7 Things You Must Do to Keep Believing in Love

You can endure failed relationships without retreating into a shell.

If you are like most people, you were more vulnerable and open when you started experiencing intimate relationships than you are now. Prior to the disappointments and heartbreaks that you’ve likely faced, you were more willing to enter a partner’s internal world with reverence and unbounded curiosity, and to open your heart and soul to that lover. Whatever flaws or prior heartbreaks had occurred for either of you, they were immaterial in the face of the intensity of your connection.

Until things fell apart.

You may have, by now, experienced many initially hopeful relationships that have not worked out. You are not alone: Many sincere and ardent relationship seekers suffer painful disappointments and disillusionments in their early experiences and are wary of risking their hearts again. As people connect and lose partners, they often have a harder time finding good prospects who are available when and where they are. Their lives are filled with rapidly shifting scenarios that require more time, energy, and motivation than they can muster.

It is not surprising that the process of searching for long-term love becomes discouraging for so many. A determined few are able to continue their search, staying soft and open to the hope of a new adventure that will, finally, work out. For most, something more potentially destructive occurs: Those who have been repeatedly wounded in intimate relationships resolve their disappointments by assuming that it's better to risk less in order to preserve more.

They begin to separate their authentic and vulnerable self from the one they present to new prospects and develop a performance presentation that is not as vulnerable to discouragement if the relationship doesn’t work out. Their new pseudo-personality keeps them safely behind emotional walls. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained" becomes, "Nothing ventured, nothing lost.”

The outcome is frighteningly predictable.

When people become less and less authentic, open, real, and vulnerable, they morph into rigid versions of their presented performers. They become more inflexible, suspicious, immovable, obstinate, and inadaptable to each new relationship. If they do succeed in launching a relationship as their “pseudo” person, they will eventually crack and awkwardly reveal what they’ve been hiding. The partner on the other side may welcome that more authentic person or turn away, depending on what they find.

If we continue to put most of our relationship-seeking energy into pre-defeated defensiveness, we deceive ourselves if we think that we are staying vulnerable, soft, and open on the inside. All of us get better at what we practice every day and the rest of us atrophy. If we practice being tough, combat-ready, and expecting failure, we will not easily reemerge as the person we really want to be if a potentially successful partner comes along.

These cynical and pessimistic responses are the most common default positions of those who have experienced multiple relationship failures. They also result in the continued commitment to choose security over risk in future relationships. Unfortunately, those who live in that defeated internal world consciously or unconsciously communicate that expectation to potential partners. It is not an attractive presentation to most potential partners. The demons who control pessimism are powerful enemies of the openness to fully love again.

Fortunately, most of us can still reclaim our prior enthusiasm and motivation. With some emotional and spiritual transformation, we can find quality love in our lives again—and maintain it. It may take a new set of skills and some effective guidance, but we don’t have to let past failures define our future success. We are strangely unique creatures who can think about our own thinking and change our behaviors mid-stream. The trick is to stay conscious and intentional in transforming into the positive people we want to recapture.

There are seven infallible truths that we have to accept before we can let go of our hard-earned emotional walls and rediscover our ability to believe in love:

1. Accept the fact that security is an illusion. Having worked for more than four decades with some of the most beloved people I’ve ever known, I’ve been in the middle of heartbreaking tragedies, none of which these people expected or were wholly prepared for. I’ve suffered with them and for them, watching the process of grief unfold as it must.

2. People become what they rigorously practice. We actually get better at being sad if we are sad most of the time, and better at being optimistic if we look at what we are blessed about rather than the price we might pay. If you really want to be different from who you are, stay on the course of the direction and goals you’ve set and ardently practice who you want to become.

3. People can become courageous through struggle. Exempting unbearable situations, those people who focus on who they become despite loss rather than the loss itself, train themselves to learn courage in the face of threat and loss. As they master that transformation, they strengthen their resolve every time they are most tempted to lose it. Look for your strengths and the ways that you become more valuable and stronger through your disappointments. Focus on those qualities in yourself that you are proud of and that are desirable for others to share.

4. Risk is a bedfellow of excitement and discovery. All are required for life to have promise. Though every one of us is continually balancing between security and risk, we can live precariously with an impassioned devotion to being safe at all costs, but we can’t be fully alive without a commitment to challenge and transformation.

5. Each choice shapes your destiny. Everything you do, say, feel, or think, each moment of your life, will take you closer or farther away from the person you want to become. Whirlpools of temporary deviation are part of life, but getting back on your path as soon as you are able will expedite that process.

6. Choose and imitate your supporters. You need people around you who support and model those changes. Birds of a feather do reinforce each other—one way or another.

7. Look forward. Observe the people you’ve known who turn fear into purpose and loss into recommitment. They don’t waste time in the past, except for the lessons they must take with them. They radiate a sense of practical idealism and a love of the options they have.

They’re good models to have internal conversations with when you feel defeat looming. Very few of us can meet the world after more than two decades in prison, as Nelson Mandela did, with the words, “If I am bitter, they have won.” But we can get closer, knowing that people like him existed and still do.

Crust is a defensive coating that starts out as a protection and ends up as an emotional prison. As it filters out potential harm, it also stops love from coming in or out. It is all about how open you are to living a full life and how much you are willing to risk. You can’t close off to potential heartbreak without also closing off to potential joy. Each of us must decide how open we want to be at different times in our life. Just be careful as you make those decisions: If you choose to keep your heart in an emotional castle surrounded by a moat of doubt, you could become locked into the sanctuary of loneliness you created.

OTHER ARTICLES: