You Have Love Cancer and You Don't Even Know It...


Today's post was inspired by this week's podcast. You can listen to it here:

The Disease

There's something eating away at your ability to love.

It's running rampant in our culture. Experts believe that it's one of the leading contributors to breakups, divorces, and failed relationships.

This cancer slowly chokes off the intimacy and connection you crave and leaves you feeling empty and emotionally and physically exhausted.

It creeps into your life slowly. You don't even notice at first. Then the symptoms start to manifest:

  • You're tired all the time.
  • You experience high stress.
  • You feel a loss of connection and intimacy with your partner.
  • Your perception of time is skewed. The days seem to drag on for weeks and the weeks seem to fly by like days.
  • You crave excitement and novelty and reflect on the days when those things were present in your life.

The list of symptoms goes on and will continue to grow...

You look at your life and wonder what's happening. Why it's unraveling. How you got to this place.

You are desperate to reclaim the love and freedom you once enjoyed, but you feel like a prisoner in your own life. You can't escape. You're stuck. "This is just what happens in life," you tell yourself. "You fall in love. You get married. You have a family. Then you just try to hold it all together."

When you suffer from this Love Cancer, it changes the positive expectations you had of marriage on your wedding day. No longer do they hope for a life full of passion and adventure and excitement. You begin to think that maybe a successful marriage is just a marriage that doesn't end in divorce.

Your idealism is all but gone. Realism and pragmatism start to set in. Maybe even some cynicism.

You start to forget what love once meant to you... and it spreads.

The cancer of which I'm speaking is BUSYNESS, and it has a cure.

The Cure

The cure to busyness is different than most cures. There is no pill. There's no routine. There's no new habits or procedures you have to implement. As a matter of fact, it's the very opposite.

To cure the Cancer of Love, you have to stop doing so much!

Every day things get in the way of connecting with those you love. You have work commitments, PTA meetings, deadlines, soccer practice for the kids, piano lessons, house cleaning, coffee dates with friends, the car needs an oil change and new tires, you have errands to run, parties to plan, events to attend, church commitments, service projects, pets to feed, and the neighbor needs a helping hand.

The cure to Love Cancer is learning how to start saying, "No."

We often forget that by saying, "Yes" to something it means we have to say "No" to other things. When you first got married, you would never say, "Yes" to a PTA Meeting and "No" to sex. How often does something like that happen now?

How often do you say "Yes" to working late, and "No" to date night?

Do you ever say, "Yes" to an attempt clean house and "No" to 10 minutes of present conversation and connection after a long week?

What are you saying "Yes" to in your life at the expense of the love you once had? What things are you saying "Yes" to that you should maybe consider saying, "No" to every now and then?


― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What do you think? Is busyness the enemy of love? What things have you mistakenly made priorities? How can you do better at keeping your priorities in the right place? Let me know in the comments!