Hi, This is Wayne Brown from Life Back On Track.

Welcome to the latest episode. If you are like anyone, you would have been in a relationship and there would have been good moments and not so good moments and that's the ups and downs of relationships.

The one thing that seems to baffle a lot of people is when they end the relationship or the other person ends the relationship and the phrase "I've fallen out of love" would get bandied around as a reason for the relationship ending.

Now, for a lot of people, that seems like a get out of jail free card, and a lot of people play it free and easy, and there is very little understanding as to what that phrase actually means. The problem for a lot of people is, and I know myself, I struggled with this, is understanding what love is.

Now, I like a lot of people had relationships where after a period of time, I felt I was no longer in love with them, or they use that phrase that they no longer loved me, and I struggled with that, and I'm guessing you would have as well because if you're listening to this, part of the heading resonated with you and you felt maybe this is something I need to learn more of understand this love thing.

So what I've realised is that love is an incredibly complex emotion. It's not a singular emotion. A lot of people use it and throw it around as if it's a singular emotion. And also we have associated it with things that we shouldn't associate it with, like I love this food, or I love this book, or I love that movie.

Love is due to its complex nature, more attributed to human interactions rather than inanimate objects like food. You can enjoy food, you can enjoy a movie, you can be entertained by a movie. You can derive satisfaction from it. Love, though, is very much a human condition, and one I want to explain to you how people fall in and out of love.

When we first meet someone, there are a number of factors at play. There is the initial attraction, which is generally viewed as lust. It's a basic attraction to someone on a very physical level. We can like them, we can enjoy their company. We can enjoy being around them as we slowly develop all the different aspects of the relationship, we develop that thing called love.

Now love is made up of trust, respect, support, encouragement, accountability, growth, so many different things. Now, I don't know if you know anything about sound engineering, but they use a thing that's colloquially called a graphic equaliser. Now, what that means is, there are aspects of the sound that you can alter. According to these little scales. Each scale or slider, as they call them, will determine the strength or the weakness of a particular aspect of the sound.

So, for example, just to keep it nice and simple, if you have the bass of a sound, you can turn up the bass and make it very bass heavy. Or you can tone down the bass and you've also got things like the treble, which is the higher notes, which you can make it really light and sharp, or you can drop that down. It becomes a more muted sound.

 Now if you apply this analogy to a relationship, each of those little sliders is one of the aspects of love, so trust, respect, etc, etc, so as you learn to trust someone and respect someone and encourage them, get support from them and give support, and all of that, all the sliders go up, which means they become a higher and higher influence in the relationship, which means you develop love now.

I first started to realise this years ago when I was talking to a chap who lived next door to myself and he is an Indian or of Indian descent, I should say, and his parents had organised for him to get married to this young woman. Now he admitted to me that when he first met her, he did not like her at all. Now I think at the time, they had been married for like 15 or 16 years, and he said he couldn't imagine his life without her.

The thing is, as they developed in their relationship and had their challenges that they overcame, they developed that trust in one another, that knowing that the other was there to support them and all of the other aspects became stronger and stronger and stronger until he eventually developed this love of this woman, and that's where I first started thinking about love in that regard

The problem is, how people fall out of love is it's the exact opposite. So instead of the slide is moving up and the love developing and getting stronger, the sliders slowly gets moved downwards, so things like trust gets slowly eroded, respect, encouragement, drops off. Support drops off. All of these things start to reduce and as they reduce, the love diminishes.

The challenge for a lot of people is they don't realise that the love is diminishing until one day they suddenly notice it's gone. And that's because no attention was paid to the relationship as it was diminishing until it was too late. Now it doesn't mean it's too late, no it doesn't. Love can be redeveloped, it takes effort, it takes effort to build it in the first place, and it can be rebuilt. However, a lot of people they just go "I'm out of love with you now" and not fully understanding what love is, and then they walk away from it and start all over again and possibly recreating that scenario again because they haven't learned that it takes effort and attention to build love in a relationship.

So If you're in a relationship and you want it to succeed, you need to be looking at all the different aspects that make up love. Now I could rattle off a list of all different attributes and components of the emotion love, however, for each person they're a little bit different, and this depends on your relationship values and that sort of thing, so that what is important to you may not be quite as important to me and vice versa.

So if you want the best possible relationship, look at what's important to you in a relationship. What are the aspects and then work on each of those and love will develop. Love will become deeper, more meaningful and stronger due to this effort. If you don't put the effort in, its slowly diminishes because it's either increasing or it's decreasing.

 These things are determined by you, your efforts and your attention to them. If you want that strong relationship and you don't want to either be the person that uses the phrase "I've fallen out of love with you" or hearing it from your partner, you need to put the attention in.

Love is a wonderful thing, and for myself, I know that it gets deeper and deeper the more time I spend with my wife because we both actively put the effort in. I see it regularly with people, and conversely, I see it where it's being eroded, and that's not pleasant to watch, especially when you're aware of it.

So if you want a quality relationship, it takes effort. Is it worth it? Yes, absolutely. It should never be hard work, however, it does take work. If you want that quality relationship, put the effort in. If you want help in getting that relationship, that's what I'm here for. So feel free to send us a message or click one of the links in the show notes, and you can check out some of the things that I do and help people with love is worth it, so make sure that you work towards yours so that you can have what you deserve.

Okay, thanks for listening and look after yourself, and remember, here's to a good life

You can listen to the Life Back On Track podcast on your favourite platform by visiting our podcast website. Click HERE to check it out. 

You can also listen to my radio show “All About Relationships” which has its own podcast on your favourite platform by clicking HERE 

Thanks for listening.