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Should you date someone you love or someone you admire?

Posted by Ria, 01 Jul

Is love the glue to every relationship? Is love the ingredient that makes relationships last?

The other day it occurred to me that maybe and true to a phrase in Don Henley's song, "sometimes love just aint enough". So if love isn't enough, what is?

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The truth is, love is a very subjective experience which varies from one person to another. Different individuals perceive and interpret it differently. Love allows for us to connect with others. For some couples, over time, their love flourishes; for others, time is loves enemy. So why do some couples manage to make it last while others can't?

There are a different reasons why relationships fail - someone wasn't the right type, poor timing... However, in this article I read the other day, Paul Hudson believes that there is only ONE reason for the success of relationships that last... He believes, when present in a relationship, this ONE ingredient makes love last. Here is his take:

"Admiration is often the missing ingredient:
Your love must go past the shallow, past the purely emotional, to a state of mutual fascination and mutual respect — mutual admiration.
When you admire an individual, you respect him or her intimately. While you... respect for the sake of respecting, admiring an individual is a much more personal matter.
Especially when that admiration comes paired with romantic love... without a mutual admiration, romantic love can never reach what some would call everlasting love...
...because you will get tired of each other. You will lose interest in time, and your mind will waver, eventually breaking the bond the two of you have created over the years."

But is admiration on its own enough to keep the love going? Maybe not. But admiration keeps it hot. With admiration, you will always find the need to impress. However, the thing with admiring someone is that just like love, you expect it to be reciprocated.

Hudson adds: "If you can manage to admire and feel the need to solicit admiration from your partner — and do so successfully — you create a self-perpetuating cycle feeding into itself, allowing your love to flourish.The reason you admire the person you love is all that really matters."

Just like love, admiration is not something you can fake. If you can't feel that a person is incredible, you can't fake that. You can't force yourself to be proud of your partner's beauty, intellect or accomplishments. Admiration is something you must feel... something you feel after interacting with and being with someone. And for it to work, it takes two.

"When a relationship is doomed to fail, it’s because admiration is an impossibility. Either we aren’t capable of admiring someone, he or she isn’t capable of inspiring admiration in us or vice versa," he says.

Well, if you ask me, I think admiration is something that should be present when you are in a romantic relationship with someone. And since you can't force it, of it aint there, maybe the whole thing is doomed from the start? I guess we need to date people we love and admire at the same time. Coz I dont think on it's own, admiration can keep a relationship going.

But don't you think with time, one can grow to admire someone? For instance, the case of two co-worker or friends falling in love?