Introduction

Opening to Love 365 Days a Year
by Judith Sherven, Ph.D., James Sniechowski, Ph. D.

We've written Opening to Love 365 Days a Year because we know that most people never receive any meaningful training or preparation for enjoyable, effective dating, or for creating a healthy and vital marriage. Our national divorce rate is painful evidence of what follows when people don't know how to be with one another in a way that enriches them as individuals and as a couple, that draws them closer and closer over time.

Opening to Love 365 Days a Year is our invitation to you to become:

• more available to give love;
• more available to receive love;
• more determined to leave old wounds behind so you can live in the unfolding mystery of your future;
• more confident that you know how to address whatever needs attention so your life and your love can flourish.

Each of the following affirmations addresses a significant aspect of dating and marriage: conflict, romance, trust, responsibility, commitment, self-respect, curiosity, celebration, frustration, companionship, sexuality and many, many more.

They are effective meditations that can help you to:

• increase your awareness of particular relationship concerns;
• change your mind from doubt and self-denial to optimism and self-respect;
• become far more available in the creation of a loving partnership.

You can learn to:

• handle conflicts in a loving and healthy manner;
• heal old wounds that often make loving a frightening experience;
• open to receive the love and attention that is given you in all areas of your life-a surprisingly difficult issue for so many people.

And you can have all this whether you're currently looking, already in a committed relationship or needing to change and repair a relationship that has been neglected or nearly destroyed.

How to Use These Affirmations

You can use these affirmations in any way you choose:

• As a daily reading that corresponds to the calendar, using the issue of the day as your meditation on practical, spiritually enriching love. Focusing on that day's issue, you can keep it in mind, write about it, talk about it, practice some new behavior or use all of these ways to become more available to yourself and to love.
• Turn to specific affirmations that are listed in the Reader's Guide, which relate to specific concerns you might be struggling with or needing support for on a particular day.
• Choose a page at random and trust that the content best fits your needs at the moment.
• Read Opening to Love 365 Days a Year as you would any regular book and practice whatever most appeals to you at the time. You may want to re-read certain sections of the book from time to time for the specific support you need to create more room in your heart for love. You may read it to redefine the differences between you and others as catalysts for greater understanding and richer romance. Or you may read it to take action toward giving and receiving love's gifts.

Of course, the more you do, the more you'll get what you desire. Remember, your life belongs to you. It is yours to shape and create. Open to love. Open to life. Opening to Love 365 Days a Year is designed to help you do just that.

Our wish for you is that
You will be loved for all that you are
And love someone in just the same way!

To Make It Easier

In the following affirmations we most often use the terms “spouse,” “lover” or “partner” for simplicity's sake. However, many of the affirmations also apply to a relationship with a date, friend, colleague or even your child.

Opening to Love can be useful whether you are married, dating, looking, separated, divorced, widowed, homosexual or heterosexual.

Destructive Differences

Throughout the following affirmations we will be inviting you to change your vision of the differences between you and your spouse, date, lover, partner-to open yourself to the value of differences.

IMPORTANT NOTE: At no time are we condoning behaviors that are abusive or destructive-whether expressed emotionally or physically. Destructive differences are unacceptable and cannot be tolerated.

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Happy Valentine's Day - February 14

Valentine's Day can be very commercial and materialistic. It can feel like a day of obligation rather than celebration. So make sure you personalize how the two of you will thank Cupid for bringing you together.

Celebrating your love doesn't even need to cost you much. You can get some three-by-five cards and some of those stickers (with hearts, roses and anything else that's meaningful) at the stationery store and then create several different cards that you can leave around the house in special places to be discovered throughout the day. You can make her favorite dessert and decorate it with white, red and pink-whipped cream, roses and little heart candies.

Whatever you do, make sure you are honoring the two of you, and your very specific relationship. Don't just go buy flowers and candy. Put your heart and soul and creativity into it-that's what makes it fun for you both. Happy Valentine's Day!

I will do something really creative to celebrate my valentine.

On Valentine's Day, my son and his friends prepared dinner for their girlfriends. The women were overwhelmed by their actions. Each one had a rose on her plate and a heart balloon tied to the back of her chair.
-Karla Kelly

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True Romance - April 24

Hearts and flowers, trips to Tahiti, hours of passionate lovemaking-that's romance, right? But what about washing the dishes together, the little private jokes you share, respecting each other's personal alone time? Or do you take those for granted, missing the aliveness of your love as it is expressed from moment to moment?

Do not cheat romance. It's available far more often than you may think. It's in every small and large way you consciously appreciate each other, share the tasks, have fun together. Does that sound too mundane? Too ordinary? Well, at first it might seem that way. After all, we've all grown up on a steady diet of movies and books that portray romance as swept-away passion coupled with extravagant gifts and trips. But that's just fantasy romance. True romance is available every time you consciously connect with your partner and treasure the moment.

Hold your heart open to each kindness, each touch that you exchange with your spouse and feel the romance-the true romance today!

I celebrate our intimacy with gusto.

Is not this the true romantic feeling-not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you?
-Thomas Wolfe

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Evolution of Love - July 18

Do you feel free to share your past with your spouse? If so, wonderful! If not, why not? Why can't you share what you learned about love from your previous partners? Are you struggling with romantic fantasies, wishing you'd been “the one and only”? Or do you still not feel safe and secure with each other? Love is a skill, a knowing that can only evolve over time-with several partners or with one. To be loved for all that you are while you hide your romantic past is a contradiction in terms. You can't have it both ways. It's your choice, of course, how well you want to be loved, how much you want to share of yourself. But consider including where you've both come from romantically-all the lessons of love that brought you to where you are today. Wouldn't that be a fuller love, this time around?

I recognize that each of my lovers taught me to love.

With each love relationship, the soul transforms and the individual's “partnership with love” evolves.
-Paula Payne Hardin

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Persistence - July 28

Lasting love is an ongoing creation. It's woven together by both people's willingness to be sensitive to each other and be changed by it. The differences between two people often cause difficulty. Some difficulties can't be worked out immediately or even overnight. Requests for change may involve numerous discussions and lots of learning about one another.

Too often people back away from doing this necessary lovework. They give up at the first sign of difficulty or defensiveness. Or they don't even speak up. Don't do that. Don't deprive love of the chance to weave its magical powers as the two of you work out your differences.

Persistence! Persistence! Persistence! It's more powerful than even love. And when the going gets rough, it's even more necessary than the feeling of love. With care and respect, bring up something from which you've backed away. Persist-for as long as it takes and with as many breaks as may occur-until you are both satisfied and enhanced by the outcome.

My persistence pays off.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
-Calvin Coolidge

© 2000 Health Communications, Inc.

About the Author

Husband and wife, Judith Sherven, Ph.D., and James Sniechowski, Ph. D., are two of the country's most respected, pioneering, and sought after authorities on relationship dynamics. Through their company, The magic of Differences, their lectures, workshops and trainings continue to change the lives of both couples and singles, awakening them to a new vision of intimate relationship, and helping them discover the rich spiritual purpose for the challenges of real life love.

Husband and wife, Judith Sherven, Ph.D., and James Sniechowski, Ph. D., are two of the country's most respected, pioneering, and sought after authorities on relationship dynamics. Through their company, The magic of Differences, their lectures, workshops and trainings continue to change the lives of both couples and singles, awakening them to a new vision of intimate relationship, and helping them discover the rich spiritual purpose for the challenges of real life love.