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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Deep love is cultivated.

http://www.businessinsider.com/lasting-relationships-rely-on-2-traits-2014-11

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/happily-ever-after/372573/

When you meditate on what you love about someone, you start to love them more. Not quite "fake it to make it" but more like building a case in their favor and it being true. When my spouse sleeps, sometimes I work on studying spouse's face and attributes. "I love ____'s eyes....smell, the way they hold me." And I practice what I would like more, I hug more, and holds are lingering.

You really have to be intentional and fight for the love you want. The more you feed into your distaste, it grows like a baby. You nature negative feelings and this negative baby will grow. The same is true if you nurture what you love and plant seeds of what you want to love to grow.[/quote]

I actually really agree with this, but I think the big trick for a lot of us is that we might be willing to do that, but, honestly, as someone who tends to invest heavily in my relationships, I find most people are emotionally lazy. That's actually my problem--I don't have kids but I have a marriage with some major, reasonably dealbreaking flaws in it that is still low conflict and high friendship. I have spent the last 20 years fully all in and making the best of and cultivating what I have, but it's unlikely to get significantly better because my spouse has limited desire/ability to invest further emotionally to do that. I also know myself well enough to know that I am my best self when I have a committed partner sharing my day to day life. If I knew that I could leave and would find one of those deep love type relationships with someone who was as much all in as I am within the next 5 years, I would go home and pack my stuff up tonight. But, I think finding that person would be like finding a needle in a haystack, and might never happen, and I'm just as likely to end up alone for good, or in another marriage with a different set of major, reasonably dealbreaking flaws. So, at that point, I figure maybe it's better to just stick with the person that I do love and have a good friendship with, as well as a ton of history and try to make it work, even though it's never going to be particularly satisfying for me.[/quote]

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