How to Find Happiness and True Love in a Relationship

Dr. Purushothaman
January 18, 2014

 

Can you find happiness and true love in a relationship? Are you looking for a partner to make you happy or complete you? Is your relationship less than satisfactory and you are wondering how to improve it? Often we find it impossible to meet our dream guy or find happiness with a man simply because we are looking in the wrong place.
When we look for love, we proceed to look for someone whom we find loveable. Then we try to train him to be the person that we want him to be - a person whom we can continue to love. How do we do this? Usually, by creating a scene and letting him know how upset we are when he doesn't behave as we wish. By this he learns that when he exhibits this behaviour we won't be pleased and we are certainly going to let him know it in the future. If he's the type of guy that wants to make us happy, then he stops doing it. Or perhaps he just goes underground and does it in secret next time. Either way, he is probably going to feel some resentment towards us.
When our guy is loveable i.e. he is doing what we want and acting in accordance with our wishes and beliefs, then we find it easy to love him. But there are also the times that we find this difficult. When he is not being loveable, we may find ourselves feeling critical of him or even harbouring unpleasant negative feelings. We may even want him to suffer, because after all, he has made us suffer, hasn't he?
So, how do we turn this less than satisfactory situation into true love and happiness? Well the first step is realising that a man cannot make you happy, no matter how much he wants to or you want him to. Whilst you will feel happiness with your partner at times, another person will never complete you. You see, happiness is a state of mind and comes from within.
You can see this by considering how you may react to the same situation depending on how you feel at the time. Imagine your man comes home from work and he has had a bad day. You ask him to take out the garbage and he completely ignores you. As he slumps in the chair in front of the TV you can see that he is feeling bad and you rush over to help soothe his feelings.
Now, the same thing happens on another day. Only this time you've had a bad day yourself. This time, you were hoping for some comfort from him. When he ignores you, you feel neglected and unloved. You let him know how you feel and an argument ensues. Communication breaks down and the rest of the evening is ruined.
So, now we have established that a man is not able to make us happy. Happiness comes from within and is about you making the choice to be happy despite your external circumstances. It is about taking responsibility for your own feelings and not expecting your man to conform to everything that you want. It is not about the perfect relationship but about focusing on the positives in the relationship rather than the negatives.
It is very hard to love someone else unless you love yourself first. This is because the way you love your man is a reflection of your own needs and beliefs around love and how it should or shouldn't be. Unconditional acceptance of yourself as well as your partner is the only way to find unconditional love in your life. Of course, this doesn't mean that you should put up with a partner who treats you badly.
So, yes you can find happiness in a relationship. But only if you are happy on your own first. If you are looking for love then you must start by loving yourself. Unless you can do this you will never be able to allow love in fully. You must take responsibility for your own happiness by examining your own beliefs and reactions and how they serve you. And you must accept your man and allow him to be the person he is. Only when all these things come together with a man who loves you and wants to make you happy will you be able to say that you have found true love.

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