In this article I am going to argue that most of us have completely misunderstood the true nature of love, and as a consequence, we are damaging our relationships and creating problems and misery for ourselves.

For many of us it is in the area of romance that we have the most powerful feelings of love. To find somebody we love and who loves us, is a truly uplifting experience. Falling in love is often the emotional high-point of our lives. While some couples may be lucky enough to sustain these feelings for a lifetime, most of us know from bitter experience that they often fade with time. The quality of our relationships may then be severely compromised or end in failure. If this happens our need for love is so strong that we will continue our search, perhaps finding a new partner, only to see the same problems re-appear in subsequent relationships. Our songs, books, poems and plays describe the ecstasy of finding love and the agony of losing it again. These experiences convince us that love is a fragile, transient phenomenon.

This is how most of us understand love. We see it as something that we lack and must therefore bring into our lives. In this book I will show that this fundamental assumption is at the heart of all our problems. It has created an outward search for love that damages our relationships and causes emotional suffering. It is only by challenging our beliefs about love and reversing our assumptions that we can solve our problems and find lasting happiness.

So let me define love in a completely different way:

Love is not a transient emotion or something that we lack and have to bring into our lives
- it is an intrinsic and unchanging part of us. It is our essence.

Of course, this new definition challenges virtually everything we know about love. Most of us have experienced at first hand the way in which feelings of love seem to come and go depending on circumstances. While it is true that our emotions do fluctuate around the experience of love, our underlying capacity for love remains constant. It is important to distinguish between feelings of love and the loving bond itself. The bond cannot be broken but we may choose to feel or not to feel that bond. Let’s look in more detail at our romantic relationships, because they are good place to explore these ideas.

As we fall in love, our romantic dream comes true. Any feelings of loneliness or emptiness that we experienced before the relationship began will disappear, to be replaced by a variety of positive sensations such as joy, light-headedness, energy, hope, euphoria, creativity and perhaps a sense of floating on air. We feel renewed and able to achieve anything. We are convinced that we have found our perfect partner and that our love will last forever.

Clearly something amazing happens to us during this process – we experience a heightened state of consciousness and become deliriously happy. We can best understand these dramatic changes in mood by looking at our needs and how they are fulfilled in a romantic relationship. At the outset, both partners have a set of needs that they bring to the relationship, the most important of which will be the need to be loved. In our conventional understanding of love we would assume that the presence of our partner has provided the love that we are lacking before we start the relationship. We assume that our feelings of euphoria are our response to their gift of love. Our happiness becomes conditional on the presence of our loving partner. We know that this is the case because if they left us, we would be devastated.

With our new understanding of love we can propose an alternative explanation. The process of falling in love removes the barriers that we have been using to hide our loving essence. At some point we make a subconscious choice to feel the euphoria – we give ourselves permission to feel all the love that is within us. The presence of our partner is important, but only as the trigger to the release of self-love. With this interpretation, when we fall in love with our partner we also fall in love with ourselves. The rapidity with which we fall in love shows that we have not learnt anything new – there wouldn’t be time for that. We already know how to love and be loved because it is our essence. Falling in love is therefore a process of remembering who we really are.

The emotional outcome from both interpretations is identical. We experience the same wonderful feelings of happiness, but the mechanism is totally different. In one we believe we have been given love from outside, and in the other we discover it within. This is a critical difference and has a profound impact on how we approach not just our romantic relationships, but all our relationships in life. The interpretations are based on two fundamentally different beliefs about love.

Our conventional understanding of love is built on a belief in scarcity - that we are personally lacking in love and that there is never enough love to go round. In contrast, our new understanding is built on the idea of abundance – that we are one hundred percent complete when it comes to love. This has some startling implications - it turns everything we know about love on its head, for instance:

• If our essence is love, we must have it in limitless supply.

• We no longer need to search for love because we already have it.

• Although we may stop feeling love, we cannot lose it.

• Our experience of love is not determined by the amount of love we bring into our lives, but by the amount of love that we allow ourselves to feel.

• The quality of our relationships will depend on how much love we are willing give to people and receive in return.

These are challenging ideas. If it is true that our essence is one of love and we have it in abundant supply, then the first and most obvious question we will ask is: “Why don’t we experience love and happiness more often in our lives”? The truth is that we place a number of conditions on whether or not we access our loving essence. In holding back the love, we erect barriers and create smokescreens that hide us and other people from our true identity. Most of us are largely unaware that we do these things.

Much can be done to remove the barriers that we have erected to our loving essence. These will always involve letting go of our guilt and sense of inadequacy and revealing our true selves. For more information please take a look at our website – details below.

If you suspect your wife no longer loves you, you are probably going through lots of pain. You feel sad and down, and you miss the way she used to make you feel. You are wondering whether she is still in love with you.

There are many materials you can buy online and in bookstores - even seminars - available to help you answer the question, “does my wife still love me”? But exercising some common sense can really make a difference after a loss of love between you. And, displaying the appropriate behavior can go long way toward healing your relationship.

If you cannot stop thinking about your lost relationship and wondering if she still loves you, I have some tips on how to rekindle her love for you. You will give yourself the best chance of getting back together with that special someone.

Avoid being dishonest with her!

This is a very important tip, but one that is often ignored at the peril of the distraught husband. Why? Many people fall back on playing games when they are hurt by their wives’ recent coldness because it gives them a sense of power. If you can make your wife think that you no longer have feelings for her - or if you can make her think you care more than you really do - you are just playing with her mind. That can make you feel powerful in the short term, which can feel good. But this good feeling is short-lived, and it will not last for very long.

At some point, you will come to the realization that trying to fool your wife does not really work. And, anything good that happens because of it will always be tarnished by the fact that it is based on lies.

Some people play games to make their wives jealous by pretending to show interest in someone else. This is merely a way to try to make their falling-out-of-love wives feel jealous. While this can work, in many instances it actually causes a breakup, once and for all. For example, your wife could be so jealous at the thought of you being with someone else that she wants you back. Or, on the contrary, she could decide that since you emotionally became disengaged so quickly, you do not really care about her anyway. The bottom line is, you have no way of knowing how this type of dishonest action will play out in terms of longer-term effects.

Be nice!

This is true for any type of relationship, but sometimes the anger that comes from one’s wife suddenly going emotionally cold can make can us act in a way that is beneath us. Even if you are feeling hurt, the fact that you want to know, “does my wife still love me?” indicates that you want to make things work.

Ask yourself how you have been acting toward your wife lately. If you were your wife, would you look forward to spending time you? Even if you feel like picking fights with her, simply stop yourself from doing so. Instead, work extra hard at controlling your ill will. In other words, be a person who deserves to be cared for!

Remember: be on your best behavior when you are around your wife, and help her to remember what it was that made her fall in love with you in the first place. She will remember your good points and will miss them. You will then have a better chance of rekindling the love you share.

What I have shared with you here are just the beginning steps in winning back the love of your wife. They are the first steps I followed when I lost the love of my life - my wife. And frankly, these are not my own ideas. Rather, I learned these ideas from top relationship experts who have made a science out of people getting their spouses to fall back in love with them.