BLOG: Living the Love Trifecta

The Love Jackpot

If you’re enjoying PLAY, PEACE, and PASSION in your relationship, then you’ve hit the love jackpot or what we call The Love Trifecta.

If you have a playmate, a sanctuary and a lover as your beloved, then you have the three critical components for not just a lasting relationship, but a THRIVING one.

The Love Trifecta creates three solid legs for love to stand on. All three are needed equally to hold strong. Like the three legs of a stool, without one, none are strong. Failure to nurture any of them, causes all of them to fail.

Wonderful Benefits / Painful Costs

Investing in creating play, peace, and passion in your relationship has wildly wonderful benefits. Ignoring or leaving these areas to chance can create pointlessly painful costs.

Why are play, peace and passion so important?

When your relationship sucks, your life pretty much sucks. It’s hard to enjoy even your favorite things. When your relationship rocks, you feel like you can handle any rocky times in the world – TOGETHER. Having a thriving relationship makes the good and bad days both better.

• Leaning into bringing more PLAY to your relationship, you get to enjoy love and life more. There’s less fighting, stress or blaming. There’s more lightness, laughter, fun and joy. You can better access your inner child and curate your once denied delights.

• When you enjoy a sense of PEACE in your relationship you can uncurl your toes, be more of yourself, and explore new levels of vulnerability and intimacy. When you demonstrate your relationship can be calm in any storm, you build trust and goodwill. Not to mention you spend A LOT less time with unnecessary dramas that zap your energy and kill off any intimacy between you. Creating a peaceful COUPLE CULTURE that resists blaming, complaining, and shaming builds an empowered partnership that can pursue inspiring goals rather than having to struggle to put out nasty “negativity fires” day after day.

• When you nurture PASSION in your relationship, intimacy keeps getting better and better. Not just your s♥x life, but your LIFE too. When you get curious about, (and even embrace), your own and your beloved’s desires, you can be more of yourselves together and evolve endlessly. Plus engaging in what inspires you individually and as a couple lights up not just your relationship, but in turn the world around you too.

Cultivated Culture

It’s important to note that hitting the love jackpot isn’t something that happens when you “find the one”, it’s a culture you CULTIVATE ongoingly once you’re together with the one you chose.

When you let go of nourishing The Love Trifecta in your relationship, you quickly end up unhappy with your partner, your relationship and your lives. You waste way too much energy in irritation, frustration, fear, low blows, blow ups or even break ups. The trust erodes until you don’t feel safe and no one feels appreciated. Pretty soon, the s♥x get’s less and less s♥xy until it becomes stale or even non-existent. Attraction turns to aversion and then one day you’re just not interested anymore.

Unless, you instead invest in intimacy by cultivating an intentional culture of bringing more play, peace, and passion to your relationship.

Simple. Not Easy.

I get that while this may be simple, it’s not often easy. My husband and I have been practicing and failing, then iterating and improving. We just keep dialing in and up-leveling our love life day after day, year after year. And really, it gets so much easier!

It is a PRACTICE we lean into so we are living and loving by DESIGN.

Disastrous Default

At first Raj and I just let the relationship do what it was going to do and then we would only deal with it when some conflict came up. We just let our relationship “run its’ course” until our arguments became painfully predictable and ugly patterns emerged that we could not ignore.

That default mode we were in was disastrous. There were embarrassing arguments, holes punched in walls, beautiful vacations ruined by pointless fights, and yes even a break up or two.

We were “living la vida loca”. It was a crazy, messy love and we both wanted something more than the ongoing arguments we seemed endlessly entangled in at the time.

Loving By Design

Once we acknowledged that our relationship would be doomed if we continued to live from the default mode, we knew we had to start living and loving by DESIGN.

When we looked at what was most important for us to thrive as individuals and as a couple, play, peace, and passion became our primary goals/games. Pursuing The Love Trifecta became the core aim in our relationship.

We said no thanks to living la vida loca and YES PLEASE to living The Love Trifecta.

90 Day Focus Seasons

Now, every year, Raj and I (and the couples I coach), divide the year into three chunks of 90 days each, to pursue goals/games in each of these three core areas – The Love Trifecta. We take 90 days to focus on PLAY (May 15 to Aug 14th), 90 days on PEACE (Sept 15th to Dec 14th), and 90 Days on PASSION (Jan 15th to April 14th). With 30 day “off” breaks in between each season.

• May 15 to August 14th is the Season of PLAY – Summertime is a perfect time to perk up the play in your relationship. Have some fun in the sun. Lighten up your love life. Laugh a lot. Even at your conflicts. Especially your conflicts.

• Sept 15 to Dec 14th is the Season of PEACE – Sept 21st is international peace day not to mention with all the usual stress of the holidays or the weight of the long cold winter days, practicing peace is a purposeful path to pursue.

• Jan 15th to April 14th is the Season of PASSION– Spring is happening, the birds and bees are out, flowers are blooming, plus you’ve got Valentine’s Day during this time too so there’s no better time to plump up your passion.

Satisfaction of Completion

Having a start and an end to a season of focus gives you a closed-loop experience where you get the satisfaction of finishing something completely and not having any relationship goals/games drag on and on without end.

This way, three times a year you and your beloved, (you on your own works too if they’re not into it – Don’t pressure them to do it with you. Inspire them by doing it yourself!), assess what you want, take aim for it, engage in regular action and then after 90 days, declare those goals/games complete, take a breather break and then move onto what’s next to up-level your love life.

Do this again and again as a relationship habit and your relationship happiness will soar.

Wonderful Is Worth It

As I said above, you don’t hit this jackpot, you cultivate it. You PRACTICE it. It doesn’t happen by accident.

Having the joy of a playmate, the sanctuary of a peaceful dynamic and the aliveness of an inspiring lover all wrapped into one relationship IS possible, yet it doesn’t happen on its own or overnight.

In fact, our default mode is to drift into becoming functional, adversarial, and distant until one day you find yourself living more like roommates rather than lovers. Or worse, one day you just want out.

Investing your energy into The Love Trifecta and bringing more play, peace, and passion to your relationship isn’t easy. But it IS simple and more importantly, it IS worth it!

How will YOU invest in intimacy today?

How can YOU bring more play, peace, and passion to your relationship?

• Set reminders in your calendars for the Play, Peace, and Passion seasons.
• As a season starts, pick a goal/game to take on (together or on your own if needed).
• Pick your prompts and post them so you keep your goals/games visible.
• Take action toward your goal/game.
• At the end of the season, assess how it went and what would be even better.
• Declare that season/focus complete and take a 30-day break from goals/games.
• Set new goals/games for the next season and do it all again. And again. Make it a relationship habit.

Your Ally in Aiming for Awesome,