Have you ever noticed how enthusiasm and affection between two people can dwindle as time goes on? Whether it’s a romance, friendship, or work relationship, sometimes the air goes right out of your sails, seemingly for no reason.

But usually, it’s not without cause. It’s most often due to the emotional cancer of resentment. However mild or intense, resentment can erode a relationship. Because it is so subtle in the beginning, you hardly notice as it slowly destroys intimacy and trust and, finally, love.

What causes the cancer to spread? It’s sacrifice, doing something for someone else that you don’t really want to do, which is driven by the fear of what will happen if you don’t do it.

In general, our culture confuses sacrifice with love, teaching us the virtue of loving others more than ourselves. So we attempt to demonstrate or prove love with sacrifice, and we get upset or feel unloved if others won’t sacrifice for us. Yet sacrifice is a wheel that crushes everyone who gets on it. It goes like this:

1. When you sacrifice (do something you don’t really want to do for fear of what will happen if you don’t) you have …

2. An unspoken expectation (e.g., they will sacrifice for you later or regard you in a particular way or love you more) that creates hidden agendas, but, you get …

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When you assume radical personal responsibility, you live in a truth that proclaims:

I am responsible for how I allow others to affect me.

In a world of forces beyond my control, I can learn to be the keeper of my own heart and mind.

Even when things appear not to be going my way, and I am upon an emotional sea of crossing and diverging currents, I can still navigate my way to my ultimate good fortune.

I proclaim that I am not a victim of the world I see. I am a co-creator of it. Let love and wisdom be my moral compass, and let clarity be the wind in my sails.

New peace, harmony, and power fill your relationships when you practice radical personal responsibility. Through it, you enter a more refined sphere of relating that enhances your life and accelerates the realization of your ultimate spiritual self. Practicing radical personal responsibility forever changes the way you approach and resolve conflict.

Jealousy and other emotions like it can appear to be happening to us or to be inflicted on us by others. But to address the root cause of any upset, you must learn to observe the internal factors that shape your own perceptions and reactions. We call this ability to observe yourself and realize your power to alter these perceptions and reactions Radical Personal Responsibility.

We call it radical because it is such a departure from what is commonly thought of as responsibility, which can mean laying blame. Instead, it is insight into the deeper workings of your mind that illuminates how you have contributed to any challenging situation before you.

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Can you say “I love you” too many times? Well, if you don’t really mean it of course you can. Or maybe it’s the unimaginative ways we express it that compel us to stop using the words “I love you” altogether.

Love is not just an emotion or feeling. Love is something we must see with our eyes, not just feel with our heart. In order to keep the word love from being common place we must keep it alive with the things we do for that special person in our life. Be it a soft burning, sweet smelling candle lighting a dark room with a delicious dinner for two on the table, and the soothing sound of music in the background; surprising your sweetheart with something romantic is a great way of showing them how much you love and care for them.

Too many times we think it is enough just to say “I love you” to our sweetheart. We are then off the hook to really work at keeping the relationship fresh and exciting. If you are clueless as what would put the “sparkle” back in your relationship, try a few if these simple things:

Give your sweetheart a wonderful back rub, gently telling them to relax and unwind from their day at work or with the kids, etc. While you are both relaxed, this is a good time to tell them you love them and that they mean the world to you. When you take the time to give them your time and attention without expecting something in return, this makes the word “love” more meaningful.

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Do you find it easy to make conversation with new people you’ve just met? Or does the thought of trying to make conversation with someone new make you break out in a cold sweat?

If you don’t feel comfortable making casual conversation with new people you have just met, you will find it harder to make new friends. You will also find it more difficult to fit in at your work place.

One of the most common reasons that people have difficulty making conversation with someone they don’t know very well is because they put too much pressure on themselves.

Many people think that whenever they meet someone new, they have to say something really interesting and brilliant, right from the beginning. Even before they know the other person very well. They think they have to really put up a great performance to impress the other person.

They don’t just let themselves just be ordinary, and talk about fairly ordinary things.

Here’s a very important lesson to learn about making conversation with people: Insisting to yourself that you have to be brilliant and dazzling in all your conversations will not win you new friends. It will not even improve your conversational performance.

When you think to yourself that you have to perform perfectly in all your conversations, you will actually make your performance worse! You will become too nervous and awkward, and you’ll be too focused on your own performance. You won’t be focused on getting to know the new person you’ve just met.

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Breaking Up, Separation, and Divorce Can Be Devastating – But May Also Provide the Opportunity for Self-Examination and a New Beginning

There is nothing easy about ending a love relationship. Breaking up is seldom the ideal resolution to problems within relationships, but all too often is the outcome, despite our best efforts to prevent it. Over the past two or three decades, about half of all marriages have ended in divorce, and the statistics for cohabitation (or living together) are higher than this.

The person who was once your best friend and your companion for life, the one who knew you better than anyone else, has now in some ways become your enemy. You cannot believe that this has happened. How could that love have been destroyed? The breakup of a relationship is one of life’s most emotionally painful experiences. The depth of pain depends on many factors – how sensitive you are to the meaning of your life experiences, how much you have idealized the relationship, and how much you depended on your partner to make your life worthwhile.

A broken relationship shatters much that we have known and dreamed about. Our relationships, especially intimate relationships, help us define who we are. Our values, our views of the world, and how we define our most intimate feelings are all embodied within our love relationships. When our relationship comes to an end, our lives enter a chaotic period for which we may be unprepared. We suddenly find ourselves dealing with a host of emotions and thoughts – grieving, despair, anger, revenge and retaliation, hoping for a miracle, negotiating, feeling out of control, hoping for happiness again and not knowing how to get there, fear, and loneliness – and little of it seems to make sense. (And where is your partner when you need him or her the most?)

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