Love and Mistakes: Righting the Wrongs

By Sheryl Aronson, LMFT

A CALL TO LOVE SERIES (Part 1)

Love. A word that takes on so many meanings to us all. How do we summon our call to love and how do we answer when we hear that call from another person?

We all have an inborn descriptive canvas of what being in love means and the canvas has been painted by all the experiences we have gone through in life. From our personal histories, we have formulated what love means to us and have come to certain conclusions. The first call to love is to know what has been painted onto your canvas.

Here’s the reason why this knowledge is crucial. Your emotional operative system is being run by these beliefs. Your emotional operative system then determines that when a person treats you a certain way, it feels like you are being loved, or not. So, it’s critical to understand what beliefs are controlling our emotional operating system. What has been painted on our canvas of love?

Before I go further, I want to state that we make the mistake believing that because we are in love with someone and they are in love with us, our emotional operative systems are the same. I will guarantee you in most cases this does not hold true! And one of the biggest challenges for couples is understanding this fact. This is when conflict and fighting occur because our emotional operative system is ringing loudly inside of us that we are not being loved by the other person.

Set aside some time and write down what love means to you. What does your canvas look like? Here are some examples: love means my partner and I have a night out once a week away from the kids, love means that when birthdays or anniversaries occur a big deal is made, love means that my partner listens to my feelings without giving me advice, love means that we share a spiritual practice together, love means that we have sex 4 times a week, love means that my partner knows what I want without me telling them, love means we never argue …

There are multitudes of ways that we have decided what loves means to us and our beliefs can be very different than our partner’s beliefs. More importantly, we want to know what our beliefs are so we can measure our satisfaction in a relationship and discuss with our partner how we can balance what we are looking for with what they are looking for without thinking our way is right and their way is wrong.

If you are single, then you want to do this inventory of yourself to better understand what factors you are looking for in a relationship that answers to your call of love. Once you have done this task, you will be able to determine how a potential person will meet your needs.

Now, I am not saying you can’t be attracted to a person who might have very different ideas about how love is displayed, what I am saying is that relationships work much better when both people are aware of what their emotional operative systems are so a better communication around our needs can manifest instead of conflict.

Don’t delay. Take the time to understand what the call of love means to you … what echoes back so you feel love … what brilliant colors are splashed across your inner canvas.

Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns.
(Part II will talk about how to develop emotional maturity to better deal with conflict that arises when our call of love is not being answered by our partners.)