![]() Many people are instead addicted to the ups and downs of romantic love. Many people never learn how to breach this deep, unconditional love. It’s a commitment to a person who you understand isn’t going to always make you happy-nor should they!-and a person who will need to rely on you at times, just as you will rely on them. It’s a constant commitment to a person regardless of the present circumstances. True love-that is, deep, abiding love that is impervious to emotional whims or fancy-is a choice. So, once it’s gone, you need to know that you’ve buckled yourself down with a human being you genuinely respect and enjoy being with, otherwise things are going to get rocky. That dizzying high you get staring into your lover’s eyes as if they are the stars that make up the heavens-yeah, that mostly goes away. It generally only lasts for a few years at most. Romantic love is a trap designed to get two people to overlook each other’s faults long enough to get some babymaking done. As Robin Williams used to joke, “God gave man a brain and a penis and only enough blood to operate one at a time.” It’s nature’s way of tricking us into doing insane and irrational things to procreate with another person-probably because if we stopped to think about the repercussions of having kids, and being with the same person forever and ever, no one would ever do it. We all also know that that guy (or girl) ended up sulking back a few years later feeling like a moron, not to mention broke. We all know that guy (or girl) who dropped out of school, sold their car, and spent the money to elope on the beaches of Tahiti. ![]() That’s because love, while making us feel all giddy and high as if we had just snorted a shoebox full of cocaine, makes us highly irrational. Parents warned their children against it, and adults quickly arranged marriages before their children were old enough to do something dumb in the name of their emotions. ![]() In ancient times, people genuinely considered love a sickness. I think if more couples understood that, they’d be less inclined to panic and rush to break up or divorce. It’s not going to be the way it used to be, or the way it will be, and it shouldn’t be. It expands and contracts and mellows and deepens. Because a love that’s alive is also constantly evolving. In a day, or a week, or maybe even longer, you’ll look at that person and a giant wave of love will inundate you, and you’ll love them so much you think your heart can’t possibly hold it all and is going to burst. You’re even going to wake up some morning and think, “Ugh, you’re still here….” That’s normal! And more importantly, sticking it out is totally worth it, because that, too, will change. No! There will be days, or weeks, or maybe even longer, when you aren’t all mushy-gushy in-love. Then, the instant they realize they aren’t “gaga” anymore, they think the relationship is broken and over, and they need to get out. They go into relationship with these unrealistic expectations. You are absolutely not going to be absolutely gaga over each other every single day for the rest of your lives, and all this “happily ever after” bullshit is just setting people up for failure. Have realistic expectations about relationships and romance By itself, love is never enough to sustain a relationship. It is something that can be both healthy or unhealthy, helpful or harmful, depending on why and how you love someone else and are loved by someone else. We’ll get more into codependence later in this article, but for now, it’s useful to point out that love, itself, is neutral. This desire to use the love of someone else to soothe your own emotional problems inevitably leads to codependence, an unhealthy and damaging dynamic between two people where they tacitly agree to use each other’s love as a distraction from their own self-loathing. The other “wrong” reason to enter into a relationship is, like Greg said, to “fix” yourself. Without that mutual admiration, everything else will unravel. Being young and naive and hopelessly in love and thinking that love would solve everythingĪs we’ll see throughout the rest of this article, everything that makes a relationship “work” (and by work, I mean that it is happy and sustainable for both people involved) requires a genuine, deep-level admiration for each other.Being together for image-because the relationship looked good on paper (or in photos), not because the two people actually admired each other.Feeling like a “loser” because they were single and settling for the first person that came along.Where did they mess up?īy far, the most common answer was “being with the person for the wrong reasons.” I asked people who were on their second or third (or fourth) marriages what they did wrong. When I sent out my request to readers for advice, I added a caveat that turned out to be illuminating.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |