Love Relationships and Extended Courtship. Enhance Your Marriage by Continuing to Court Each Other.
After your marriage it becomes critical in your love relationships with each other that you continue to exhibit the same loving behavior you demonstrated to win the heart and mind of your spouse. Think about it for a minute. During the courtship phase, each of us was on our best behavior to convince our future mate we were indeed the person of their dreams. We wanted to be sure and do everything possible to let them know how important they were to us and why they should be willing to commit themselves to us. What usually starts to happen after the honeymoon bloom has worn off is that couples get too caught up in the everyday grind of life. They then start to let their standards slip in terms of treatment towards each other in their love relationships. They become more familiar and start to take each other for granted. They are not as affectionate towards each other as they were before. They allow other things to take up more and more of their focus in their love relationships. In some cases couples aren’t as nice to each other. They may say or do things they may never have considered doing while they were dating. So why does this happen? Too often people think they have now won this person’s heart, and so they don’t try as hard any longer in their love relationships. It doesn’t happen consciously, but it can creep in gradually over time. Remember, once the ‘I Do’s’ take place, the real work starts! Ways to Continue Courting in Love Relationships Complacency in Love Relationships Any successful athlete, businessperson, or anyone who has accomplished anything worthwhile will tell you it is hard to get to the top, but it is even harder to stay at the top. The same thing applies to love relationships in marriage. You can never take for granted that just because someone has fallen in love with you the love the two of you have will continue to burn bright if you don’t keep putting wood on the fire. It’s simply not logical thinking. The sad fact of the matter is that this is exactly what too many people do in their marriages. They become casual in their love relationships approach. They don’t continue to bring their ‘A’ game when it comes to maintaining and increasing their love. I remember once hearing a story in church about a man who owned a vineyard. He instructed his servants to plant olive trees, plant hedges around the vineyard and set up a tower so they could see their enemies. The servants planted the olive trees. They put up the hedges and did everything the master had asked except build the watchtower. The servants started talking amongst themselves. They kept saying that there was no need for a tower because all was well, and it was a time of peace. They rationalized the money saved from building the tower could be used for other purposes and do much more good. This was not all. They started arguing amongst themselves and became lazy in that they weren’t doing anything. You can imagine what happened next. The enemy came and overran the hedges. They destroyed the vineyard, killed most of the servants, and ran off the remaining ones who were able to escape. The enemy then rebuilt the hedges and built a watchtower. Needless to say the master of the vineyard was not happy. He was extremely disappointed that his servants didn’t carry out his instructions. He recognized the enemy had now built a watchtower and that reclaiming what rightfully belonged to him was going to be costly. He took everyone he could find and went and reclaimed his vineyard. So how does this apply to you in your marriage? You have to make sure you continue to court each other. You need to make sure you do not think it is a time of peace, so there is no need to build the watchtower. You always need to make sure you proactively invest in your relationship because there will come a time when things get hard. It may be through the loss of a loved one, loss of a job, the illness of a spouse, and the list goes on. You should make sure you are ready, I mean that you have the hedge in place, that the watchtower is in place, and that everyone is at their post faithfully performing their duty. If you fail to do these things, then your marriage can also get overrun. What we learn from the tale of the vineyard is that once the enemy overruns the vineyard, it becomes much harder to reclaim than it would have been to just do what was needed in the first place. This means you can never let your guard down. It means you do not become casual in how you treat each other. It means you always add value to your spouse and your marriage.
Attention and focus are required to make extended courtship work in love relationships. It is a mindset you need to engrain into your subconscious until it becomes part of who you are. You then follow up with action that in turn produces positive results. So how do you obtain and then maintain this mindset? You do so with gratitude.You constantly need to remind yourself of the good your spouse possesses. You focus on how it makes you feel, and then why you are grateful for these things. It’s human nature to want to please those people you are grateful for and who have had a positive impact on your life. As a couple you need to make sure extended courtship is a priority. This means both men and women. When both men and women are committed to the idea of extended courtship, this helps to ensure neither party is taken for granted. Being taken for granted can easily happen within a marriage. Taking each other for granted usually occurs as work, kids, and other responsibilities pull on you for time during your day. It can happen to even the most loving couple. The couples at the greatest risk are the ones who think it can never happen to them. This is actually when a couple is at their most vulnerable. The idea that one is immune from something can cause people to become casual in their performance or duty so to speak in their love relationships. The next step is a decrease in effort, which in turns weakens the marriage. If allowed to continue over time, one day both of you will wake up and realize you are not where you hoped to be. Look at it this way. Imagine you are flying a plane or navigating a boat on the ocean. If you are off by even one degree in your calculations, then the plane or boat will gradually go off course. After several hours, in the case of the plane, or several days in the case of the boat, it is possible to be several hundred or even thousands of miles off course. In other words, you as the navigator have to constantly check your bearings to be sure you are going in the right direction. Why? The reason is that vehicles never travel in a straight line. They move from side-to-side a little here and a little there. Course corrections have to be constantly made to ensure the plane or boat moves in the right direction to get from point A to point Z. Does this mean the navigator doesn’t know what they are doing? No, not at all.Keep in mind that there are outside influences that move the plane and the boat. These forces are the wind, the ocean currents, and other factors. The same occurs in life. You need to make sure you never assume you will get to where you want to be in your marriage with no effort. Extended courtship allows you to make sure you constantly head in the right direction. It helps you to have purpose in your relationship. It helps you to make sure you don’t take each other for granted. Love should be your main motivator in wanting to continue courting your spouse.It will help you to increase your love and devotion for each other. It will also give you an enhanced sense of importance. Doesn’t the love of someone you value help you feel more important? Doesn’t the love your spouse has for you help you feel better about yourself and the value you offer to the world? You bet it does. If your spouse treats you with the same love and affection they did when you were dating, then how does that make you feel? Doesn’t it make you feel special? Doesn’t it also invoke some of the same feelings of excitement you had for each other during those days? I’m sure it does. Why Continue Courting?Do you have a great story about continuing to court each other? What have been some of your successes? Do you have a great story you wish to share? Share it! The Benefits of Extended CourtshipSo what do you think will happen when the two of you start treating each other the way you did when you were trying to win each other’s hearts? If you said it would feel the same as it did before, then you were right. Your mind has attached those feelings of love, affection, and excitement to the behavior you used in courting. So when you start exhibiting the same behavior, those old feelings will return. Passion will return if it has gone. Excitement will return if it is gone. Devotion to each other will grow and increase. The only way not to experience those feelings would be to not think about them at all or not engage in the courting behavior. If neither one of you are willing to try, then what does that say about each of you as a person? You spent a lot of time while dating doing all you could to convince each other you were the man or woman of each other’s dreams. Doesn’t it make sense to want to make sure you get those feelings back if they are gone, or that you use courting each other again as a means of increasing those feelings of love and affection? You bet it does. You have invested time and effort into each other. Then both of you are worth doing everything you can to make sure those investments in terms of time and effort pay off. You married the person of your dreams. It remains important that each of you continue to be the person of each other’s dreams. Commitment and making your love a priority will bring out those forgotten feelings of pure joy and excitement. Return from Love Relationships Extended Courtship to Dialed In Love Advice
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