One of the hardest things in life is to satisfy this need for loving and belonging. When we fall in love, we fall in love with the space the other person touches in us. And that to us is of the highest quality. We can stay in that love most of the time. We can have a loving relationship through the years of life when we end all the external control psychology that we practice on out partner and them on us. When a relationship commits to giving up external control, then that is planning the marriage. More people plan the wedding and forget the most important plan, which is to stay married and to continue to plan the marriage.

When we love someone and they don’t love us back or have stopped loving us, and then leave, this is one of the most painful processes in life. Glasser calls this former loved one someone you have put in your quality world and you just can’t take them out. Most of the great operas, literature and plays deal with this theme. Finding someone to love and being loved back they way we want to is, for most of us, the happiest part of life. A human being is the most unhappy when they don’t have someone to love or aren’t loved by the person they feel they want and need. The problem is that you have them deep in your quality world and they don’t have you in theirs. Being in this pain, people choose all kinds of behaviours, from depression to anger to violence etc. The only way a person recovers from this type of painful experience is to find another satisfying relationship to replace it with. And so they now have to get close to people they already know or find someone new. This is the difficult thing about being human. How do we find someone who will love us the way we want to be loved? The other side is this: How do we love someone the way they want us to love them?

When you confuse the two of these positions, getting along often becomes very complicated. In the face of that complication, we make a choice as to what psychology we will choose in order to deal with that person. You can know very quickly if what you are doing is working because your feelings tell you. You start to feel better and therefore move closer to the other person. When you are doing something and your needs are not being met and you don’t feel any better, then what you are doing behaviorally towards the other person is destroying the environment, which is making things worse and therefore you feel bad.

Please consider this.

Bri