Emotions —
In my opinion, having full faith and trust in your partner is the ultimate foundation of a relationship—more than love, more than friendship, more than sex and passion—trust and faith in the other person and in yourself is the foundation. Love is important. There must be love, but I do believe there is a difference between love and in love.
Emotion versus feeling. Emotion is a state of being and feelings are the way in which we express that state of being. An emotion is who you are and a feeling is how you express who you are.
There is a difference between saying, “I am angry” and “I feel angry.” I believe that these are two completely different things in how they are experienced. Feeling angry changes when the next feeling comes in to replace it, but being angry takes time to heal.
Where love is concerned, the difference I see between loving someone and being in love with someone is pretty much based on that difference between emotion and feeling. I do not believe that you will always be ‘in love’ with a person you are in a relationship with, as romantic as that would seem. I do, however, believe you will always love them. Love is the emotion; in love is the feeling. Feelings change from moment to moment and day to day.
Ask anyone who has been married for many years if they have always been in love with their partner every single day, and if they answer honestly, they probably will tell you that they haven’t always been in love, but they have always loved.
Being in love doesn’t require faith and trust. It is just a feeling you feel toward another. Sometimes, I can tell you from personal experience, being in love is not a choice. It’s a feeling that comes and goes based on the events of the day or what happens in the relationship, but truly loving someone requires trust and faith at the foundation.
It is a choice you make and choose to keep with you, and it simply can’t be built on lies or deception or it will crumble and when the in love feeling goes away, which it always does, there is nothing there to sustain the relationship until it comes back… assuming it ever does.
If being in love is the sole foundation for your relationship, and that feeling ever leaves you, even for a short time, the relationship will eventually fail.
If, however, your relationship is based on trust and faith in each other, and then the love is built on top of that trust and faith, that in love feeling may wax and wane, but the love will always keep you together. The foundation is strong.
I have broken trust before in my life. I think that we all have
at some point. It is important to try your best to never abuse the faith someone has placed in you and to never do anything to break their trust, but sometimes, sadly, it is inevitable. At that point, I think how you handle yourself and the situation becomes very important as to whether the crack you caused in the foundation can be repaired, or if too much damage has been done and the relationship fails.
This is true for romantic relationships and friendships and even business relationships. Trust and faith are important components to any relationship, and if the foundation is cracked beyond repair or if the party who did the damage doesn’t handle themselves properly, the relationship will continue to deteriorate and eventually will end.
I’ve heard it said that trust must be earned. I’m a bit confused by this. I mean, I understand that if someone has abused your trust, and you have pulled it away from them, then that person definitely has to earn it back, but at the same time, how exactly do you earn trust from someone who does not trust you?
That’s like saying, “I’ll only trust you to drive my car if you can prove to me you can drive my car, but I won’t let you drive my car in order to prove it…”
How exactly can trust be earned if it’s not extended? Well, I suppose that that person could go and get another car exactly like mine and show me they can drive that car, but they still haven’t proven to me they can drive my car, only a car like mine. How do they earn my trust if I don’t give it to them first?
So if trust must be earned, how do you earn it?
I simply do not know. Perhaps by showing yourself to be trustworthy with things that don’t matter much at first and then building on them. I think that’s what I’ve done with people in the past. I don’t trust well or easily, but sometimes I will entrust someone with something that doesn’t mean much to me. If they abuse the trust, I won’t give them anything more important to try with. If they don’t abuse the trust, and they show themselves to be trustworthy, then I’ll slowly grant them more of me until they have the big stuff too.
It’s not fair to make someone who has never burned you have to prove themselves, but I have found that those who
are worth it, those who really matter, and those who really care do not seem to mind proving themselves at all, because they know they are true. They know they are worthy, and they will prove that time and time again.
And to bring it all back around to love and in love…
I think that we start out in a new relationship in love, and we begin the process of extending trust and faith. If our partner shows themselves to be trustworthy, we extend more and more of ourselves while we are still in love and that in love feeling eventually changes into something deeper, more profound, stronger and more solid than the in love feeling ever could be. It turns into true love.
Once that true love is there, the feelings of being in love will come and go throughout the relationship, but the love, once established, will never leave. That is, unless something happens to cause the trust in the relationship to be broken and the foundation becomes cracked beyond repair.
So if you find yourself today in a place where you are in love, begin extending the trust and faith you have in the other person and build your foundation solidly, with honesty and integrity. If you are passing the in love stage and your
foundation of love has been built, do everything in your power to keep it solid and strong.
If you have found there is a crack in your foundation, determine if you can repair it. If so, fix it now, because when that in love feeling leaves you, if that foundation is not solid again, you may find yourself alone. There is no worse feeling than finding yourself alone, and knowing that 1) it is because of your own actions that it happened, and 2) that you could have prevented it.
Remember, we all make mistakes. It’s how you handle the situation when a mistake has been made that makes all the
difference in the world, not the mistake itself.