5 attitudes essential to relationship success

Browse through your local bookstore and you'll find shelf after shelf of self-help books telling you how to make more money, how to be more outgoing, how to play a better game of golf, or just how to have a more positive mental attitude.

Though most of these books do talk about specific skills we need to learn, many of them focus primarily on particular attitudes that are important for us to develop if we are to do well in a given endeavor.

There's an important truth suggested there. Though our actions are important, our underlying attitudes are crucial to our success in any area. In fact, our frame of mind, or outlook, or perspective on things is probably more important than learning the right skills or acting the correct way. Our underlying attitudes can enable us to develop the behaviors we need, but they can also sabotage any efforts at such changes.

Not too surprisingly, when it comes to our relationships, attitudes are likewise important. For example, successfully loving other people requires certain attitudes to undergird our loving behaviors.

In a recent article I read, five such attitudes were suggested. I'd like to pass them on to you this week:

• Courage. This is the first attitude suggested, and for a very good reason. To love other people is a risk; it means reaching out and giving of ourselves. When we do so, we risk frustration, rejection, failure, pain. There are no guarantees in loving, whether our love is fresh and untried, or comfortable and tested by time. To risk loving, then, we have to have the attitude of courage.

• Persistence. Loving is hard work. We often forget that. Real love is not so much found in the initial investment of ourselves in other people as in our willingness to stick with it, even when there are no immediate payoffs.

• Trust. A third attitude necessary for successful loving is trust. We must choose to believe that the people we love will accept our love, value it, treat it respectfully, and seek to give it in return. And we need to be trusting even when we have little or no experience with the people we love.

• Forgiveness. To be able to understand, accept and forgive other people's failings, even when we are hurt by them, is one of the most important attitudes we must cultivate to successfully love. Our forgiving attitude is played out on a day-to-day basis as we are consistently confronted with the humanity of the people in our lives. We can choose to forgive, or we can choose to store up our pain and hurt and allow them to destroy our love. (In such forgiving, I am not suggesting that we don't work to change each other's faults, but such changing is not possible unless it is preceded by forgiveness.)

• Holding on and letting go. To love others, finally, means that we are willing to be intimate when they need and ask for it; but, at the same time, let them be when they require space. To love is not to clutch or cling to, nor is it to push away. Love involves an attitude of allowing both closeness and distance as a healthy part of relating.

To grow and nurture such attitudes does not mean that they are expressed the same way in all our relationships. There are many people we will encounter over a lifetime who, in their woundedness, will not know how to respond to our love. They may ignore us, be frightened by us, or even seek to hurt us.

These individuals must be loved cautiously, sometimes from a distance. We have to protect ourselves from being too hurt when they lash out in their pain. Yet even with these people, our attitudes of courage, persistence, trust, forgiveness, and holding on and letting go come into play.

If, as some people suggest, loving and being loved is what life is really all about, then our attitudes in loving will be crucial to the satisfaction and fulfillment we find in living. Fortunately, the attitudes we have talked about are, I believe, a basic part of who we are as people. Our task, then, is only to let them find expression in our loving.

• Dr. Ken Potts is on the staff of Samaritan Counseling Center in Naperville and Downers Grove. He is the author of "Mix Don't Blend, A Guide to Dating, Engagement and Remarriage With Children."