I love working with LGBT couples: they come to me, wanting to improve their communications, work out problems between them and deepen their love. In couples’ therapy, one of the most helpful things I do is to help a couple examine their definition of love. Specifically, we look at the difference between “Falling in Love” and what I call “Standing in Love.”

Doesn’t everyone want to “Fall in love?” It comes from all those old movies we’ve seen, where everything just comes together and – no matter what hell the two people have been through – in the end everything just falls into place as the two lovebirds kiss and fall into each other’s arms.

Illusions of how love works create a lot of suffering, whether we’re single or partnered. “Falling in love” implies that we’re passive and helpless. I don’t think this paradigm works well for anyone. Over time, if we stay in this passive place, we usually get resentful and frustrated, we wonder why our “love” doesn’t feel good anymore.

“What happened to our love?” I hear over-and-over again from unhappy couples.

We need a new way to conceptualize love. The old idea about love sets our relationships up to fail. Let’s look at what I call “standing in love.“ It takes guts, strength and a lot of impulse control to “stand in love.” This concept of love emphasizes that we need to be active in sustaining love. It just doesn’t happen; we have to take a stand.

Ugh, I can hear you say. It sounds like a lot of work and, yes, it does take work. Most relationships, initially, go along quite nicely. But almost everyone reaches a point that I call, when the glitter wears off. This is the period when you begin to see your partner for who he or she really is. That façade of the first few months begins to wear away and you see this person as they really are - wonderful at times and pretty awful at other times. They begin to see you this way too. Many people bail at this phase, and wonder why their relationships never last more than 2 or 3 months. They don’t have the willingness to hang in past the glitter stage; they want everything all smooth and easy. Unfortunately, this isn’t real life…no matter how wonderful your partner is.

Some of my single clients are confused about the difference between romance and love. They date a lot, meet some great people, but soon discover that they don’t really know what they want. They want romance but settle for sex and then they ask me, “Why can’t I find true love?”

I encourage you to spend some time thinking about the role you would like sex to play in your dating life. Rather than fall into bed with someone by default, why not think it out ahead of time? If you want love or romance, it helps to get clear on what that means to you - and what role sex plays in the picture – before you go out and meet someone. A lot of hook-ups could have been more romantic and likely to lead to love if our libidos were not in total charge.