March 8th, 2012 Posted in Dating, Mating, Relating, The Love Bucket® | 1 Comment »
Four Seasons of Love Part 4
The Love Bucket is all about fulfilling desire. Sometimes that desire wanes to the point of break-up. Four Seasons of Love is how The Love Bucket gets empty.
The four seasons of love can include “nasty weather” with bleak, blustery and sometimes very frigid moments. Like a hurricane or tornado there can be destruction leaving nothing behind.
Here’s a quick recap of the Four Seasons of Love
Four Seasons of Love Defined:
DATING - Season 1 of the Four Seasons of Love
INTIMACY - Season 2 of the Four Seasons of Love
COMMITMENT - Season 3 of the Four Seasons of Love
BREAK-UP & MAKE-UP - Season 4 of Four Seasons of Love
Four Seasons of Love celebrates love providing ideas for experiences for couples in the real world and online. The Love Bucket of romance and intimacy gives you and a chance to rekindle the flames of passion… Four Seasons of Love define the four seasons of the lifecycle of love in four parts. Part1 = Season 1, Part 2 = Season 2, Part 3 = Season 3, Part 4= Season 4
For marriage, it can simply be a loves spat or it can end in divorce. Many times a fight helps clear the air so you can make up. Hot make-up sex is a well known experience.
The well-known Dummies books have several volumes relating to the four seasons of love.
To honor our friends and authors of the Dummies books we will dedicate the four seasons of love to them. Here’s some of their sage advice:
Basic Divorce Decisions
Important and difficult decisions have to be made when you’re working out the terms of your divorce, especially if minor children are involved. Basic conditions of your divorce that need to be decided on are
· Who will have physical custody of your children?
· Who will have legal custody of your children?
· If you will have sole or primary child custody of your children, what visitation rights will their other parent have?
· Will you prepare a parenting plan? If so, what will it include?
· Which parent will pay child support, how much will the payments be, and when will the payments end?
· Who will pay for your health insurance and your children’s health coverage — you or your spouse?
· How will you handle child-related expenses like private school tuition, tutoring, after-school activities, summer camp, and so on?
· How will you and your spouse share the cost of your children’s college educations or enrollment in a trade or career school?
· Which of you is going to claim your children as income tax exemptions?
· Will you or your spouse pay the other spousal support (also known as alimony)?
· How much will those support payments be?
· How long will the spousal support payments continue?
· What are your marital assets and marital debts?
· What percentage of the value of your marital assets is each of you entitled to?
· What portion of the property and debts will each of you take from your marriage?
The Four Seasons of Love can hold the air of finality if your partner dies. Yes, this season of love can be filled with insecurity and distraught.
Grieving the Death of Your Partner
When you lose your spouse through death, you obviously get no say-so in the matter. This lack of control and utter helplessness is in strong contrast to the loss of a spouse through divorce, which, though it may be unavoidable, is still an act of will rather than a loss of control over one’s destiny.
Lack of control is the salient factor in the profound loss of any loved one. In the death of a spouse, however, you face the loss of someone you specifically chose to be with and whom fate saw fit to take from you.
Dating Break-Ups
Breaking up with less pain
The relationship isn’t working for you. It really is the end. Breaking up is as important a skill as any other part of dating. It’s not fair to just disappear without a word. The world’s too small a place, and you’re too big a person, so don’t even think about it. Now the goal is to end it with the minimum blood loss, nastiness, and pain. When you finally decide to make the break, how do you actually go about doing it?
Avoid blame
The first temptation to be avoided is the need to blame somebody or something. Because there are only the two of you, it’s logical that you will decide, heroically of course, to make it all your fault, even though you know it’s not true: "You’re too good for someone like me," "I don’t deserve you," — both of which mean you want out now. Or you could blame your partner: "You never loved me enough," "You cared more about your work than you did me," "You’ve never really gotten over your first love," "You’ve put on weight, lost hair, gotten moody. . . ." Yada, yada, yada.
You don’t need to fall into either trap. All you have to do to be dignified is to be specific about your feelings without laying blame. It doesn’t matter in the long run whose fault it is, and avoiding blame spares you both a lot of pain.
To avoid the blame game, try saying, "I feel . . ." rather than "You are . . ." and no, it isn’t okay to say, "I feel you’re a rat." This approach is okay only if you follow up with something about yourself, like, "I feel neglected when you work weekend after weekend." (Of course, if you had been able to say this when you were feeling it, the relationship might not be beyond redemption at this point.) If you’re specific now, at least both of you can look at the data as dispassionately as possible rather than feeling that either of you failed.
Don’t ask why
When a relationship is over, the "why" is less relevant than the "how" — how are we both going to walk away and be able to live our lives without scars or regrets? Sometimes, a perfectly good relationship is a perfectly good relationship only for a while. That doesn’t mean it was bad, only that it wasn’t long-term.
If the two of you are specific, you’ll know what went wrong and what, perhaps, either of you could do differently next time. The why may be lost in the mists of time or be a proper subject for therapy, but when you’re going your separate ways, getting stuck in the past feels incredibly painful. And the why is in the past, often clouded and sometimes unknowable. When you’re reduced to asking why, you’re both sunk, and there are no comforting reasons to be had.
After the breakup
Now you’re broken up. You’ve gone through the first hard part, the misery has ended, but another kind of misery is about to begin: the unhappiness of doubt, the "did I do the right thing" second-guessing. The aftermath of a breakup can be one huge pity party (allow yourself only 24 to 36 hours of tears) or it can be productive.
Look for patterns
If this isn’t your first breakup, take this opportunity to privately examine whether your relationships are following a pattern, beginning with your first love in second grade who hit you with the teeter-totter.
Do you pick unavailable people and then feel neglected when they’re unavailable? Do you need to be in control all the time or else you feel anxious? Do you take care of people and then get angry when they don’t take care of you, even though you’ve set yourself up as the caretaker (which is really just a variation on being a control freak)?
Looking for patterns is a really good thing to do for yourself because most people get involved again eventually (and, usually, much too soon, before they’ve sorted out the last disaster). You’ll most likely want to get involved again, too, and knowing your patterns may help you avoid making the same mistakes.
Talking to your ex about the patterns you see in yourself isn’t very productive. And puh-leeeze, under no circumstances, point out the patterns you see in your ex’s behavior. You’re not the parent or the therapist, and no matter how keen your insight, your remarks will be viewed as self-serving. So keep those pearls of "wisdom" for a hundred years from now when you’re the best of friends, and even then, swallow them.
Accept that many things don’t last forever
Just because a relationship doesn’t last forever doesn’t mean it’s not good. Unfortunately, many of us feel that if it doesn’t last as long as we wanted or expected it to, then somebody must be to blame, someone has to pay, and it wasn’t a good relationship at all.
Remember that it takes a while to get to know someone, and even perfectly nice people can find that there’s no chemistry after some time passes. Therefore, the relationship wasn’t bad or a failure, and neither party has to be the bad guy or at fault. The only perspective by which you can evaluate if the relationship made any sense or was a good investment of your time is with time.
If you think of every experience as being tuition in the school of life and love, then you can understand that some tuition is higher than others, and some classes are more fun or stick with you longer, or teach you more than others. But it’s only after time passes that you gain the perspective to see which things you really benefited from.
Always look forward
It is humanly impossible to go backward in a relationship. After you know that someone can be both kind and smart, you’ll never settle for one without the other again. Therefore, every breakup is an opportunity to go forward, and, after a while, you may even be able to say thank you to the one who gave you your walking papers, even though it felt awful at the time.
Making UP after a Fight or Break UP
You can get back together after a break up. Read earlier article entitled Want To Get Your Ex Back? (WARNING)
When there is a break-up, the love bucket is broken! You’ll have repair the broken holes in The Love Bucket. The Love Bucket is a concept so it is the areas in your relationship that have been neglected, avoided, mistreated, ignored or abandoned that need attention.
Click the broken love bucket image to see you can use a modern approach to get your ex back.
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