Finding Love in Your Life

So many people spend their lives looking for love and finding only unsatisfactory relationships. The problem may be that they’re looking for all the wrong things. If you’re trying to find love but coming up empty every time, perhaps it’s time to look at what you really want and need, and create a plan for finding love in your life. If you think that sounds a little cold-blooded, a little like creating a business plan, you’re right. While there’s no way to create love out of nothing, finding love and building relationships is not much different than building successful business relationships – it requires the same steps and attention that any successful business does. Consider how each of these steps toward building a successful business applies to finding love and happiness in your relationships.

Define Your Core Values

The best relationships are built on shared values, so if you don’t know what your core values are, you’ll have trouble finding someone who shares them. What is most important and central to your life? For some, it’s faith, and their true love must share their faith in order for them to be happy together. For others, those values might include outer expressions of interior beliefs, such as a love of adventure or a desire to better the world. Before you can find someone who will share your life and your values, you need to know what they are.

Figure Out What You Need Emotionally

One of the most important factors in whether relationships are happy and satisfying is whether the emotional needs of both parties are being met. Every person has basic emotional needs, and they’re not always the same, nor are they always the expected ones. Can you live with a person who doesn’t trust you and needs constant reassurance of your faithfulness? Do you need someone who respects you, or someone who looks to you for advice and leadership? Are you happiest with someone who is physically affectionate and cuddly?

Put Yourself in Love’s Path

Romance novels are built on the premise of finding love when you least expect it – when you’re not looking. The plot makes a great story, but in real life, it’s much harder to find love when you don’t actively create opportunities for love to find you. Evaluate your daily and weekly activities and consider how likely you are to find someone you want to spend your life with while doing those things. Would the woman (or man) of your dreams be sitting on the bar stool at your favorite hangout? Are you likely to run into your perfect mate sitting in your office until 9 PM every night? If you’re not involved in activities that put you into contact with the kind of person you want to share your life, get involved. God does work miracles, but it helps if you give Him the raw materials to get started.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

Every salesperson knows that the single most important thing you can do is to network. Finding love is no different. You don’t have to solicit blind dates from your family members, but it doesn’t hurt to let your friends know that you’re looking and would appreciate introductions to compatible friends. If that feels odd, turn to a professional dating service – there are many dating sites online where you can meet people as well. This goes along with the third step – putting yourself in love’s path. It’s hard to find someone to love if you’re not willing to take a chance on a date.

To find love in your life, in short, you have to know what you’re looking for, then open yourself and make yourself available for it to find you.

Five Ways to Enhance Trust in Your Love Relationships

Building a new relationship built on trust and love isn’t easy, but it’s a goal well worth pursuing. Whether you’re trying to revive the love in your current relationship or looking for your true love, there is one simple quality that will enhance and expand the love in your relationships – trust. It’s difficult to love someone if you can’t trust them – and it’s difficult for someone to love you if you break faith with them and are not trustworthy. While you can’t control another person’s actions, you can build and enhance trust in your relationships by the things that you do and the ways that you act. These five surprising things are ways to build the bank of trust on which your relationships are based.

Be Punctual

Being on time for appointments may seem to have little to do with love, but it’s a surprising cornerstone of trust. When you’re consistently on time for dates, dinner and telephone calls, you are establishing yourself as someone who can be trusted to be there when you say you will be – and that’s a vital element of trust. If you say you’ll be there at 7, be there at 7. It’s respectful and caring.

Show Honesty in Little Things

If you don’t tell the truth about little things, how can you be expected to be honest about important things? When your lover catches you in a lie about even the most innocuous things, it calls everything you say into question. And if you feel that you can’t be honest about something because of the reaction the truth will cause, it’s a strong suggestion to take another look at the relationship and the person with whom you’re involved.

Be Open About Your Life

Romance novels may suggest that women are entranced by mysterious strangers, but it’s impossible to build a love relationship based on a mystery. Many men and women hide secrets in their past out of fear that others will pass judgment on them and pass them by. When you do that, you build a wall around part of your life – and risk that somehow, your lover will learn your secret from someone else. When that happens, it can cast your entire relationship into doubt. Be honest about your past, your family, your work and other important elements of your life.

Be Respectful of Yourself

Before you can respect anyone else, you must learn to respect yourself and understand that you and your love are precious gifts. That doesn’t mean that you should be arrogant or think you are better than others. It simply means that you should expect others to treat you with respect, and expect yourself to return that respect to them.

Listen When Others Speak to You

Listening is one of the most important love skills to master. It’s not a matter of learning “active listening tricks” or finding ways to encourage communication, though those can help facilitate communication. It’s a matter of truly, honestly and openly listening when another person speaks to you so that you can hear their expectations, their needs and their desires. Listening can not only tell you how to show your love to another person, it can also help you identify whether this person is the right person for you.

Finding true love isn’t easy, but being part of a loving, trusting relationship is more than worth the work you put into it. When you build trust between yourself and your lover, you’ll be amazed at how your relationship deepens and becomes more satisfying.