True Love After 40

If you don't love yourself, no one else can ever give you enough love to make up for your lack of self-love. You will be constantly questioning whether he really loves you. You will doubt whether you are truly lovable and fear she will leave you. Your need to receive love that you are not giving yourself will eventually erode any real love from your partner.

When you do not accept yourself and love yourself, you have a hard time believing that another person can actually love you. You spend your time worrying and wondering if it's true. When you are able to see yourself as a person who is worthy of love, you stop questioning his love. Once you can stop questioning his love, you can step out of this neediness and begin to give and receive love.

Doubting you are lovable leads to fear that she will leave you. You cannot give her the love she needs because you are so focused on your own belief that she doesn't really love you. You can go in several directions with this: being extremely needy and asking for constant encouragement or being angry that she cannot fill the gaping hole your need for love creates.

A healthy person can only take so much insecurity from another person. Eventually, the thing you fear will come true. It's very hard for one person to give love to someone who constantly questions and doubts her/his love. No matter how much love your partner wants to give you, if you don't believe that you are worthy, you will drive your partner away.

As you can see, it is so important that you learn to accept and love yourself. When you do this, you are able to give and receive love. You don't have to get it perfect before you begin to seek someone to spend your life with. You just have to start yourself on the path to becoming a person who believes in yourself and your worthiness to be loved.

I invite you to sign up for my free reports, "Improve Your Confidence: 10 Tips for dating While Shy" and "Why am I Still Single and What Can I do About it? Ten Attitudes That are Keeping You from Finding Your Dream Man."  Both can be found here: http://www.trueloveafter40.com/freereports.htm.

"I am in the process of making positive changes in all areas of my life." Louis L. Hay

I can say I have definitely been through a lot of changes in the last (almost) three years.  Some of those changes were difficult; others were devastating.  I've been redefining myself as I deal with the changes.  It has been hard and I am so blessed to have friends and family who love and support me.  Without them, I would not have made it through.

If you have been through a rough patch or you are recovering from a profoundly painful loss or illness, you know what I'm talking about. 

One of my favorite lines from Rush's song, "Tom Sawyer" is "He knows changes aren't permanent, but change is."

Change is going to happen whether we want it to or not.  Some changes are welcome and we make them happen.  Other changes, like job loss, illness, natural disasters, and death often come unexpectedly and we cannot stop them.

I believe that we can weather changes with the support of those who love us.  Despite this support, some changes are hard to bear.

Who loves and supports you as you go through changes?  Take the words of Louise L. Hay and decide that you are in charge of the positive changes you are making in your life.  If you are a life-long learner and you're growth oriented, you are doing great!

If you're going through some changes in your relationship and you'd like to get back on a growth path so you and your spouse/partner/girlfriend/boyfriend can begin to co-create the life you want together, check out my new True Love Coaching Calls for Couples.  They begin in February!

What do happily  married couples do differently than the over 50% that get divorced (or remain unhappily stuck)?

A lot has been written about the secrets of happily married couples. Here are a few quick thoughts I'd like to share about this:

• Happily married couples have a sense of commitment to their marriage.             

They are committed to making the relationship work.  They don't spend time thinking about an exit strategy.  They are going to see it through "for better or for worse."

When they argue (of course they argue) they see it as a bump in the road, but they don't begin packing their bags.  They believe they can work through any conflict and they are sometimes stubbornly determined to do just that.

• Happily married couples have lower expectations.

Before you gasp in disbelief, keep reading.  Often couples in their teens and 20's have severely unrealistic, sky-scraper high expectations of their partners.  Couples who have managed to get through those expectations and reassess what is realistic and what is not are happier, I believe.

So, they expect less of their partner and perhaps more of themselves.  They are well-rounded and do not expect that their spouse is their "everything."  They both have friends and activities that they do separately and together.

What are your thoughts about what keeps happily married couples together?

Wouldn't it be fantastic if "all you need is love" were really true?  It's a great concept and it is lovely to believe in, but can it be true?

When it comes to relationships, love is definitely a bond we hold dear, especially in our Western culture.  But wait! For many thousands of years, people have married and created families without love.  Some met their future spouse on the day they were wed.  Perhaps affection and eventually love became a part of the couple's attitude toward each other.  Yet, they stayed together with or without love.

Now, we insist that we must have love.  I wonder about this, especially in the divorce-prone society we live in.  I wonder if the "love" we think we must have is a fairy tale version of the love that bound people together for thousands of years in the past.

Perhaps our ancestors knew something that we didn't.  Maybe a sense of responsibility and loyalty were more important than love.  

I'd "love" to know what you think about this!

Treasure your loved ones in the year to come as much as you do on these important Holidays.  These feelings of joy will pass and diminish if you let them.  It's impossible to maintain the level of warmth and excitement you feel at this moment all the time.

Naturally, you feel highs and lows.  If you didn't experience sorrow, you could not truly appreciate happiness.  So while you are in the middle of these good feelings, remember them.  Store them in a special part of our mind.  Bring these feelings and thoughts out regularly and let your loved ones know how important they are.

Mark it in your calendar every Tuesday or on the 9th of the month (whenever you choose) and take some time on the days to remind yourself of your abundance and to tell others how much they mean to you.

I am fascinated by the life and work of Florence Foster Jenkins, "(July 19, 1868 – November 26, 1944) an American soprano who became famous for her complete lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, and overall singing ability." 

She was a woman who had an unflappable belief in her ability to sing opera despite the fact that she had  many critics and the people who came to her concerts laughed at her.  Her music, in my opinion, is truly awful, but that is not the point.  The point is that she believed in herself.  She sang because she felt she should.  She had something to contribute and she didn't let criticism stop her.

Of course, we could decide she was simply delusional.  Maybe she was.  It doesn't matter.  Here's my question to you: what could you accomplish in your life if you had half the confidence Florence Foster Jenkins had?

Now, what's stopping you?  If she could be a success with nomusical skill, what can you do with your creative mind and talents?  Go for it!

To learn more about this extraordinary woman, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Foster_Jenkins.  For a sample of her "music" go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM6qntPpyZ0. 

So, call me crazy, but I've decided that I won't wait until after the holidays to choose to eat healthier and exercise.  Well, actually, I got the idea when I got fed up with the fact that I could not fit into way too many of my clothes.  Since I detest shopping, getting rid of some extra inches I had acquired during my first year of marriage seemed like a good idea.

My question to you: do you tend to wait until Monday to start something new?  Or wait until the New Year? Why is that? I wrote the book on procrastination, so I know what I'm talking about!

I have chosen to leap ahead instead of waiting until a more convenient time to start something new.  If you are also doing this, how is it working for you?