Love That Lasts - Notebook

Have you ever wanted to find a love that lasts a lifetime and to be loved no matter what? If so, you may hope it will happen like a lightning strike bringing you instant and eternal love. But enduring love doesn’t usually happen this way. As Allie and Noah reveal in The Notebook, it takes a lot more to stay with a relationship through thick and thin to experience and enjoy a true and lasting love.

Allie and Noah begin their relationship as many couples do, full of passion and feeling for one another. Then, like many couples, they go through a series of challenging trials that force them to discover if what they feel for each other is more than just infatuation. Over time, and after many trials, they learn the skills that help their love to last. Because of this their love even lasts until the end of their lives.

In our modern era when so many relationships end in divorce, heartache, and frustration, is it even possible to find a love like Allie and Noah experience? Is it possible to have a love that not only lasts, but even deepens through time? Fortunately, Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks offer help. Best-selling authors, they have counseled thousands of couples, and have experienced a lasting love themselves. Especially in their book Lasting Love, they provide insights for creating an enduring love by following five key steps.

Hendricks’ Tips for Lasting Love

* Become a master of commitment

* Be emotionally transparent

* Avoid blame and criticism

* Value creativity

* Learn the power of appreciation

The Hendricks’ insights begin with the importance of becoming a “master of commitment.” If you truly want something you need to make a commitment for it to happen giving you the will to nurture it in both good times and bad. If you don’t know what you want, or you don’t sustain your commitment, the potential for lasting love is certain to become the pain of lost love. Allie and Noah provide ample evidence of how a true commitment works. Given the misunderstandings, social pressures, personality conflicts, financial and health pressures, their relationship would have broken and never been recovered if they had not had a strong commitment to make it work regardless.

Sadly, many couples do not understand how to make a real commitment. Too often one partner makes a strong commitment and the other does not the Hendricks reveal. Unconscious commitments, where one, or both, parties are more committed to something else, can also interfere. With Allie in the film, her unconscious commitment to please her parents causes her to sacrifice being with the man she really loves. Only as Allie and Noah make a whole-hearted commitment to the relationship can it begin to really work well. Maybe so many people are deeply moved by The Notebook precisely because they hunger for what a healthy commitment can bring them in their lives as well.

The Hendricks’ second insight speaks to your capacity to be emotionally transparent. This requires an ability to understand and communicate what you are feeling honestly and respectfully to your partner. Both Allie and Noah have this skill. They fight frequently, but this ultimately strengthens their relationship because they are challenging each other to be authentic in everything they think, feel, say and do. This honesty creates a level of aliveness that deepens their capacity for intimacy and nourishes the trust and love between them.

The third key insight the Hendricks’ share is the importance of avoiding blame and criticism. In The Notebook there is heartbreak, betrayal and loss opening seemingly justifiable doors for blame and criticism. But while so many movies with similar themes allow their characters to slip into vengeance, bitterness, or cynicism, all the characters in The Notebook portray something much more positive. They own responsibility for their actions and practice empathy for others. Even the character Lon, who has plenty of reason to feel betrayed, avoids blame and criticism - of himself, Allie or Noah - as his own dream of love is crushed.

The fourth Hendricks’ insight is that creativity fuels long lasting relationships. Watched carefully, you will see how important this element is in the film. Noah releases Allie’s creative drive to play the piano, paint, and write the “notebook” itself. And Allie inspires Noah to build. Without creativity relationships become stale and the couple is likely to descend into complaint and despair. Without creativity deep levels of yourself remain unseen and malnourished. By helping each other be creative, couples keep their relationships alive and well.

Finally, the fifth key insight of the Hendricks’ is the value of becoming a master of verbal and non-verbal appreciation. In The Notebook, the words, gestures, and actions of Noah and Allie, especially in their later years, reveal a deep level of tenderness and love between them. Despite the extraordinary challenges they face and overcome, their love endures to the end. They use appreciation to enhance the positive energy in their relationship creating an atmosphere of feeling valued and loved on a daily basis. Using this step, and the other four insights the Hendricks share and the film reveals, you can create a lasting love and finally experience, or maintain, the loving relationship you have been yearning for.