Are You In Love With Love?

Do you love your partner or are you in love with that wonderful feeling of being in love? It's easy for our brain to like the wonderful feeling of the early stages of being in love but it can trick our brain into believing that love will always feel that way. That leaves a lot of Hearts feeling disappointed and Heads feeling frustrated. Let's talk about it. In this episode, Randy and Beverly unpack why falling in love is awesome and staying in love takes some understanding. #HeartVersusHead

Heart Versus Head is a podcast about relationship styles and how those relationship styles influence communication in the most important relationships. The hosts - Randy Hampton and Beverly Craddock - are a married couple who are sought-after relationship coaches, award-winning authors and regular people who (like everyone in relationships) are just trying to stay connected through all the noise of life in the modern world. You can learn more about the couple and their work at HeartAndHeadCoaching.com, where you'll learn to fight better and connect again.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Heart vs. Head, a podcast that helps couples communicate and fight better. Here are your hosts, Randi Hampton and Beverly Craddock.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

So Randi, I had a client the other day and I think she's in love with love.

SPEAKER_03 0:27

Just in love with love, not in love with the person she's with, just in love with love.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Wow. Of course, it's going to be a little more complicated than that.

SPEAKER_03 0:37

Understandably. But I hear in love with love and I go, well, yeah, aren't we all? It's cool. It's like the three good emotions, love, peace, and happiness. And yeah, those are all great. Who's not in love with love, but you make it sound like that client hadn't taken the next step. And I guess that's actually kind of common.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

In the beginning, we're all familiar with the honeymoon phase. I mean, that is what we all love about love, right? It's when we fall in love and there's this intense attraction, sometimes physical or emotional chemistry. It's like we can't get enough of that other person. And we really put them kind of on a pedestal where we just see their best side. We overlook flaws or sometimes yellow or red flags. And all we want to do is just talk and spend time together. The problem with the honeymoon phase is that you can't sustain it. It dies out. And it's anywhere from six months to two years, depending on the couple, the situation. The client that I'm talking about is a female. They had been in a relationship for about four years, I believe. So the honeymoon phase was definitely over. She was really not happy with where the relationship was. And the more that she talked to me about the issues, it started to dawn on me that she was looking for that spark that you get in that honeymoon phase.

SPEAKER_03 2:14

Well, there's certainly a study out there. Maybe it's just an urban legend, or maybe there's actually the study out there. I've not read this specific study, but I remember somewhere along the way reading about a study that said falling in love is for the brain, just like cocaine. It's that dopamine hit that It is like cocaine. It's just that woo. And so that feeling is very addicting, I would guess. Are you saying maybe this person, like so many that we see and maybe sometimes even us, is just a love addict?

SPEAKER_02 2:54

I don't know if I would go that far. Obviously, we don't deal with labels. We're into coaching. It's more about expectation and needs. I think in the beginning, we're all hearts. Two people fall in love, head or heart, you're going to both be hearts. And that honeymoon phase is amazing. I remember telling you after we got married a few months that you were a better boyfriend than a husband.

SPEAKER_03 3:21

I remember that. I hope it's not still true, but I do remember the day you said you were a better boyfriend.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

are very emotion-led. We love those intense romantic moments. When that fades and we go into the next phase of the relationship, which is really the reality phase, that's where everybody goes back to who they are. The routine sets in, daily life is predictable, and everything goes from novelty of that new person to now reality or normalcy. And so, of course, this is where the problems come in. This is where we start to see the flaws, the weaknesses, the things we overlooked before, maybe things that weren't even there. They were just in our imagination or perception. And so it's easy to see why someone like this client would mourn almost those days of honeymoon phase.

SPEAKER_03 4:32

I think that's probably why there's a a lot of people that you see that have kind of serial relationships that are about a year too long and just kind of keep doing that because they're looking for that feeling to last forever. And once it fades, they move on. I remember talking about this just briefly. We don't pre-plan these podcasts. We grab a topic and then we kind of freeform it. That's so that it's just a natural conversation, I think. We try not to script it. I've heard so many podcast where people kind of script their stuff. So we try not to do that. We did talk about this after that client you had mentioned, oh, I think this client's in love with love. And as I was thinking about that, I was kind of thinking about the head perspective on that as the head partner. I understand the in love with love thing, but I also realized there's another component at play in this because when the heart partner is happy, happy, happy, and then more and more and more in the loss, they're The head partner has entered a relationship and like has this tendency to just check the box. We sit around in our life as heads and we go, okay, there's the things that I need to do. Family, career, make money, have a hobby, have some friends. Yeah. You know, check, check, check, check, check. Everything's all planned out in our head and everything goes in the right box. We have this tendency when the relationship is safe. And I think that's maybe the place where where it kind of settles in, where the head goes, okay, this relationship feels stable. This is my person. I think there's this tendency subconsciously. I don't think anybody does it intentionally, but just kind of this tendency to go, okay, check. I've got the relationship. Now I need to pay attention to the career. I need to get back by focus on whatever.

SPEAKER_02 6:27

Well, and that was certainly true in our relationship because when we got married and things started settling in to that reality phase, you had moved into a different job, a different city. And so, of course, you had a more demanding job. You spent more time and hours working on that. And so I felt like I lost you. I was like, where'd he go?

SPEAKER_03 6:51

Well, that's why I was a better boyfriend.

SPEAKER_02 6:53

That's right. Then what a heart does is we'll spend months trying to figure out what's wrong. We'll sit there in our head and we'll become detectives. This is where hearts become private eye, head-led people. And we start looking at our partner and wondering what's going on. And we start asking more questions and sometimes even looking through phone or email, although I don't think I was that kind of person. But we really want to know what's going on. Where'd that person go? They must have something that is just pulling all their attention away. And we don't really think of it as work. I mean, maybe short term okay yeah there's a big deadline he's busy for a couple of months but once that passes we expect that partner to come back

SPEAKER_03 7:41

I think this gets to the thing we were talking about with kind of love being this king emotion so great and wonderful it's like the best emotion hearts are trying to maintain it and want that feeling whereas heads like the feeling of love we just realize that it ebbs and flows And so we're not as concerned. We think it's just going to be there while we do all the other stuff. Mm-hmm. I'm trying to think if I've ever lived up to the perception of me. Holy cow. I give a good perception. Let me tell you, people are like, oh, he seems nice. I'm like, I'm not nice. Okay. So this is a challenge because I remember my boss telling me when you and I were dating, I was so in love. You were in love. We were hearts. Well,

SPEAKER_01 8:53

let's

SPEAKER_03 8:53

spend all the time we can together. People told us we were so cute. Right. And my boss basically said, hey, Randy, you're used And it wasn't that I wasn't doing my job. I had just become an average employee. I'd become the average employee and he was used to me being insane, crazy, wake up at three in the morning to return his emails. And when I wasn't doing that anymore, his perception changed too. He was happy for you though. Just settle into the relationship. And maybe for me, it was the stability and feeling that stability and knowing the amazing strength of your love and all of those things. And you need to be aware of it in your relationship, especially if you're at that point in the relationship where you go, oh, wow, my head partner used to love me so much. And now they don't. You started talking about it where hearts feel like the head's attention goes other places. But I think hearts assume that our attention. You

SPEAKER_02 10:24

found another partner.

SPEAKER_03 10:25

Which is love is being given to someone else or something else Versus a job or... And it's not really love from a head perspective, it's attention.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

See, this is where it goes awry though, because hearts, our oxygen, if you've been following our podcast, our oxygen is connection and attention. And so it makes sense that when a head refocuses that attention on other things, we freak out because we're not getting that attention. If we don't get attention, we're not getting connection. all of a sudden it's an issue. And this is why a lot of couples, maybe you've got some friends in this situation where they had the honeymoon phase. It was amazing. They moved in together. So exciting. And then six months later, they're fighting or somebody's moving out. And the problem is they made this big decision to move in together while they were in the honeymoon phase. And then when reality hit, once their roommates and everybody's back to life and job and responsibilities, then all of a sudden the two of them start fighting and they start seeing the reality, the conflicts rise up, the relationship just seems like you're with somebody completely different. And no wonder that seems like a major hurdle.

SPEAKER_03 11:54

This gets back to the maybe study about love and cocaine in the brain. So what you're saying is we're all making decisions early in the relationship while we're high, high on love. And that may not be the best time to be making decisions.

SPEAKER_02 12:10

Stop. Are you insinuating that we dated six months and therefore you may have made a improper decision while on cocaine

SPEAKER_03 12:20

love? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I just I'm wondering. I'm just asking. No, I made the best choice of my life marrying you. But it certainly explains that. That concept of a better boyfriend. Right. You're a better boyfriend than you are a husband. Right. Because we're focused on it. All of our attention is pumped into it. And then our attention turns to other things. Now, that's not to say your attention can't turn to other things. Somebody darn well better be focused on a job.

SPEAKER_02 12:54

That's a good thing. It really

SPEAKER_03 12:56

is. Somebody better be focused on- Future. Planning the life. We just miss- there's assumptions there the heart assumes that the love has gone somewhere else the head assumes that the love will always be there even if we turn our attention to something else and then one day we wake up and we're both wrong because it's not that way

SPEAKER_02 13:21

so I think we've laid out the problem how it evolves how it gets there things that we're seeing in clients that are coming in for some assistance there's nothing wrong with asking out We do relationship coaching and absolutely love what we do.

SPEAKER_03 14:02

And when our partner comes at us and goes, I just feel like you don't love me anymore, we're able to go, oh, wait, maybe this is that. And we can respond to it in a more appropriate way because that's not what we're looking for. I never wanted you to feel like the love I have for you diminished in any way.

SPEAKER_02 14:20

Right. For you, it never changed. And that's why the head partner becomes so confused when the heart is like, is there something wrong? Is there something going on? And you're wondering why there's all the questions. You're focused. Did I miss something? Why is there a problem? Why is she asking me this? Because for you, it never changed. For me, it was night and day.

SPEAKER_03 14:44

You compared it once to a bait and switch, like seeing an ad for a car and going, oh my goodness, they have a Ferrari for$7,000. I'm going to go buy this Ferrari. And you show up at the car lot and they're like, oh no, Sorry, we sold the Ferrari eight minutes ago. But for$7,000, I can sell you this 1978 Ford Escape or whatever. Well, you're better than an Escape. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I'm just not quite the Ferrari. That is a true story. That's what she told me. She said, I think it was a bait and switch. I did not. It was in the container in my brain for hurtful things.

SPEAKER_02 15:35

Here's the good news. Okay. Everything in life is, you know, there's good and bad to it. So the good side of this is it really is an opportunity to take your relationship to the next level. So when you're in the realistic phase, if you can go another six months, one year, and the communication is there, and you're loving each other probably even more because love does mature, love does grow and evolve and change through the phases, then you're going to know that you really have found your person. You're going to find that there's more teamwork, having each other's back. You're going to start to see that the foundation is really strong. And that is the best thing ever, which Randy and I had all of those things. I was just chasing love, just like a And what I always talk to hearts about is if you don't have the romance and date nights and that intimacy that you're looking for, go after it, chase it. Your partner's right there. They haven't gone anywhere. I mean, they are responding a bit differently, but they're the same person. If you initiate a few things, if you suggest go out to dinner with a date night and so forth, they'll be there. They'll meet you. in that romantic place. I'm

SPEAKER_03 17:05

glad we had this chat. I hope it helps somebody out there go, oh, wait, maybe that's what's happening in our relationship. Heart and head are different. Grab a copy of The Couple's Rulebook. The Couple's Rulebook on Amazon we wrote in 2018 and explains a lot of these differences between heart and head. But these are the kind of things that just happen over and over and over and over and over again in relationships. Anything you want to add, Beverly, before we get

SPEAKER_02 17:45

out of here? you'll see that the realistic phase is actually a good thing.

SPEAKER_03 18:04

All right, Beverly, I love being in love with you. We'll talk to everybody next time on the podcast.

UNKNOWN 18:15

Aloha.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Thanks for listening to Heart vs Head. You can learn more at heartandheadcoaching.com and check out new podcast episodes every Wednesday. If you have a question for Randy and Beverly, send an email to info at heartandheadcoaching.com.