How to Feel Love From Your Mate

We all want to receive more love and be willing to give more love! How do we go about giving love more deeply and fully? Should we give gifts of jewelry? How about providing more romance? Or would there be more compliments? Spend more time with our partner or send flowers ( men enjoy getting flowers too). Be more seductive, wear alluring clothes?

Well sure, we could provide all of the above, but to feel loved and appreciated we would have to consider the five C's: consideration, co-operation/confirmation, cherishing, caring, and confiding.

These five behaviors, when used together, open us up to feeling safe, secure, loved, appreciated, and valued in our relationships:

Consideration. Concern. This is about paying attention to what someone is doing, how they're doing and feeling, the tone of their voice, and their needs and wants. When we feel genuine and attentive concern, we feel more understood and known for who we are and how things affect us. It's about realizing that everything isn't about us. To desire consideration and concern is to desire our mate to listen to us, to attend to our needs with fondness, gentleness, and admiration. A mate who takes you seriously and who values how you feel.

Co-operation/Confirmation. When you feel consideration coupled with concern for your well-being and feel worthy in the eyes of your mate, you're feeling approval for being who you are. As you feel more and more secure you will keep your vulnerability in check and open up to your mate and others without reservation or fear.

Everyone has a dark-side - those things that are self-destructive, self-centered, selfish, and foolishly wrong or risky - we have to be able to see beyond the surface behaviors and search for the real person hiding under self-destroying actions or activities and look for their hidden possibilities. We can be there for others only when we are free of judging or finding fault with their self-defeating habits.

Cherishing. Feelings of appreciation and being seen as a person of value and worth allows us to thrive and become more in-tune with our inner-self, that self that wants and desires to be close to our significant others - our partners, our children, our family and friends. When we feel loved, we are realizing that we are special and there is no one just like us.

Confiding. Being able to convey how we feel about people and their relationship to us is vital to being affectionate. Affection can be more than physical - it's about feeling and telling others how you feel about them, that you like or love them and you want to spend time with them. By being free to be romantic, kind, thoughtful, and playful, you are sharing and confiding to your mate in intimacy your basic, true feelings with faith.

When we admit in our relationships that we are who we say we are by our actions and our words, we trust that others will allow us to see them in their true light. Our true self is the self we will be when we don't have to spend our time and energy trying to be who others want or expect us to be.

So, if you want your mate to be more loving, less controlling, or demanding - put yourself in that same space of being a loving, allowing, and giving partner. By becoming that person, you won't have to worry about losing yourself in order to take care of your mate - you will be heart-partners, sharing love, support, respect, and security in your relationship.

"Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody gets there unless everybody gets there." ~ Virginia Burden, The Process of Intuition. This is what we hope for in our significant relationships, we all get there, together.