195 – The Difference Between Love&Lust - a podcast by Alf Herigstad

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Quick announcement before I get started, The eBook Kindle version of my book, Forging A Man, is now available on Amazon.  The big part of that announcement is that it is still in the free promotion.  So if you are listening to this episode between now and April 23rd, 2017—you can download the book for free!  All I ask in return for the free book, is that you leave a review on Amazon.  There is a link to download the book belowThe print book will be available in about a week if everything goes right and I’ll let you know when that happens.
Well, it’s Friday.  Now I’m going to take a moment to recognize the sponsor of our Friday show, StumpTown Kilts. Last weekend my wife and I went to a local event called Norway Days over at the fairgrounds.  As I’m walking around I had three or four different people come up to me and compliment me on my kilt, which was of course…a StumpTown Kilt.  Even people who are wearing other brands of kilts have complimented me on my kilt. So every time that happens I take a minute to show the people some of the features like the big hidden pocket, the adjustable sizes and the snap on pockets, and I tell them about the fact that I don’t have to iron it.  Everyone who approaches me seems to want one, especially after I show them these things.  One guy wouldn’t let me leave until I wrote down the information for him to get one.
I’m used to it now.  That is what life is like in a StumpTown Kilt.  You get noticed and envied, and so does your kilt.  Now the listeners of this podcast can get their very own kilt for a substantial discount.  All you do is go to http://stumptownkilts.com (stumptownkilts.com) and pick out your next kilt.  Then, when you are checking out you enter the purchase code:  betterman, all lower case, all one word, and you will receive 10% off your online purchase. It’s a great deal, so stop putting it off and go visit http://stumptownkilts.com (stumptownkilts.com) today.
_______________________________OK, so I got a letter from a listener named Raiyan a couple days ago.  This is what he said:“Hi Alf, I was wondering if you could talk about the role of love in men’s lives. I’ve personally been emotionally invested in relationships that weren’t there and I feel like this feeling is consuming my manhood and my life in general.”
I think what Raiyan is talking about here is something that has happened to most of us at least once in our lives.  You fall madly in love with someone to the point that it becomes unhealthy.  It becomes all you think about, you stop eating regularly.  You start making stupid decisions and acting in ways that are not customary to you. Sometimes your other real relationships start to suffer as a consequence of your single minded passion.  You do all this only to find out that there is no relationship there at all.  The other person does not feel the same way you do, and all of that emotional energy was just wasted.
At the end of that it’s hard to feel very good about yourself.  That happened to me once and after it was all over I felt like a fool, it was embarrassing.Here is what I think about this.  If this scenario happens once or twice when you are a young guy, thats pretty normal.  It happened to me when I was a teenager.  I think it’s just one of the unfortunate effects our hormones can have on us, they can make us a little crazy.
However, if this situation keeps happening over and over again.  If it keeps going on into your adulthood and starts to have a negative impact on your life, consuming you—that’s not normal.Whenever we repeat a negative cycle that means we did not learn that lesson.  In a healthy situation, something bad happens and we learn from that experience so that it can’t happen again.  If you find yourself getting caught in the same thing over and over again the first thing you need to do is recognize that, and try to...

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