone of a happy and fulfilled life together.

In order for limerence to develop into a healthy love, you must be ready to allow that to happen. Just as you need to prepare the soil in a garden for a seed to grow into a plant, you have to prepare the conditions in your life – mentally and physically – to allow love to grow into a happy relationship. Preparing yourself and your life to welcome love requires you to examine yourself, your attitudes and your life, and to make changes that make your “garden” a more hospitable environment in which love can grow. You must work on developing the four cornerstones of love in yourself and practice applying them to every relationship in your life. Without that practice, you’ll find yourself attracting the wrong people, or worse, fail at developing a relationship you really want because you don’t know how to do it.

The Four Cornerstones of Love: Trust, Honesty, Faith, Respect

Practice opening yourself to trust. We live in a cynical world. It’s far too easy to look for the “catch” in every good thing that happens. It’s easy to spend so much time looking for the motives behind people’s actions that you fail to appreciate what they have to offer you. It’s difficult to trust in anyone when you’ve been hurt or disappointed, but it’s vital to open yourself to it unless you want to live your life and destroy your relationships with a constant cloud of suspicion. That doesn’t mean you should be a doormat, but everyone deserves your trust until you’re shown they can’t be trusted.

Be honest in your dealings with others. Trust – mutual trust – is an essential part of building healthy relationships. If you want trust from others, you must offer them honesty. Keep in mind that there’s more to honesty than telling the truth. It means representing yourself honestly in your deeds and in your life as well.

Be faithful in your relationships. Faith is built on a foundation of trust, respect and honesty. When you are truthful and honest with others, they can have faith that you will act in a certain way. If you break that faith, relationships suffer.

Treat those around you with respect. You cannot love someone truly when you do not respect them, nor expect someone to love you if you don’t offer respect to them. Listen and hear what they say to you, and respond to them honestly.

You may have noticed that the four cornerstones of love are nearly circular. They weave in and out of each other to build a firm and solid foundation on which you can build strong, loving and long relationships.

Recognizing True Love When You Find ItYou

True love has four hallmarks. When you find a relationship that holds all of them, treasure and nurture it because that relationship holds the seeds to a happy and fulfilling life for you and your partner. The four keys to true love are faith, trust, honesty and respect. How do they fit into building a loving relationship with one special person?

Respect

When you truly love someone, you respect them for who they are at this very moment. You don’t imagine that they will become some fantasy of your perfect person, and you are not consumed with changing them into the person you can love. It is not possible to have true love without shared respect for one another. Before all else, cultivate respect for the people in your life. You’ll find it that much easier to find love when you respect others for being who they are.

Trust

True love requires that you trust your partner implicitly. We all come into relationships with baggage – disappointments and past failures that inform the way we view others and ourselves. Sometimes that baggage places the heavy weight of suspicion on your shoulders. No relationship can survive suspicion and remain happy and healthy. If you cannot trust that the person with whom you want to spend your life, then either you or they are not the right person. Look carefully at your relationships with those around you. If you find that you are “naturally” suspicious of others, consider it a failing in yourself. Before you can find true love, you must learn how to trust others. If you cannot trust, you will not be capable of accepting real love when it is offered to you.

Honesty

Honesty is the cornerstone of both love and trust. Being honest is more than “telling the truth”. It involves being an honest and genuine self. You must be honest with yourself and the world, and present yourself honestly as the person that you are. If you are presenting a façade to the world, you will never be able to trust that anyone truly loves you. You will always wonder how someone can love you when they don’t know the true you. When you present yourself honestly, you’ll never have to wonder.

Faith

The final cornerstone of true love is shared faith. For many, that faith is belief in the same God. For others, it is faith in shared values and beliefs. That shared faith lays the foundation for an entire life, built together to last forever.

When you find true love, you’ll recognize it by its hallmarks. Look for the four keys to true love and you’ll find that special relationship that will inform your entire life with joy and fulfillment.

Positioning Yourself to Find Love in the New Year

Finding love – it’s one of the most common quests among humans. We all crave that special connection with another person, but relationships are often difficult to navigate and cultivate. The fact is that few people put as much thought, planning and effort into finding the right partner to love as they do in planning their careers – but the steps to finding ideal love relationships aren’t much different than the steps one uses in cultivating new business relationships. If you’re tired of relationships that just don’t work for you and want to find true and lasting love, you need to position yourself to find the love you’re seeking.

Finding the Right Person

If you’re looking for a new car, do you shop at the grocery store? Of course not – grocery stores don’t sell cars. If you want to buy a Porsche, would you shop at a Ford dealer? Again, of course you wouldn’t. You’d shop at a dealer who typically sells high-end foreign luxury cars. It’s easy to see that when you’re shopping around for a material object, but most people shy away from employing the same logic to finding the right partner for their relationships. They look for love in singles bars and at dances or through dating services without considering whether the kind of person with whom they want to spend their lives would frequent those kinds of places.

In other words, if you want to find a life partner who values the same things that you do, you’ll find them in places where those values are important and on display. If you want a partner who shares your faith, become more involved in social and other events sponsored by your church. If you want a partner who shares your love of travel, attend travel seminars or take language classes. You’ll find the person who most fits into your life by living the life you want to share with a partner.

Be the Person You Want to Love

Likewise, you need to be the kind of person that will be attractive to the kind of partner you want to attract. Think carefully about the qualities that you find important in a lifelong partner and about the qualities that person looks for in relationships, then work hard at being the kind of person that is worthy of being loved by that kind of person. If you want respect, be respectful. If you’re looking for honesty in your relationship, be honest in everything you do.

Building relationships, especially lifelong relationships based in love, requires at least as much attention and work as you’d put into building your career. Love is all around, but it won’t show itself until you do the work you need to do to cultivate it in your life.