Your love life doesn’t look like the one you dreamed of. And yet, on your side, you give a lot and do everything to create the conditions for happiness in your relationship. You tell yourself that the problem is the lack of reciprocity for the efforts you make, your partner taking all this love without giving its equivalent in exchange.
Of course, this is one of the shortcomings of your love life, but your problems start elsewhere: they are rooted precisely in your capacity to invest everything and to make all the concessions to nourish a relationship where you are not treated as you deserve. It’s not your actions that cause the problems, but the cause: why do you accept this situation? Because you need love. Everyone needs love of course, but in you this thirst is so intense that it manifests itself in a need to be reassured all the time and a visceral fear of being abandoned.
By loving like this, you forget your need for respect, and your life as a couple becomes a place of anguish and suffering when it should be your haven of peace and security. Here are 5 ways to change that and finally get the love life you deserve:
Take an Objective Assessment of your Love Life
The first step is to take stock of your love life, so that you can face its shortcomings without having the possibility of minimizing them. You can help yourself with the outside view of a very close friend for example, a kind person, who knows you as well single as in couple, who can thus note with objectivity what changes in your life and in your energy level when you enter into a relationship.
You will make a list of the times when you have not felt respected in your needs, and when you have made concessions without your partner making any, in your current relationship or in previous relationships. Analyze these situations, to what extent you felt ignored in your demands, and especially what reasons you gave yourself to accept all this.
Generally, one can only endure this kind of love life when one prefers to accept anything but celibacy. But this intense fear of loneliness goes beyond a need for love that anyone would have, it is what is called in psychology the fear of abandonment.
Find the Origin of your Need for Love and your Fear of Abandonment
Does the expression fear of abandonment echo in you? If so, you need to understand its origin. Chances are you are immediately aware of it: perhaps you were abandoned by one of your parents, or you felt their divorce as a break with you. Maybe you were left in a traumatic way during your first love relationship, or the first one that meant anything to you.
In general, the most intense fears, those that determine our adult behaviour in an almost irrepressible way, are most often rooted in an event from childhood. You must therefore try to determine the different stages of what traumatized you: a distancing during your childhood, then later experiences that pressed on an already existing wound.
This analysis does not solve everything, but it allows you to rationally distinguish between the abandonment that traumatized you in the past and the one you fear today to the point of accepting anything.
Force yourself to face it
You mustn’t sweep under the carpet what you are so afraid of. This realization is not pleasant at all, but it is necessary if you want to take control of your fears. It is a painful step, but it is a giant step towards a life free of your anxieties.
You will face your fear in two ways:
- If you have discovered, for example, that one of your parents was involuntarily at the origin of your injury, you must talk to him, not to settle accounts (it is useless and it will not help you), but simply to express your emotions with the aim of being reassured, if possible, by the person to whom you address yourself. This has a double interest: to allow you to hear another version than the one you understood when you were little, and to make this story go from your unconscious to your conscious, where your rationality will be able to treat the problem.
- You will learn to set the boundaries you have been afraid to set and observe what happens.
Take Care of Yourself
It is good that you are angry at your own conditioning and determined to fight your fears, but you will be even more effective by developing compassion and kindness with yourself. Indeed, if a friend told you to change with sternness and contempt, would you find the strength to do so, or would you be even more insecure, returned to the feeling of being inadequate, and therefore to the fear of being abandoned? Obviously, you would listen more to a friend who would say to you “I understand you, your fear is normal and you have developed it to protect yourself, but now it does not serve you any more, on the contrary, it serves you and creates problems: you have the right to give up this habit of thought. “.
Therefore, behave with yourself as with a friend. Be as determined as you are forgiving of the time the process will take, and above all, implement proactive solutions: make an appointment with a therapist and increase the number of activities that can make you feel good and reassured, whether it be sports, outings or treatments.
Build a New Foundation for your Relationships
Now it’s time for your realizations to have consequences. You will make changes in your relationships:
- you will express and set boundaries, both in your relationship and with your friends
- you will change your criteria for selecting the people who come into your life. Your casting will be more demanding and based on the fact that others must be able to respect your needs.
- You will build a wider and stronger emotional network: the more you feel surrounded, the less you will be in a position of emotional dependence
By doing this, you will confront your fear of losing those you love, and you will realize that nothing very serious is happening. The people who love you are happy to respect your needs, and those who find it unbearable that you make these demands have no place in your life. If it turns out that some people want to get out of your life because you are simply asking to be treated properly, you may suffer, but this will be an opportunity to realize that you are surviving the things that used to scare you: your fear of abandonment will have less and less hold on you, and above all, your new ability to set limits will attract to you a profile of people capable of truly loving you.