Love is not enough, however, to play the game well. Love is not enough to get you where you want to go. Love is not enough for a healthy marriage.

Marriages are a test of our emotional and life skills. Since most of us were never taught many of these skills, it is no surprise that so many marriages, even those that are based in love, are a continual struggle and often fall apart.

The following is a list of various, interrelated emotional and life skills that are necessary for a well-functioning marriage. As you read through the list, ask yourself: Which of these am I good at? Which of these do I need to improve? Which of these are hard or nearly impossible for me? Are there any skills that I think are missing from this list?

Emotional & Life Skills Necessary for a Healthy Marriage

1. An ability to know and name your emotions at any given time.
2. An ability to communicate your emotions verbally and directly.
3. An ability to manage the full range of your emotions without acting out destructively toward yourself or others. (Acting out destructively means channeling your internal feelings into behaviors that cause emotional or physical damage to yourself or others.)
4. An understanding of what helps you to manage emotions, and a willingness and ability to seek those supports when necessary.
5. An ability to tolerate feeling a lack of connection to your partner sometimes.
6. An ability to disconnect from other people, technology, and other types of stimulation, and to be alone with yourself.
7. An awareness of your physical needs and a willingness to make choices that optimize your physical health.
8. An ability to be emotionally present for a loved one even when you are unable to do anything to fix his or her pain or suffering.
9. An ability to laugh at yourself.
10. An ability to see how your actions, even when well-meant, can sometimes negatively affect others.
11. An ability to apologize and take responsibility for the way your actions affect others.
12. An ability to communicate verbally, directly, gently, and respectfully to others when their actions affect you negatively.
13. An ability to receive critical feedback without blocking it through defensive tactics such as denial, shifting of blame, playing the victim, or bullying.
14. An ability to identify what you need or want from others and communicate that verbally and directly.
15. An ability to tolerate feeling disappointed by others without acting out destructively toward yourself or others.
16. An ability to tolerate the experience of having others disappointed in you, without acting out destructively toward yourself or others.
17. An ability to step back, gain perspective on any given situation, and see it in the context of the big and complex picture of life.
18. An ability to step back and see the whole picture of yourself or another person, in all of its complexity, shades of grey, and seemingly contradictory parts.
19. An ability to have another person see all the different parts of you, even those parts that you dislike or detest.
20. An ability to tolerate sometimes feeling misunderstood or inaccurately perceived by others.
21. An ability to allow space for another person’s thoughts, ideas, perceptions, or feelings, even if they seem wrong to you.
22. An ability to ask for space for your own thoughts, ideas, perceptions, or feelings, even if they may cause conflict or upset others.
23. An acceptance that there are pros and cons to any choice, and that there is no way to avoid sacrifice, compromise, and dissatisfaction.
24. An ability to move beyond your own thoughts, ideas, or fears, and truly understand how another person is feeling.
25. An ability to verbally and directly show that you understand how the other person is feeling.
26. A basic competency in navigating the world professionally, socially, and practically.
27. An ability to face your aging and death, and the aging and death of others, without acting out destructively toward yourself or others.
28. An ability to let go of pain from the past, forgive yourself or others, and refocus on the present moment.
29. A basic level of competence in organizing your daily life and managing time.
30. An ability to tolerate feeling bored and dissatisfied.
31. An ability to seek and explore ways to grow, expand, and change.
32. An ability to set limits and boundaries with others and with your environment in order to take care of your own emotional, mental, and physical health.
33. An ability to recognize the experiences of feeling powerless or out of control, and to tolerate those feelings without acting out destructively on yourself or others.
34. An ability to respect and accept other people’s boundaries, even if they upset you, without acting out destructively toward yourself or others.
35. An ability to tolerate the possibility of being rejected or abandoned by your loved ones without trying to ‘close off their exit door’ through controlling behaviors, inducing guilt or threatening to be destructive to yourself or to them if they leave you.
36. An ability to remain reasonably calm during difficult discussions or conflicts with others.
37. An ability to agree to disagree, make compromises and create solutions to conflict.

Do not despair if you are not good at some of these skills. A marriage, fueled by love, has an excellent chance at health if you and your partner are simply committed to working on developing competency in these areas. No one ever reaches perfect mastery in this realm. We all muddle through as best as we can.

If you truly want a healthy marriage, however, take responsibility to evaluate what you need to work on and get whatever support you need to improve your skills.

But it’s important to consider that “true love” is not just a theory or a figment of a writer’s imagination.

Nor is it just the fictionalized stuff of romantic comedies. It can occur in day-to-day reality, too.

Below are 14 ways to help make it happen. You may be surprised to learn that true love is not only attainable — it may be closer than you think.

1. Romantic true love must be created. It does not ‘just happen.’

2. You become capable of creating romantic true love when you commit to your own truth.
3. You commit to your own truth by dedicating yourself to becoming aware of the complex and wide range of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences as they continually shift and change.
4. You become aware as you move beyond whatever blocks you from being open to the truth of your experiences.
5. You move beyond your blocks to truth by learning to observe your thoughts and feelings in a compassionate way, even if those thoughts or feelings are scary or inconvenient.
6. Once you are committed to your own truth, you can work to create a romantic true love relationship.
7. Working to create a romantic true love relationship means seeking a partner who is also committed to awareness of his or her own truth, or encouraging an existing partner to commit to awareness of his or her own truth.
8. Once you and your partner are both individually committed to truth, you can work to build a relationship that supports truth.
9. In a relationship that supports truth, there is space and respect for both people to have whatever thoughts and feelings they may have, even if those thoughts and feelings are scary or inconvenient.
10. Truth in a relationship does not mean communicating every thought or feeling with your partner and causing unnecessary pain; truth in a relationship means that both partners feel safe to be open and honest about anything that seems important to share.
11. When there is respect and space for each person’s truth, you do not have to hide from the truth in fear of your partner turning mean, denying or invalidating your thoughts or feelings, or intentionally saying or doing things to hurt or abuse you.
12. A relationship where it is safe for truth to emerge will challenge and support both partners toward increasing awareness and connection to the spectrum of their own truth.
13. Once you and your romantic partner are both committed to being true unto yourselves, and you are building a relationship that supports truth, only time will tell if it is romantic true love.
14. If it is romantic true love, it will endure, growing and evolving to continue to support truth, integrating whatever arises into its fabric. For example: ‘Sometimes I detest my husband.’ ‘Sometimes I feel thrilled by my partner.’ ‘Sometimes I wish that my wife would just stop talking and leave me alone.’ ‘Sometimes I look over at my partner snoring and I find him totally unattractive.’ ‘Sometimes I feel suffocated by my marriage.’ ‘Sometimes I feel incredibly fortunate to be married to my spouse.’ ‘Sometimes I feel rejected by my partner.’ ‘Sometimes I feel alone, even with my partner sitting right next to me.’

    ‘And amid all of this, I still want to be together.’ ‘Our bond remains strong.’ ‘We both keep growing.’ ‘We keep going together.’ ‘We keep loving each other.’ ‘This must be true love.’

As result, while many of us have developed into healthy adults in our careers and in our roles as parents or friends, we are stuck when it comes to sex.

Contemplating the idea of entering into our own sexual minds can cause fear and anxiety. There is religious, cultural, and familial judgment and persecution for being direct and honest about sex. There can be fear of facing parts of ourselves that we don’t understand and fear of exposing things about ourselves that feel wrong or shameful. There is understandable reluctance about going back into painful or upsetting sexual experiences from our past.

There is also a natural aversion to looking directly at our own sex lives.

So how can you be more grownup when thinking about your sexuality?

Sex may be a realm where we want to stay somewhat unconscious. We might not want to give up the escape and release from our adult responsibilities. We might believe in the idea that sex should just flow, be natural, and not require thought or work. We might think that there is nothing less sexy than talking honestly about sex.

But if you are interested in a lifetime of healthy sexual energy, thinking and talking about your relationship with sex is enormously fruitful. Like any other aspect of our healthy human development, from physical to intellectual to emotional to spiritual, sexual growth requires attention and work. And, as with the other areas of our development, moving forward sexually means becoming more conscious.

We become more sexually conscious by taking an honest and compassionate look at the full range of our sexual thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and fears. This process often goes slowly as we work to move beyond walls of shame or judgment. We might need professional support to face traumatic past experiences, or to support us to make changes that reflect our increased sexual honesty.

There is a price for becoming sexually conscious, just as there is moving from childhood to adulthood: It can involve a sense of a loss of freedom. As we progress into greater honesty and awareness, we lose the freedom to use sex as a way to escape from ourselves and act out our unconscious issues.

What we get in return is another kind of freedom. We get the freedom from being controlled by psychological patterns that operate largely under the radar of our consciousness and lead us into sexual experiences that don’t fit with the rest of our adult selves. Instead of repeating the same old behaviors, we gain the power to make conscious choices about how to fulfill our needs and desires and the capacity to find satisfaction in sexual experiences that feel whole and right.

So, whether you are in your 20’s or 80’s, single or married, consider the path of sexual growth. Get the support you need to safely look back into your sexual history and to look deeply into your current sexual self. Explore who you are as a sexual being. Try to be objective about the role of alcohol or drugs in your sex life. Be honest with yourself about your relationship with your body.

If you are in a relationship, reflect on what you communicate to your partner through sex, and what you communicate through NOT having sex. Look at how issues around control, self-esteem, and fears of inadequacy play out in your sex life. Begin to talk directly to your partner about your own sexual self, and gently ask questions about your partner’s thoughts and feelings about sex.

These difficult and often awkward steps toward sexual consciousness take great courage, but the payoff can be profound. By freeing ourselves from the prison of our old patterns, we liberate the creativity and intensity of our sexual energy and harness our adult sexual power.

Or not.

The holidays are stressful. There are the challenges of too much family, not enough family, not enough money, continual exposure to food and alcohol, and perhaps worst of all, the gap between our actual life and our fantasy life. As if gazing into the perfect happy scene within a snowglobe, we might fall into a trance of how our life should be.

We might feel torn apart by nostalgia and grief over the good times and good people of the past, and wracked with guilt and inadequacy for failing to create a more wonderful life for ourselves. We might feel scared about our dissatisfaction and hypnotized by the promise of fulfillment just beyond the hard glass.

Addictive and codependent behaviors thrive during this season of fantasy.

We use our drugs and habits to escape the pain, while imagining how we will miraculously make changes, always tomorrow, or next week, or next year. We frantically try to keep our idea of the all-good holiday alive through our codependent behaviors, imagining that we have the power to make sure that everyone else is happy and no one gets upset, while suppressing our own feelings of anger and disappointment.

So what should we do about our addictive or codependent behaviors during the holidays? Should we just give up and wait until January 1? Or is there hope for progress now?

One option involves using the holiday season to take an honest and compassionate look at our current behaviors. Instead of using up all of our mental energy imagining how our life used to be better, or how our life should be different, or how we need to change, we can turn our minds and eyes toward simply observing present reality.

We can watch our relationships with alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, prescription and non-prescription drugs, gambling, pornography, video games, television or Internet videos, social media, food, exercise, work, and shopping. We can ask ourselves: How much are we using? How much of our time does it consume? How much money are we spending on our habits? How long have we been using? Is it increasing, decreasing, or remaining constant?

We can watch our relationships with our loved ones. We can ask ourselves: How much of our energy is being devoted to worrying about or trying to control other people’s addictive behaviors? How much are we being controlled by fear of others’ reactions to our boundaries or limits?

Then we can ask ourselves: why are we doing this? What purpose does it serve? What immediate rewards do we attain? In what ways are our behaviors fulfilling our needs? Are there feelings of shame, anger, sadness, loneliness, anxiety, or depression tangled up in our habits? How do these feelings lead to our behaviors? How do these feelings result from our behaviors?

How are our habits affecting our physical health? How are our behaviors affecting our relationships with others? How are our drugs, habits, or relationship patterns affecting our work life? What are the short- and long-term benefits and costs?

As we watch and explore our behaviors in an open and neutral manner, we set the stage for our growth toward increased health. We emerge into the New Year with information about ourselves that we need in order to develop a plan of action, if we so choose, toward change. And by being more honest with ourselves and more present in the life we currently are living, we have broken the paralyzing spell of fantasy: We have begun moving toward a better life.

Sound familiar?

Do you struggle with feeling like you are a bad person?

Do you try to escape and numb-out from feeling like a bad person through the use of food, alcohol, drugs, overwork, or overuse of technology? Do you punish yourself for being bad through self-harming behaviors and poor choices in your relationships? Do these behaviors then confirm that you are a bad person, and lead you in a viscous cycle of badness?

Does your sense of badness extend to how you feel about your body?

Are you driven to always be extra good, and never offend or disappoint others, in order to counteract your true badness? Do you live in fear of your bad self being exposed and seen by others?

Are you frustrated that despite the work you have done to improve your self-esteem you still repeatedly collapse into feeling bad?

You are not alone.

There are so many people who feel, on a deep and gut level, that they are bad. These generally are not the people who are ‘bad’ in the sense of lacking empathy for others, or deriving benefit from harming others. Instead, most people whose thoughts are tied up in ‘feeling like a bad person’ are acutely tuned in to other people’s feelings, feel terrible when others suffer, and do not behave in ways that are any worse than the average human. In fact, when they describe their core sense of badness, it’s not about actually doing bad things (although bad behaviors do make them feel worse). They talk about how this sense of badness just is. It is their most basic and familiar experience of themselves. Perhaps this is also true for you.

So, why do you feel this way?

It is likely that you are trapped in a pattern of interpreting your own pain and conflict, and the pain and conflict of others, as meaning that you are bad. This pattern could stem from a variety of nature and nurture combinations, such as your being a sensitive child growing up in an environment where adults did not take responsibility for their own feelings or where your feelings were reacted to with anger or neglect. Whatever the causes, the result is that you now feel, on that deep and core level, that it is your fault, as the bad person, when there is pain or conflict inside you or around you.

From a logical and rational perspective, this is a misinterpretation. Would you accuse someone of being a fundamentally bad person because they feel unhappiness or angst, or because people around them are experiencing conflict or sadness?

Yet, since this pattern of misinterpretation developed long ago, at a time when your self was forming, the sense of a bad self is so deeply ingrained that it can be difficult to conceive of another way of feeling. Simply holding up logic and rationality in the face of the bad self, or trying to counter the bad self with a tally of all the ways you are good, is seldom effective. That bad self has its heels dug in, and it does not want to budge. The more you push on it, the more it pushes back. The more you try to prove that you are good, the more cleverly it shoots holes in your goodness.

Helping Your Big Bad Self

So, what to do about your big bad self? When you find yourself sinking into the abyss of badness, gently ask yourself:

1. Is it possible that I am absorbing the unhappiness of the people around me, and misinterpreting those bad feelings as meaning that I am a bad person?
2. Is it possible that I am absorbing the conflict around me, and misinterpreting the bad feelings as meaning that I am a bad person?
3. Is it possible that I am feeling disappointed, neglected, or rejected, and misinterpreting my own pain as meaning that I am a bad person?
4. Is it possible that I am feeling an internal conflict between wanting to take care of my own needs and wanting to take care of other people’s needs, and misinterpreting that struggle as meaning that I am a bad person?
5. Is it possible that I am feeling an internal conflict between meeting my own desires and meeting other people’s expectations of me, and I am misinterpreting that difficulty as meaning that I am a bad person?
6. Is it possible that I am feeling the limits of my own power to help others, personally or globally, and misinterpreting that limitation as meaning that I am a bad person?
7. Is it possible that someone is angry or disappointed with me and I am misinterpreting that as meaning that I am a bad person?
8. Is it possible that I am feeling the internal conflict between the part of my self that is grateful for all the good things in my life, and the part of my self that feels unhappy and dissatisfied, and I am misinterpreting that as meaning that I am a bad person?

As you look more closely at your ‘I am a bad person’ pattern, you open up new choices. You no longer have to stop at the sign that says ‘you are a bad person,’ and sink into the hole of self-punishment and self-destructive behaviors. You can use the ‘you are a bad person’ sign as a chance to turn down a different path, where you identify what is really upsetting you.

When you look beyond the counterproductive distraction of ‘I am a bad person,’ you can redirect your energy toward the real problems at hand. You can get support to deal with your pain, to work through your internal conflicts, to develop skills in managing conflict with others, and to identify when and how you can help others and when it is your job to let go.

It is possible to move beyond the land of darkness, beyond the dungeon of self-hate, and beyond the bonds of badness. The process is slow and disorienting, as you shake up the very foundation of your sense of self. Aligning yourself with this work, however, has enormous positive potential as you actively transform your ‘core of badness’ from a force of destruction and stagnation into an intricate part of your road toward health.

Have you ever been standing at the sink, washing vegetables for dinner, and suddenly felt a bizarre sense of going through the motions without really being there?

This experience can be deeply upsetting. It can send you into a tailspin of angst, claustrophobia, alienation and fear. The good news is that these moments of saying ‘help, I’m living the wrong life’ are great opportunities for personal life transformation.

So, the next time you start to feel that sense of being a stranger in your own life, here are some tips to keep you calm…

1. Don’t panic.

Feeling like your life or even your own self does not fit you is a normal part of the human experience. While sometimes you may feel real connection in your marriage, congruence with your work, and a sense of ‘yes, this is me’ in terms of your body, heart, and mind, these feelings will generally cycle into times of feeling a serious lack of connection to your spouse, friends, work, or self. That is just how life goes. The best you can do is to remain calm and use the crisis as a time to reflect and possibly make some changes in yourself and your life.

2. Stop your all-or-nothing thinking.

At these times of feeling disconnected, it is easy to fall into the trap of an internal back-and-forth battle as you question whether your life fits you. This battle is unproductive because reality is much more complex. Work on catching yourself when you are thinking in all-or-nothing terms, and remind yourself that your life is complicated, with parts that fit as well as ones that don’t.

3. Grieve over paths not taken.

You, like all people, probably have multiple ‘paths not taken’ because you have had to make choices, which all have had pros and cons, among limited options. Your decision to focus on your career, for example, may mean you have lost out on valuable time with your family, or your decision to have children may mean you have lost your opportunity to pursue a career as a professional athlete. You might also be confronting the results of choices you made when you were younger (and less wise) and had different priorities.

Grieving allows you to move beyond guilt. It moves you beyond anger at yourself for past choices. It also allows you to get over anger toward people and situations that interfered with your hopes and dreams. By grieving, you can accept what has happened and move forward.

4. Ask yourself the hard questions.

When you stop thinking in all-or-nothing terms and free yourself from guilt and anger over paths not taken, you can begin to explore the hard and complicated questions about your life — such as whether your work, relationships, daily routines and the like are still a good fit for you now. You also can consider whether parts of yourself and your daily life activities have been neglected; whether you have new needs and preferences requiring attention; if your values and priorities ahve shifted; and what parts of your life you may have outgrown.

5. Try the big dreams/small steps approach.

Embrace the excitement of the potential to completely transform yourself and your life in a few fell swoops, like people seem to do in movies and books. Then allow that excitement to fuel your efforts to identify where and how you can begin to make changes in your life. These changes usually happen as small shifts and baby steps. Get support for this process and remind yourself that although progress may feel slow, the alternative is remaining stuck.

6. Consider inner transformation.

Internal change can make your experience of yourself and your life different even when everything on the outside is changing excruciatingly slowly. This kind of inner transformation is almost never as simple as changing your attitude or deciding to be happy; in fact, merely telling yourself to appreciate your life when you feel miserable usually just makes things worse.

Real inner transformation is truly difficult. It involves working through the web of ways you have become entangled in other people’s expectations, suppressed by your fears, and disconnected from yourself. The payoff for such hard work can be surprising and amazing. You may find a sense of fulfillment and peace that you could never have imagined experiencing in your ordinary and imperfect life.

They feel loss when their family moves, when people in the family leave home, when pets die, when the boy or girl they like doesn’t like them, or when their best friend finds a new No. 1. They feel loss when holiday traditions change or vacations are suspended due to financial strain on the family. They feel loss when Grandpa can’t pick them up and twirl them around anymore, and when Grandpa dies.

Learning to grieve for losses great and small is a critical skill in a child’s healthy development. Children who do not learn to grieve are unequipped for life, as life and loss are indivisible.

Without the ability to grieve, children will grow up feeling confused, overwhelmed and helpless in the face of losses. They may become totally stuck, weighed down physically and emotionally, chronically irritable or even explosive with anger. They might become dependent on anything that allows them to avoid dealing with the losses, such as dependence on nonstop technology or being busy all the time. They may try to avoid loss by avoiding attachment and love. They might also turn to the anesthetizing effects of alcohol, drugs, or food to numb out from the simmering feelings within them.

The critical skill of grieving, like any skill, must be taught. Children do not magically learn to grieve on their own.

As parents, one powerful and effective way to teach the skill of grieving to your children is to model it for them. When you skillfully face your own losses and practice the skill of grieving, your children learn through your example. If you were never taught how to grieve, you can make a commitment to learn or improve your own skills at grieving; the better you become at grieving, the more effective you can be in showing your child how to grieve.

When you, as a parent or caregiver, model grief for your children, you attune to your own feelings and recognize how certain feelings are triggered by loss. For example, you might notice that you feel sadness or melancholy after finding out that your child no longer wants a hug in the morning, or pain and emptiness when you realize that you and your brother may never have a healthy relationship. You might notice that you feel angry when your partner isn’t there for you in ways that feel supportive, or sick to your stomach when you see that today’s date is the day your mom passed away three years ago.

Following this attunement to yourself, you can move forward in the grief process by working hard to see the whole picture — that life is sadness and loss as well as happiness and connection. You can search within yourself to find whatever it is that keeps you going in the face of pain and loss, whether it is your love for your family, your love of the natural world, your spiritual beliefs, a pragmatic ‘life is for the living’ attitude, some combination of these, or anything that fits for you.

As you allow yourself to acknowledge your pain and move through the grief process, you can narrate your experience for your children in an age-appropriate way:

‘You can probably see that I am feeling sadness. I am remembering my mom. It makes me feel sad and angry and lonely. I like to take a moment and just close my eyes and let go, like I am on a roller coaster, and let the feelings wash through me. Sometimes I scream a little in my head — ‘aaaaaa.’ It hurts inside.

‘Then I think about the love I have for you and the amazing joy of the first spring rain, and then I open my eyes and I go back to today. I am really looking forward to going to the park later.’

As you model this grieving process, your children see that delving into loss is not dangerous or destructive, but simply a part of living. They will see and sense how you experience the pain and then come out and participate in daily life. They will see and sense the wholeness of you, their parent, as you hold the pain and love, darkness and light, together inside of you as one package, being careful to not let the pain nullify the love, or the darkness blacken the light. They see that it is possible to hold on and to let go — and even to do them both at the same time.

When children learn to navigate the terrain of loss, through your modeling, they become familiar with the cycles of grief and do not cower in fear when losses occur. They become practiced in the art of moving into the pain and emotions and then moving back out into the light of day. They gain perspective and find that yes, life is painful, but that yes, life is also joyous. They find their own resilience, and the light within them that keeps them going amid pain and disappointment. With each grief cycle, they become ever more resilient and capable of creating a life that is meaningful to them.

But no matter how much chocolate we eat, how bright our flowers, how much we say that it’s a silly holiday, or how happy or unhappy we are about the state of our relationships, this love celebration often comes with some serious pangs of loneliness.

While we might fantasize that love is a cure for loneliness, and imagine that someday we’ll stop feeling lonely, or that other people don’t feel lonely, the reality is that love and loneliness go hand in hand; when we open our hearts to feel love, we also open our hearts to feel loneliness.

Loneliness does not mean that we are doing something wrong or that there is something wrong with us. Loneliness is not a contagious disease that we can ward off by never being alone or manically pursuing relationships. Loneliness is not a sin. Loneliness does not mean we are ungrateful.

Loneliness is not reserved for single people, depressed people and introverts. Loneliness is a part of every human’s experience, whether we are looking for a partner, married, the life of the party, or a certifiable hermit.

There is the loneliness of having a secret we are afraid to tell, the loneliness of illness, and the loneliness of being misunderstood. There is the loneliness of having a face, body, or brain that looks or behaves differently from the people around us. There is the loneliness of looking around at our family and wondering ‘who are these people? Was I switched at birth?’

There is the loneliness of feeling disconnected from our spouse, invisible to our partner, ignored by our lover. There is the loneliness of being the one who is financially responsible for our family and the loneliness of being financially dependent on a spouse. There is the loneliness of feeling imprisoned in a box of other people’s expectations and the loneliness of yet another ‘eat your carrots’ negotiation with our 3-year-old.

There is the loneliness of having to keep on living without that someone who is suddenly, or not so suddenly, just not there anymore. There is the loneliness of caring for someone who used to care for us, or for someone who no longer even recognizes us.

There is the loneliness of not having our perspectives on politics, religion, or life in general shared by other people. There is the loneliness of trying so hard to have our gifts and work valued by others, and still feeling unrecognized, unappreciated, and unseen. There is the loneliness of being alone on our path of life, with no one showing us the way forward, or telling us it’s going to be okay.

There is the loneliness of bad things happening and wondering why we seem to have been forgotten by God or the universe, or wondering why we are being singled out and punished. There is the loneliness of coming home to no one and the loneliness of feeling like we are trapped behind glass while the world goes on around us.

There is the loneliness of feeling disconnected from our own thoughts, feelings, and sense of self — a loneliness that comes in the shape of confusion, scattered energy, and a sense of being lost.

So, on this Valentine’s Day, as we open our hearts, let us also open our eyes to see that life is an endless arc between loneliness and love. We are capable of love because we know loneliness, and we know loneliness because we are capable of love.

It takes courage and strength to keep swinging on the pendulum. We may wish that we could stop time and hold on to that moment of love, and when we can’t hold on, we may be tempted to throw our hands up and simply define ourselves as all alone. But time marches on, and swing we do, in a journey through loneliness and love that is fluid and complex. We are alone and we are fully connected. And we are, all of us, in it together, everywhere in between.

‘I am saved. I am safe. I am lovable. I am desirable. I am acceptable. I belong. I am overflowing with love to give and joy to share. I am so incredibly alive. We are a perfect match.’

And then reality sets in…

‘He leaves his wet towel on the bed.’

‘She is constantly texting.’

‘He is always late.’

‘She is always working.’

‘He drinks too much.’

You may wonder, ‘Who is this person I thought I knew?’ ‘She’s changed.’ ‘He’s different.’

‘You complete me’ spirals down into ‘You deplete me.’

Despite our hopes for perfection, romantic love relationships, like every aspect of life, are complicated, continually changing and confusing. While our fantasy is that the ‘right’ romantic relationship will relieve us of our pain, fear and longing, the truth is that our romantic relationships stretch us to the limits of our emotions — from intense pleasure to crushing despair.

One moment we can feel deeply connected to a partner and the next moment feel totally cut off and alone. Sometimes we think our partners are the absolute best, and other times we feel frustrated, annoyed, and seriously disappointed by them.

This is simply the nature of romantic love relationships. We cannot avoid the ride of emotions, and we cannot separate out the parts of a person we enjoy from the parts that drive us nuts. We are all human, and we trigger and disappoint one another, even when there is true love.

We can do our best to stand back and see the whole complex picture of the relationship, the ups the downs, the progress forward, and the stuck feeling that comes from repeating cycles.

We can do our best to decide, based on this whole picture — ‘overall, am I getting enough of what I honestly want and need in this relationship? Overall, are we moving forward and growing together?’

If we decide the answer is yes, that this relationship is worth our emotional investment, we need to learn to be strong enough to get through the cycles of joy and pain. We need to learn to make room for all of it — the magical pleasure, the drudgery of daily life, the fear and disappointment.

We need to let our hearts grieve for the loss of the fantasy of romantic love, and then show up as fully as we can within the evolving experience of our real relationship.

As we embrace the ride of romantic love, becoming ever more entangled in the messiness and challenges of life (in all of the stuff that we had wished our true love could have saved us from!), we may have times when we have doubts and fears about the point of it all. But then there are the moments when reality and fantasy are married into a feeling of real connection, and we remember why we keep trying, keep riding, and keep loving.