Years ago a psychologist by the name of Robert Sternberg came up with a pretty good explanation that is difficult to improve on. What Sternberg did was to break down true love into three parts. I will try to share them so that you can easily apply them to your situation in a simple way. These three parts will help you to determine if what you have in your relationship is true love!

Part 1: Passion
This part includes physical and sexual attraction. It is like “Wow!”… You might hear angels and music…… . You initially cannot get over this person. The attraction is overwhelming. Pheromones abound. Electricity and chemistry are constantly zapping and bubbling in and around you. You feel an obsessive need to have your feelings reciprocated. For most persons, this is the first part of feeling attraction.

Part 2: Intimacy
Intimacy leads to attachment. It creates closeness and connectedness. We call this process becoming bonded with another person. Intimacy grows first by spending much time with another person. Then it grows deeper by sharing with one another every aspect of our lives. Intimacy is built on trust and safety. If you cannot trust and feel safe with a person then intimacy disappears and will degenerate into distrust and suspicion.

Since intimacy takes patience to develop, many are not prepared for such task. It is work. It implies a lot of talking and disclosure. If a person has been hurt in previous relationships, then they will have great difficulty finding closeness …

Many of us are constantly in need of an extra 10 minutes — or hours, as if time is a balloon that’s escaped our hands; as we keep grasping, the balloon seems to float higher and higher.

As Marney Makridakis explains in her fascinating and empowering book, Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life, time seems to be an issue in most areas of our lives — our dreams in particular.

Not only do we feel besieged by responsibilities but we also get overwhelmed about opportunities and projects we’re passionate about. (How often have you said that you don’t have enough time to pursue a passion, enjoy a mini getaway or read that growing stack of books?)

While we can’t transform time by adding more hours to our days, we can expand our perception of time, Makridakis writes. Time is limitless, actually.

According to Makridakis, “Time is a valuable resource that is far more infinite than we tend to think. We worry so much about not having enough time, when time is, in fact, one resource that is always present, for as long as we are living. Much like oxygen, time is there for us. While the finite amount of time we have is real, the occasions when we feel it lacking, drifting, or lost are largely a matter of perception only.”

That means that we can apply certain tricks and techniques to changing our perception …

The other weekend, I re-read Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness. It’s all about happiness (no surprise), but in an aside, Russell explains how he solves difficult intellectual issues.

I think I’ve followed this strategy myself — not because I cleverly realized it was a good strategy, but because I was stumped, so put aside a question out of sheer desperation.

Here’s his method…

This guest article from YourTango was written by Kim Olver. 

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. We will go to the doctor for a physical checkup, but how many of us engage in a mental health checkup? The goals of my process, InsideOut Empowerment, provide us with ten things we can do to improve our well-being and increase our happiness.

1. Assess the strength of your needs while learning to obtain the proper amounts for happiness. We all have five basic human needs — connection, freedom, significance, survival and enjoyment. While we share that in common, the strength of our needs vary. So for example, one person may be high in connection and enjoyment, while another person might be high in significance and freedom. The key to happiness is to engage in behavior that brings you the precise amount of each need you want. Having too little leaves you feeling deprived and having too much can leave you feeling over-saturated.

Believe it or not, extramarital “head sex” — the emotional bond formed with a secret lover of sorts — may be worse (at least for depression) than real sex outside a marriage, according to Peggy Vaughan, author of The Monogamy Myth and creator of DearPeggy.com.

“Most people recover from the fact that their partner had sex with someone else before they recover from the fact that they were deceived,” says Vaughan. “An affair, in the final analysis, is more about ‘breaking trust’ than about ‘having sex.’”

A few years ago Vaughan took an online poll, asking readers: “If your partner had an affair, what would be more difficult to overcome: the deception, or that he/she had sex with someone else?” Almost three quarters of the men and women polled said deception.

Vaughan believes that secrecy is primarily what distinguishes a close friendship from an emotional affair.

I’m pleased to announce a free Psych Central webinar on the topic of relationships and ADHD.

Get psyched with Psych Central’s Zoë Kessler and author Melissa Orlov in a fun hour of sharing about the good stuff in an ADHD / Non-ADHD partnership!

We’ll talk about how we can bring out the best in you and your loved one.

During our webinar, we’ll:

• re-discover what each partner brings  to the relationship
• discover some new ways to bring out the best in you and your loved one!
• invite you to share your positive stories
• remind each other of opportunities and possibilities

…and more!

Creativity can bring a lot of joy into our lives — if we let it. As we get older, unfortunately, many of us leave our favorite activities behind, forget to play and instead go through the motions. Wake up. Go to work. Run errands. Come home. Have dinner. Watch T.V. Go to bed. Rinse. Repeat.

In The Book of Doing: Everyday Activities to Unlock Your Creativity and Joy, Allison Arden, publisher of Advertising Age, shares a slew of fun and playful ideas to reignite our creativity. More than that, her book shows us how to create and find joy in our everyday lives.

So what is “doing”? According to Arden, it’s anything and everything from creating, making, helping, experimenting, drawing, reading, playing, acting, cooking, tasting, celebrating and loving.

Here are 10 of my favorite ideas from her book. I hope you’ll try them!

This guest article from YourTango was written by Virginia Clark.

Your mindset is everything when it comes to helping you find love. I’m not just talking about romantic love. I’m talking about love, overall. Love is a state of mind that either is or isn’t something you cultivate.

Wikipedia defines mindset as:

A set of assumptions, methods or notations held by one or more people, that creates a powerful incentive within these people or groups to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviors, choices, or tools.

Your mindset is how you approach the world. If you let it run wild, it will compel you to make the same choices over and over again. No one is exempt from having a mindset. We all have one. It’s like a filter through which you perceive your reality.

Imagine that you’re 4 years old and that it’s 1968.

You’re brought into a small room, a “game room,” with a table, chair and three sugary snacks. You’re asked to pick one treat. You choose the marshmallow. Then you’re told that you can either have the marshmallow right away by ringing a bell, or wait a few minutes and get two marshmallows. Then you’re left alone for 15 minutes.

This seemingly simple experiment conducted by Austrian-born clinical psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University became known as “The Marshmallow Study.” But don’t let the silly name fool you. This study tested over 600 kids at the Bing Nursery School and has become one of the longest-running studies in psychology.

What Mischel actually wanted to explore had zero to do with kids’ desire for sweets, of course. The lead investigator wanted to test the concept of delayed gratification.

It has been said that some of the strongest individuals are the ones that have experienced tragedy, trauma or have struggled with physical or mental illness. And I can understand why.

Maybe you haven’t had it easy. But for that reason alone, you’ve had to build resilience, courage and persistence to find a way to bring hope, love and happiness into your life.

Not everyone has that type of determination. Not everyone has that kind of strength.

But while you spend your days working and striving to be better, it’s easy to feel discouraged. Sometimes it only takes talking with others or seeing a friend’s Facebook page to make you wish your life was easier.

When you spend time with your eyes forward, looking ahead at all the people who have more than you, you may forget to look back. Yes you have a long way to go. Yes, your life may not be as simple as your neighbor’s, but along the way in your own individual journeys, don’t forget to acknowledge and celebrate how far you’ve come.

This week you may even find your own gift(s) in difficulty. You will share a sense of community with those who have faced the same issues as you. You may discover tools to maneuver your life better. The good news is that you’re definitely not alone in your journey. In each of these posts there are threads of hope, and together we weave the most beautiful quilt, don’t we?

I’ve posted this quiz before, but because I think it’s such a very helpful thing to know about yourself, I’m posting it again. Recognizing this distinction has been one of the most important insights that I’ve had into my own nature — more helpful, say, than understanding that I’m an under-buyer, not an over-buyer.

A piece of advice I often see is, “Be moderate. Don’t have ice cream every night, but if you try to deny yourself altogether, you’ll fall off the wagon. Allow yourself to have the occasional treat, it will help you stick to your plan.”

I’ve come to believe that this is good advice for some people: the “moderators.” They do better when they try to make moderate changes, when they avoid absolutes and bright lines.

For a long time, I kept trying this strategy of moderation — and failing. Then I read a line from Samuel Johnson, who said, when someone offered him wine: “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.”

Ah ha! Like Dr. Johnson, I’m an “abstainer.”

Life is hard for everyone. That’s why it helps to have an assortment of tools to navigate life’s inevitable lows.

And that’s exactly what you’ll find in Russ Harris’s book The Reality Slap: Finding Peace and Fulfillment When Life Hurts. Harris is a psychotherapist and renowned expert in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The book is based on ACT’s principles.

The reality slap is a term that Harris uses to refer to life’s various lows, which include everything from losing a loved one to experiencing failure or envy.

According to Harris, after a reality slap strikes, we face another problem: “the reality gap.” The reality gap consists of two sides. One side is the reality we have; the other side is the reality we want.

The bigger the gap between these realities, the more painful our emotions.