6. Close relationships challenge our ability to love

By Tom O'Connell

In our closest relationships, our ability to love is challenged because relationships are dynamic. Like people's moods, relationships seldom stay the same for any extended length of time. Change is the only constant reality, and our fantasies of peace and harmony can be dissolved time and again during the passage of one ordinary day.

Are you confident about your relationships? You may be in denial. Psychologist Stanton Peele cautions, "This feeling of confidence in oneself and one's relationships is hard to achieve, and may only rarely be encountered. A host of social forces work against it, and, as a result, it is unfortunately easier to find examples of addiction than of self-fulfillment in love."

Is Peele exaggerating? Considering the frequency of divorce and the high rate of short-term relationship terminations, the odds seem to be in favor of Peele's view. All too often, romantic relationships are based on the pursuit of feverish sexual pleasure and the false light of infatuation instead of on a foundation of unselfish love.

To live is to need to connect, but our challenge is to connect with another in a balanced, not addictive, way. Also, we shouldn't expect our partner to fulfill our insatiable "needs." Our perceived "needs" are subject to change based on moods and desires that are very unpredictable and basically self-centered.

Actually, self-centered expectations are the very stuff that leads to addictive relating and deteriorating relationships. If we act out our desire to connect in the same way we approach our consumption of alcohol and other addictive love objects, we feel good briefly, feel unfulfilled the rest of the time, and are about as close to understanding love as Columbus was to reaching the Orient.

Romantic, addictive love is by nature exhilarating, and operates like cocaine, with a series of highs followed by a series of crashes, and no real middle ground. Yet the middle ground is where deeper love lives. In the middle ground we will sacrifice our perceived needs for the sake of the one we love. And we will learn to think of our "needs" as "preferences."

Peele says, "When there is a willingness to examine one's motivation and behavior toward others, the idea of addiction can be treated not as a threatening diagnosis, but as a means for heightening the awareness of some dangers which are very common in relationships....Just as it is important to keep the addictive elements that are somewhere present in all human contact from becoming full-blown addictions, it is at least equally valuable to expand the positive, life-seeking potential that also exists within any relationship."

These are powerful words. Look again at these words: "positive, life-seeking potential." This is the stuff of life we're discussing here. It's the essence of life. After all,  life is about relating. What else is there? Also, there are no experts on this subject. We're all amateurs, and we all need to be students of healthy relating. Always learning.

Referring to psychologist Erich Fromm's work, Stanton Peele writes, "A loving relationship is predicated on the psychological wholeness and security of the individuals who come to it. Out of their own integrity, the lovers seek growth for each other and for the relationship. Respecting the people they are and have been, and the lives they have formed, they try to maintain the prior interests and affections they have known. Where possible, they want to incorporate these things into the relationship, in order to broaden the world they share. They also reserve the time--and the feeling--to keep up those activities or friendships which it would be impossible or inappropriate to offer each other."

In addictive love, each person expects the other to meet all needs. And this is an exercise in futility. Nobody can do this. With healthy love, "Enough is enough." With addictive love, "More is better." There's nothing wrong with romance, but expecting a relationship to be always romantic is a form of unbalanced thinking. And so is the notion that our addictive "highs" are "needs."   

When forming a healthy relationship, people ought to realize that it takes considerable time to get to know another person, and to discover how compatible the two  may be. Unfortunately, impatient sexual gratification sidetracks this process.

True love doesn't survive in the addictive mode. It withers and dies. True love is no flight of fancy. As Peele notes, it is "demanding and sometimes exhausting." Then what are two lovers to do? "The lovers approach the relationship itself as an opportunity for growth. They want to understand more about it, about themselves, and about each other....The aim is to provide support for one's partner to become the best human being he or she is reasonably capable of being." If this is the aim, the relationship has a chance for success because the relationship is based on true love. Enjoy the journey.

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