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All or Nothing Love - The New Way of Marriage

Mini-Love-Lesson  #207
One of over 200 FREE mini-love-lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide!

Synopsis: A new and possibly higher, more excellent and more rewarding way of doing couple’s love and couplehood seems to be emerging, built on the past but surpassing it and striving for higher quality living, personal potentials fulfillment and equality love relating.


An Emerging Fresh Form of Couplehood

First, they were each other’s mentor, trainer and sensei in different forms of oriental music, fitness training and martial arts.  That continued but melded into being each other’s hot, passionate partners in an affair.  Then that then morphed into living together couplehood.  Legal marriage followed their psychological marriage a year later as they began to think about having children.  They both proudly proclaimed that their love grew as they pushed each other hard for excellence and to be the best that they could be, not only athletically but in every other way to.  Bringing out the best in each other by way of what can be called Adamant Love (“Adamant Love – How It Wins for Us All), became the major modus operandi of their love relationship.

In the developed nations of the world that is suspected as becoming the new, emerging, major goal, lifestyle and form into which 21st-century couplehood/marriage is now evolving.  Pushing, encouraging, assisting and challenging along with praising, complimenting and rewarding a spouse for growth, strengthening and improvement in any area of human endeavor is becoming a new, primary way to show love and do couplehood.  Those ways have always been part of how love could be demonstrated but before they usually were more focused on helping children and loved friends become better at something.  Now apparently, these coaching, pushing and improvement-oriented behaviors are becoming more love-mate focused.

The Changing Face Couple’s Love

Previously such actions in marriage as mentioned above usually involved one spouse helping another toward some occupational goal.  That goal would then result in mutual financial and lifestyle benefit.  The new “all or nothing” love relationships include that but are a lot more about personal ways of developing outside of job and career advancement.  One modern couple I am familiar with push each other to be repeatedly improving at rock climbing, poetry and their respective hobbies of gardening and wine making.

It used to be, and still is in many places, that most people got married as a way to permissibly have sex, have children, have parental and family approval, have social acceptability, have okayness for career security and advancement, have their religion’s blessings and have companionate love.  Now in the developed and in some cases developing world, all of those things are much more achievable without authorized marriage.

Recent evidence suggests that more and more couples first grow psychologically married and may or may not legalize it later.  Legal marriage which used to seem like a necessity to almost everyone is dropping in importance for increasing numbers of both younger and older couples.  What is of increasing importance is personal fulfillment and quality living including a high functioning couple’s love relationship.  The new idea is “go after it all” and go after it “all or nothing”.

What modern, young couples may do differently to achieve those all or nothing goals is start mutually and cooperatively exploring for their own and each other’s potentials for human growth and development. A big part of this is quite equality based and focused on both partners becoming stronger, tougher, healthier and with stamina enduring in spite of discomforts, pain and other difficulties which might occur when striving for those improvements.

For the kind of couplehood were talking about, these traits count not only physically but psychologically and relationally.  Equality between genders and every other differentiation category seems to be quite important in this new form of being a loving couple.  Living mutually together as authentic individuals who help each other with self-expression is also of strong importance.  Mutual higher order parenting skills (“Parenting Series: How to Love Your Child Better) are part of what is pushed for, along with ever advancing learning for all family members not just children.  Being able to continually grow and improve in all the skills of healthy, real love development is seen as fitting quite well into this new, so-called “all or nothing” form of couple’s love relating.

The Issue of the “Older Ways”

This emerging way of doing love as a couple is not being done in rebellion or as a rejection of older ways.  Security still is highly valued, sexual love counts for a lot and love, if anything, is even more important.  Home life and home itself as a sanctuary and refuge from a difficult world definitely is sought after.  In addition, the home is seen as a major place for growth in which adamant love can push for many kinds of personal, couple and family improvements.

The goals, values, styles and forms of marriage in recent, former times largely are seen as fairly acceptable although perhaps in need of some freshening revision.  What is evolving and transpiring in this new form appears to be a further development on a perhaps higher and healthier plane.  This form builds on the past and perhaps can best be understood much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs where when one need or potential is fulfilled we develop and evolve to fulfill a higher potentiality.  It also seems that this new relational development may provide couples with a form of coupleness much better fit for the future and for healthy, love functioning in that future.

The High Demands of High Functioning Love

This so-called All-or-Nothing form of couple’s love relating is seen as perhaps requiring more than a lot of individuals and couples easily or comfortably can produce.  Living with and loving your high challenge coach, your truth telling therapist and your champion who you don’t want to disappoint (all wrapped up in one person) can be quite demanding for a couple.  But that is exactly what appears to be happening, at least part of the time in this new form of doing couple’s love. This is exactly what it’s all about – jointly developing the ability to do things better, focus on and push each other to fulfill potentials and live higher and beyond the standards of the past.  And it seems this expenditure of effort, time and personal involvement may be paying off in higher quality life and love.

To live in that elevated way, couples quite likely will have to love each other well and skillfully.  They will have to communicate, cooperate and, in good teamwork, conjointly get good, really good at being a couple.  They likely also will have to organize their life to include adequate periods of letdown, relaxation, non-demand freeform recreation and anything goes and who cares what happens fun.  It may not be easy but it may become superior.

For Learning More about This New Form of Couplehood Love?

If you want to learn more about the new all or nothing approach, you can read the recently published book, All-or-Nothing Marriage by Northwestern University professor, Eli Finkel.  He has made a long-term, comprehensive study focusing on where the trends in couple’s love relationships currently are headed and how the ever changing forms of marriage likely are to evolve in the not so distant future.

One More Thing

If you found this mini-love-lesson interesting, intriguing or in any way engaging, how about sharing it with and talking it over with a friend or two?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly


Love Success Question: How do you think the new form of doing couple’s love might benefit you – or would it?


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