Working on Yourself in Love : How Lasting Love is Earned

Love that lasts has to be earned

Love always comes when we least expect it. Then it leaves us shaken and often broken. Because how can you live your life so well after you’ve touched paradise, and lost it?

It gives the greatest meaning, then takes it all away. We could give anything to make love last, and yet, it seems to slip away over and over. Because the only path to making this heaven last, is by earning it honestly. 

Love that lasts has to be earned. If you steal it, if you force it, it slips from your hands.

The kind of love that keeps deepening, that meets your soul and changes your life… is not for those who are searching for the perfect partner. 

It is for those who are willing to work on themselves. 

We tend to look for love as if it were something to find. But the love we are actually longing for is something we make ourselves available for, and its quality depends more on who we are becoming than on who we manage to attract.

Love That Lasts Has to Be Earned

If we manage to create Love from seducing it for a short while, we sooner or later have to pay the price. Because Love can only come from inner alignment and from opening to something larger than ourselves. It is not ours to control — but it is ours to become more worthy of, over and over again.

But before this Work can start, there has to be a partner with whom there is a true affinity.

The Affinity of Will

Affinity, yes, but what they are now matters less than what they wish to become.

Not what you want them to become. What they wish to become.

If the direction they are moving in genuinely moves you, there is an affinity of will. You are not in love with who they are today so much as with the person they are reaching toward, and you are willing to walk beside that. Because Love is always about becoming, and the vulnerability of who we are not yet.

The Affinity of Feeling

There also has to be an affinity of feeling: the ability to read one another in silence.

This is not easy. But when two people are relaxed, when the nervous system settles, emotional affinity tends to reveal itself on its own. It comes naturally. When there is a lot of trauma, or a lot of pain passed from one person to the other, this ability can be compromised, or buried. That does not always mean the affinity is absent. It is unavailable in the midst of too much intensity. If this ability to read one another in silence is there in the moments of calm, of regulation, then the emotional affinity is real.

Physical Affinity Is Deeper Than Beauty Standards

Physical affinity has almost nothing to do with the modern standard of beauty. It is about the ability to feel intimate with someone when you touch them. The ability for energy to pass through one another. Specific genetic characteristics which match us and allow from deep within to “unlock” the energy exchange.

This is not more available simply because a person is "sexier." Those standards are built on ego, status, and the perception of others. We are drawn to status because it moves us — there is a link between status and the manifestation of our own potential, and we feel it sexually. But choosing a partner to borrow that status is a kind of bypass. It skips the merit that would let us truly arrive there ourselves.

So we have to loosen our grip on those standards to reach a deeper affinity with someone. When we are too infatuated, our attention stays on the surface, and the surface is exactly where the deeper work cannot happen. The soul level is quieter than that.

What Sexual Energy Reveals When Affinity Is Real

Here is the strange and beautiful part. When there is true affinity, and sexual energy is circulated between two people rather than spent, it increases. And it produces two effects.

First, it makes the beloved more beautiful. We see this all the time in people who are in healthy relationships. They are in love, and it shows. They look balanced, radiant, regulated, younger even!

Second, it makes us see them as beautiful. When we are in love, carried by real affinity and a genuine exchange of energy, we suddenly see the beauty of the whole world, our partner included. This only works when the affinity is truly there. But when it is — when the emotional, intellectual, and physical affinity are all present — a partner whose body is scarred, even badly burned, will still be astonishingly beautiful in our eyes. And these are not blind eyes. They are the lucid eyes of Love.

What It Actually Means to Work on Yourself in Love

So what does working on yourself in love actually mean?

It begins with knowing where you want to go. Not where it feels realistic to go. 

You have to find deep within where you feel called to go, if anything was possible.
Your truest, deepest wish.

That may feel very far away. And very unlikely. We may never fully reach it, yet we should never fall into discontentment for not having reached it yet. The work starts from naming it honestly. To be truly honest with oneself. And because this aim is far, there is no time to waste. Even if we never reach it, this means something, and this will lead us somewhere.

This is where we have to watch for escapism. Many of us have learned to perform love beautifully, but performance always comes at a cost. And as we said at the start, love cannot be forced or performed into being. The person you are with, whether or not they turn out to be the "right" one, is the exact right person to show you where you are still failing love's requirements. They are the exact right person to teach us what we need to learn to enable a higher Love to come into our life. 

The Requirements of Love

Love must be earned, and it is only earned when we follow its requirements : 

Try to understand your beloved. Go beyond your own perceptions and judgments and try to see as they see, without forcing your perceptions into a box. We cannot love what we do not understand.

Choose truth over pleasure. Pleasure is sexual energy, a great force that gives Love its wings. But when pleasure is chosen against truth, we lose at the love game. All the people-pleasing, all the seduction — it is a form of manipulation. Trust the path of truth, even when it is hard. In the end, it leads to something rock solid, something that cannot be shaken. And the path to truth always starts with being honest with ourselves. We lie to ourselves so much, that we cannot avoid lying to others, while being convinced that we are honest.

Look honestly at the ways you betray Love. Love is universal. I cannot love my partner and despise my mother. I cannot love the person I am with and mistreat my ex. Love is an energy we reach from within, and the more of it there is, the more it connects us to everyone. Spending a little time each day becoming better servants of that force of love, noticing our own shortcomings, the ways we could love better, is the fastest route to durable love.

Do not harm others by your love. You may have found the love of your life, the one you always waited for. And yet, if you step toward that person by betraying your current partner, the broken heart you leave behind will cost you the very love you had been waiting for. It will slip from your hands, somehow. Because Love is a force of interconnectedness. We cannot isolate it. 

Regulate yourself, independently of your beloved. Maybe your partner is the one who makes you feel most at peace, most relaxed. But if you do not also learn to bring yourself back to calm on your own, you will not be able to offer them that steadiness when they need it most — when life shakes you both at once. The skill to self-regulate consciously, without escaping, is a lifesaver.

Wish the best for your partner, even if it means loosing them. This is true proof of love. Because Love is a connection to something beyond us, which makes us feel completely happy and satisfied. Giving them space, giving them what they want instead of what you would prefer. Not blindly, but because you truly feel the best that way. Because you see them so deeply, that you see all of their joy and sorrow. 

Love Requires Space to Live

All of this takes time, energy, and dedication. Every day.

If you are in love, and the only way you want to express it is by spending every moment with your beloved, something is off. How will you see your own shortcomings if you never have the quiet to reflect on what happened between you? How will you understand your partner more deeply if you never step back to integrate your time together and sit with your questions?

When there is no contemplation, only the hunger for more and more closeness, there is no room left for love to be refined. Love needs space to live.

The Reward

Love always comes when we least expect it. Then it leaves us shaken and often broken. Because how can you live your life so well after you’ve touched paradise, and lost it?

It gives the greatest meaning, then takes it all away. We could give anything to make love last, and yet, it seems to slip away over and over. Because the only path to making this heaven last, is by earning it honestly. 

So yes, if you felt like you could have given anything to make love last, and you tried to work on yourself but could never make it, there is a way. 

But it demands everything from us. 

To let go of all the lies we tell ourselves. All our convictions. All our attitudes. All our automatic reactions. 

We need to see something with new eyes. We need to allow Love to initiate us into what we yet are not. We need to accept that Love is not there yet. Not trying to force it, not trying to make it happen. 

But allowing it to teach us. Allowing it to make ourselves aware. To purify us from all those lies. To mold us into what we wish to become. 

If you wish for true love, the kind of love that makes you into who you could have never become on your own, the kind of love that teaches you maturity, and that leaves you with unshakable peace, you need to pass through this. 

Love is so sacred that it will not give its fruits until it has shaken your dead leaves away. 

So let it do so. You will find love faster by choosing the honest path of sincere work on yourself. The kind of Work that we have not yet started. 

(All the Work we have done is useful, but let’s look at the one we haven’t started yet. This is where the initiation lies.)

There, this paradise so far, again will find its way to us, in the most unexpected ways, in a timing we cannot know… And maybe that time, we will be ready for it to bloom through us.