Next time you fall in love…

…bring your seeing-eye dog with you.

You’ll need some help to navigate the world once you’ve got your love-goggles on.

A client of mine recently sent me an e-mail.

He’s rejoiced—he met a woman.  They’ve been together for two weeks and now he wants to spend the rest of his life with her.

Two weeks.

How in the hell can you know you want to be with somebody for the rest of your life after only two weeks?

I fall into the same trap.

Love is blind. You’re filled will emotion. It’s a high. It’s better than any drug; it’s better than alcohol. It’s better than anything else you’re ever going to experience in your life.

But how can you possibly think you’re going to spend the rest of your life with somebody when it’s only been two weeks?

Yeah I know, there are people that have done it. They’ve met and gotten married two months later and everything is fine.

Absolutely.

I can always think up an example to back up my claim.

But I would say that the majority of the time I hear of a couple falling in love after two weeks, I also hear that it didn’t work out sometime later.

Right?

So we should really consider the help of a seeing-eye dog, because the dog is going to sniff out all the little idiosyncrasies—the things you ignore.

The dog is going to sniff out the early warning signs. They’re going to be able to know that this person’s not for you quicker than you are because you’re going to be caught up in Fantasyland—riding the rides over and over and over again.

You can’t really know somebody until about a year into the relationship. And then between year one and year two, all of a sudden you start making those compromises.

That’s when you start forming the partnership. That’s when real love starts to happen.

That’s when you start to see who the real person is. Love is like a fine bottle of wine. It gets better as it ages.

The beginning of the relationship—you can throw that out. It will never be the way it was in the beginning ever again.

What you’re looking for in love is a real foundation. It’s like a building. You want to build one block at a time, one emotion at time. Love is very powerful.

Real love is really based on your comprises, learning each other, figuring how each other acts in different situations, understanding each other, growing with one another, and then talking about the issues.

Its about communicating everything—how you want your life to be, what are you looking for out of life, whether or not you want kids, how you would want to raise your kids.

There’s so much more to love than just the initial “Woohoo, I’m in love!”

Love is a negotiation, guys.  Love is compromise.  And real love, that takes time.

So for all of you that are fresh in love, enjoy it, but realize there is an expiration date and it becomes real, or it becomes bad, or it becomes over.

Stay focused.  Talk with your partner over and over again.  Make sure your needs, wants and desires are being met.  Make sure you guys can compromise, communicate, talk, work through issues, work through things together, understand one another, and understand one another’s limits.

Compromise is key to partnerships and business.  Love is a business.  You’re not going into business with somebody who you can’t compromise with, or you who doesn’t understand your point of view.

So be careful, the next time you have that rush of love, stay focused. You may realize that half your relationships would have ended a lot sooner if you would have been more aware during the drugged-up beginning stages.

The next time you think you’re in love, open up your eyes a little bit more. Go through my book Naked over and over again. Open your eyes up to the realness of what’s going on.

Love is great. I’m a big fan.  I think it’s a wonderful feeling. I think it’s a wonderful thing shared between two people. But I want love to be real for all of you. I want all of you to really understand the beginning is just a wave of emotion and you need to get past that to see into the core of the person and see if you have a real partnership.