Love is what you do, and not what you feel.

People always talk of love, generally like of something that is stronger than we are and that is not the thing we can explain and provoke artificially. Those people who are happy in family relationships think in a different way. For them, love is an instrument to construct relationship and to construct life. The instrument, which can be controlled.

Even though I am on the side of such people, I in great sympathy with people of the first category, because it is really not always useful to analyze too much and put relationship under a microscope. Yet, it is useful in case you put a lot of efforts in your relationship, and you develop not only your relationship but your personality and your attraction as well. It's amazing how meaningful love and respect for yourself are for building relationships with others. The attitude of others to you is primarily a projection of your attitude to yourself. Pretty often you see around you people that others treat differently than you. The main reason for that is their attitude towards themselves. The stronger the person’s devil-may-care attitude the more successful he or she becomes.

However, confidence in your own abilities often conflicts with such thing as inner dialogue. It is the series of arguments produced by the subconscious mind in order to protect people from risk and from emotional discomfort. Taking into account the fact that subconscious mind is not able to think in long-term perspective sometimes self-talk helps us and sometimes hinders. To test any supposition of internal dialogue on usefulness we may do a simple test comprising of four questions:

1. Is this idea a true fact?

2. Does the fact of sticking to this idea meet your main interests?

3. Does this idea influence your nervous system in a positive way?

4. Does this idea help you to achieve your life goals?

The less frequently you get a "yes" response the more important for you is to learn how to control your inter dialogue. How can you learn to control it? First you need to write a journal of your personal thoughts and ideas within a few days with a definite interval, e.g. 30 minutes. Then take a look at your journal, test all the notes with mini-questionnaire and see what dominates in your thoughts: passiveness and caution or eagerness and determination. In the first case, the recipe is as simple as a piece of cake - in the next days you will need to do exactly the opposite things than those suggested by your thoughts, of course, staying adequate. The more you overpower your habits and your fear - the higher will become the speed of your personal growth and the more you will attract people, the better you'll be able to take responsibility for what you are doing and the more successful your life will become.

Given that "love" is one of the highest rated and frequently used words, it is more often said by less self-sufficient people who are inclined to depend on others, who are fatalists. The term itself is very abstract so each person interprets it differently and, as a rule, pretty blurry. At the same time we know that the concept of love applies not only to the opposite sex but also to children, pets, family, cities, countries, etc. My friend, Dmitry Verovsky, suggested me the definition, which covers all the categories of love. According to his ideas, LOVE is defined as the MAGNITUDE OF SACRIFICES READY TO BE MADE IF NECESSARY FOR THE OBJECT OF LOVE. This interpretation also implies that love is not a discrete value as it has power, which is even possible to measure. Good, quiet, romantic, silent, blind, rational... No mater what kind of love we take, it can be called love only if we feel inner willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the one we love. According to this definition, unlike infatuation, the main foundation of love is friendship. Of course, self-love, based on your self-preservation instinct is one of the main feelings, which is common to all the people without exception. But if don’t love your partner like yourself, if you don’t treat him/her as the best friend and if his/her interests don’t become your interests, the relationship with him/he would rather look like a competition than like a partnership.

While we are in love we easily live another person's interests, because this is where we find the source of the most valuable emotions for us. But as soon as this source runs out people start behaving much more cold and selfish. This is quite natural psychological mechanism peculiar to relationships built solely on emotion. Those unions, which were originally based on friendship, partnership and responsiveness, as well as on a conscious desire to create a family, are more harmonious as a rule. Such relationships are less dependent on the emotional background and the partners are more open to the dialogue and constructive actions.

All around people are convinced that love is a feeling. But for me personally love a lot closer to activity. Activity that may be successful and unsuccessful depending on which action you take and what knowledge and skills you rely on. Those people who see love as just a feeling consider stupid, reckless and feckless behavior to be the main criteria of love. And for those who understand love as activity pay the most attention to how justified the behavior of a loving person is, how high his/her love intelligence is: whether he/she really lives by the interests of a family rather than purely by his/her personal needs.

Love, like any other activity, always implies a rapid burst of enthusiasm in its early stages. Enthusiasm has a natural feature - not to live long. Therefore, most people whose infatuation goes away in many ways resemble those who by all appearances have found and successfully applied the new effective diet, but then get back to the original weight. If you try to build any activity based solely on enthusiasm that activity will very soon sink into oblivion and all the initial efforts will be wasted. For the success of any initiative you need a plan. The plan, which you have to stick to, no matter what happens. Otherwise, why to bother and start this venture?

If you still ask yourself "Is it possible to love without games?", then you have to go a long way before you on a deeper level realize that strong relationships are built, primarily, not on emotions and needs but on personal responsibility and active actions. The good news is that by reading this book you greatly shorten the road to your goal.