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The Greatest Love Requires Great Courage

It doesn't take courage to simply have a relationship. You choose to spend your time with
someone, to have sex with him or her, perhaps to live together. It does however take courage
to love your partner deeply, to not be merely a couple but to be true lovers, and to create a
conscious relationship together. The greatest love always requires the greatest courage.

If you measure the success of your relationship in terms of how comfortable it makes you feel,
you may convince yourself that your relationship is good because it doesn't challenge you, and
confuse yourself that your challenging is unhealthy because it's creating wild surges of emotion.
I'm not saying that a relationship that is always painful is good for you, and you should stay with
that partner—you shouldn't. When you develop the courage to love deeply and consciously,
you will find yourself feeling uncomfortable a lot of the time, as your relationship stretches you
beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone as you experience the changes essential to
growth.

The depth and honesty of your love, and the more trust you create between you, the more your
relationship will present you with the truth, and the more uncomfortable you may become.
Sometime after a significant commitment is made in a relationship, such as moving in together,
getting married or having a baby or another baby, will usually bring with it a time of conflict and
turmoil. Remember the Power Struggle referred to earlier in the chapter, well here it is.

The Courage to Share Precious Moments

If loving deeply requires a certain degree of emotional courage, then sharing precious moments
requires even more courage. Why?

The more precious moments you share together, the more difficult it will be for you to avoid the
truths you may have denied or hidden from in your relationship, the harder it will be to pretend
things are “ok” when they're not, to convince yourself that you're being loved enough when you
aren't, and to close your eyes to the unspoken problems in your relationship. We go to great
lengths to avoid these precious moments, because they force you out of your comfort zone and
demand that you finally attend to the problem with complete honesty. It's time to take off your
masks and reveal the feelings at the heart of who you are. It is the only way to true growth within
the relationship. The longer these issues are ignored, denied or masked, the more deep rooted
the issue becomes and the greater the level of pain and heartache when they finally burst their
way to the surface.

Staying in love

Staying in love is, perhaps, the greatest challenge in your relationship. A substantial number of
people stay together after love has gone, for the sake of children or simply because the thought
of starting again and being alone is unbearable.

The truth is not complicated...it is just hard to grasp and keep in one’s awareness. Love is a
relationship. This is not hard to understand. What is more difficult to really comprehend is that
every relationship is an independent entity. It is like a separate person. It is made up all the
interactions between the members of the relationship. This relationship remembers and
influences how every future communication is interpreted.

To make it even more demanding, love changes as it grows. We should not be surprised that
falling in love, being in love, and long-time love require, if we are to be successful lovers, that we
create new, more appropriate understandings, skills and practices to enhance our love in every
phase.