True Love: How to Make Your Relationship Sweeter, Deeper, and More Passionate (Becoming a True Power Couple)

By Daphne Rose Kingma

Lessons on Finding Love and Becoming A Power Couple

Wherever you are on the relationship spectrum—married, dating, or single—you can learn about love! Expert on love and relationship oracle Daphne Rose Kingma is here to help readers love more passionately.

Your go-to guide to healthy love. Love can come in many ways, and can be just as complex as it is beautiful. Relationship books for women and love gifts for men tend to focus on the end goal being something physical, but the best love stories end with something better than that—healthy love and tips to being a power couple. True Love is a spiritual love book that focuses on building the foundations of love and how to experience a healthy love within all of your relationships, including the relationship you have with yourself.

A warm and welcoming voice from an expert on love. Daphne Rose Kingma knows what it takes to experience deep love and how to become a real-life power couple. Her witty, poetic voice, recognizable from her frequent appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, helps couples and individuals to embrace passionate marriages and deep relationships. Read her keys to creating sweet, healthy marriages and relationships right here!

Inside True Love, you’ll find:

• Over sixty insights for expanding your view on healthy love
• Instructions on how to be a true power couple from an expert on love
• A source for understanding love, relationship help, and how to give and receive love and respect, devotion, and more

If you enjoy love books—best sellers like The Naked Marriage, Married Roommates, or Modern Love, you’ll love True Love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Conari Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642509045

Daphne Rose Kingma

Dubbed the “The Love Doctor” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Daphne Rose Kingma is an emotional healer, spiritual guide, former psychotherapist, relationship expert, keynote speaker, and author. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages, selling over a million and a half copies. A frequent guest on Oprah and Charlie Rose, Kingma has appeared on various television and radio programs. A longtime resident of Santa Barbara, California, she is also a frequent workshop leader at Big Sur's prestigious Esalen Institute. www.daphnekingma.com

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Copyright © 2022 by Daphne Rose Kingma.

Published by Conari Press, a division of Mango Publishing Group, Inc.

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True Love: How to Make Your Relationship Sweeter, Deeper, and More Passionate

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2021949476

ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-903-8, (ebook) 978-1-64250-904-5

BISAC category code FAM029000, FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Love & Romance

Printed in the United States of America

For Dominique, whose true vocation is to love

None of these words would ever have been delivered

to the page without the loving encouragement and indefatigable effort of my editor-of-genius, Mary Jane Ryan, to whom I offer a garland of boundless thanks.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

The Conditions of Love

Love Is a Process, Not a Destination

Everybody Needs More Love

Everybody’s Wounded: The Torn Ear Theory of Love

Everybody Has Circumstances

Your Sweetheart Isn’t You

Your Sweetheart Isn’t Psychic

Assumptions Are Dangerous to Your Love Life

Communication Is the Interpersonal Miracle

Communication Is a Revelation, Not a Contest

Relationships Have Seasons

The Practices of Love

Nourishing Your Loving Self

Love Yourself

Say What You Feel

Ask for What You Need

Be Emotionally Brave

Reveal What Makes You Feel Loved

Expose Your Secret Love Scenario

Go Easy on Yourself

Cherishing Your Beloved

Celebrate the Exceptional

Praise the Ordinary

Do the Extraordinary Ordinary Thing

Be a Person of Your Word

Criticize Only in Private

Do the Unexpected

Behave Yourself in Public

Shower Each Other with Kisses

Speak the Love Words

Say Please

Give More Gifts

Ask If You Can Help

Ask the Ridiculous Question

Listen for the Meaning Underneath the Words

Walk a Mile in Your Sweetheart’s Shoes

Say Thank You

Treasuring Your Relationship

Put Your Love on a Billboard

Commiserate with One Another

Negotiate the Mundane

Acknowledge the Hardships Your Circumstances Create

Keep in Touch

Take Intimate Time

Rekindle the Romance

Watch Your Tongue

Depart and Reunite with Loving Gestures

Fight the Good Fight

Leave the Kitchen Sink in the Kitchen

Remember the Early Days of Your Love

Be Willing to Make the Generous Gesture

Accentuate the Positive

Fluff Up the Ego of Your Love

Tie Up Your Emotional Loose Ends

Apologize, Apologize, Apologize

Play

Celebrate with Ceremonies

Reveal Your Fears

Share Your Dreams

Be Generous with Your Body

Trust One Another

Do It Again and Again and Again

The Transformations of Love

Console One Another

Forgive One Another

Acknowledge the Power of Language to Create Reality

Sanctify Your Relationship

Consecrate Your Relationship

Hold Each Other in the Light

Bow to the Mystery of Love

About the Author

Foreword

At twenty-five, I thought I knew a lot about love. After all, I’d been coupled up since I was eighteen. But then I met Daphne Rose Kingma and had the privilege of working with her on many books about love, and my relational abilities expanded exponentially. She is, I believe, the most loving person I have ever met, and her books are the wisest teachings on relationships I’ve ever read.

This one is my favorite. It distills in its sixty-five, two-page chapters all you need to improve your relationship, no matter its stage or state. Its seemingly simple format offers the profoundest insights into what we can do to have relationships that are, in the words of the subtitle, sweeter, deeper and more passionate.

At the time it was written, the most important lesson for me was Your Sweetheart isn’t Psychic. Somehow I believed that if someone loved me, they would magically know what I wanted and how I felt without my having to say it. Boy was that a hard one for me to get over.

Looking through it now, after twenty-nine years of being with the same person, other lessons jump out. Like Depart and Reunite with Loving Gestures. In such a long-term relationship, it’s so easy to take the other person’s coming and going for granted. But that’s exactly what we need to not do—take the other person for granted! Reading it again has inspired my husband and me to choose some practices that we’ll incorporate to keep our love fresh.

Overall, reading it after twenty years, I am deeply grateful for everything I learned in these pages. So much of it has become incorporated both into my being and into how my husband and I live our relationship.

As Daphne writes in this book, A relationship is always far more than we imagine or expect it to be. It is more than a living arrangement, more than being together in a social circumstance, more than the bright-colored kite tail of romance; it is the coming together of two persons whose spirits participate with one another, beautifully and painfully, in the inexorable process of their individual becoming. In this respect, relationships are like relentless grinding stones, polishing and refining us to the highest level of our radiance. It is this radiance that is the highest expression of love—this is why a relationship is a spiritual enterprise.

This teaching has been the cornerstone of my relationship and has gotten us through many conflicts and challenges with one another. I can truly say I doubt I would still be married if not for what I have learned from this book. May it similarly help you, however love manifests in your life.

—MJ Ryan

Preface

This little book is a prescription for true love: love that lasts, love that heals, love that transforms, love that brings inestimable joy. While there are many books that discuss the hidden psychological agendas in relationships and offer a variety of coping mechanisms, this is not my purpose here. Rather, I offer this book as a gift of nurturance and mending for your love, a course for encouraging the skills of loving. No matter who you are, you can enhance your relationship by incorporating these attitudes and behaviors.

You can read it from cover to cover or open it at random and read an entry a day. One particularly valuable way to use it is to pick an item and ask your mate to try to do that thing—for the day, for a week, for a month—while he or she does the same for you. Chances are you’ll both pick things you really need and getting what you want will greatly enhance the love between you.

Love flourishes only when we have psychologically prepared ourselves for it. Part I, The Conditions of Love, talks about this preparation, offering some of the knowings we must have in order to create a felicitous climate for love. These include insights that will change the way you view your relationship, what is possible in it, and the expectations you have for it. Part II, The Practices of Love, offers suggestions for gestures and actions which, if consciously performed, will ensure that the love you have planted will flourish and grow. It is divided into three sections: Nourishing Your Loving Self, Cherishing Your Beloved, and Treasuring Your Relationship, because true love consists of taking care of yourself, the other person, and the relationship itself.

Finally, true love has a very high purpose. It is to deliver us—through the mirroring presence of the person who loves us—to the deepest reaches of ourselves, to a sense of the meaning of our lives and to a fulfillment of that purpose. Part III, The Transformations of Love, provides some ways to call upon the power of love to recast us into who we truly can be. This is the highest grace of love, its truest calling and its greatest work. It is in this capacity to love that we truly have the power to move mountains and to change the world.

Introduction

In each of us there is a tremendous longing for love. The love we desire is not only the euphoric butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling of new romance, but also the ineffable consolation of being deeply known, received,