A couple in their 30s came to see me to work out whether their marriage had a chance. They sat facing me, as far away from each other as possible at opposite ends of the couch, the woman’s jaw firm and uncompromising, the husband sitting forward, hands clasped tightly, elbows on his knees. He jiggled his right leg incessantly, looking down at the floor.
It’s bittersweet, this thing called love, because its other side is pain.
It wasn’t so long ago that this pair, let’s call them Lance and Debbie, just couldn’t get enough of each other. It started with a lunch date, which led to dinner that same night and many wonderful times after that. They sizzled and sparkled; they were ‘in love’. Two years later, they married. And now, you could say, the honeymoon is over.
Where did the love go?
According to the songs, love “hurts”, “makes the world go around”, is “all there is” and it’s “in the air”, but what is love, actually?
Philosophers, religious leaders and psychologists have long tried to define love. Plato, who revered the love of knowledge, thought romantic love was a kind of madness – and he was a little bit right. Chemicals released in the brains of the newly ‘in love’ act like natural amphetamines, increasing the sense of excitement and making scans of their brains resemble those of people with mental illness.
Human beings have a huge capacity for love in many forms – from the romantic, passionate love we might feel for a lover to the protective love for a child or friend to a love of concepts like freedom or knowledge, and things, such as a beautiful painting or treasured object. All of these enrich us.
Love is the ideal espoused by the great religions. At its most spiritual, it’s a state of grace that makes forgiveness possible.
Nearly all of us will love something or someone in the course of our lives. It’s hard to put into words, it just is – something we feel, in our bodies, hearts and souls rather than rationalise in our minds.
The anthropologists, ‘evolutionary psychologists’ and neuroscientists of our modern world have joined the attempt to examine love. One of these, anthropologist Helen Fisher, made a fascinating study of the evolution of human mating habits and observed that love has three distinct and overlapping stages – lust (short-lived), then attraction (a bit more enduring), then attachment (more enduring still).
The first phase is like a green light when you telegraph messages of your availability to each other. It’s hot, it feels great – due to a rush of testosterone and oestrogen – and its effects are brief, just a few weeks or months at the most.
The attraction phase that follows is when lovers decide this particular person is ‘the one’. They’re committed, and ‘in love’; they think of each other all the time. This is a glorious, luminous period that highlights all the handsome/beautiful, good and lovable qualities of the other; they have no flaws, or if they do, it’s easy to overlook them.
This phase also feels great, again thanks to a range of chemicals flooding the brain, and it too has a use-by date. Apparently the brain can only cope with all this excitement for so long, usually for no more than 18 months to three years, when things change again.
And now the blinkers come off. Until now what the lovers have seen in each other has been largely their own creation, projections of what they wanted to see. If they weren’t ‘whole’, or complete, in themselves at the start (and who is?), they probably expected the other person to make them feel worthwhile. But it hasn’t happened.
My clients Lance and Debbie married during the attraction phase, otherwise known as infatuation, and now they’re having to come to grips with a different reality. They’re getting to know each other’s less appealing sides and adjusting to living with another unique individual from a completely different family culture.
They thought what they had was love, rather than a time-limited stage of love, and they’re feeling very uncertain and disappointed.
In a mature love people can ideally hold onto themselves, not being drawn into the drama or reacting defensively if their partner throws a tantrum. It’s a love of others for themselves, with all their quirks and vulnerabilities, rather than for some idea of how they might enhance one’s life. This kind of love is more possible when individuals can be authentic rather than what some marital therapists call their “pseudo selves”, trying to impress or please others and denying their real feelings and fears. The bottom line is that our relationships will only be as satisfactory as we are in ourselves.
Interestingly, Buddhists turn the truism about having to love yourself before you can love another on its head, saying you come to love yourself through the practice of loving others first. Now there’s food for thought.
After finding out what had brought Lance and Debbie to therapy and letting them vent their frustrations, I found what seemed an appropriate moment to ask what attracted them to each other in the first place. Smiles flickered across their faces as their memories flooded in.
“She was really pretty and smart and happy,” said Lance, sounding wistful.
“He was romantic and funny, he made me laugh,” said Deb. The atmosphere lightened, a break in the clouds.
Later it emerges that Deb came from an expressive family where arguments raged and were settled and forgotten. Lance’s family, on the other hand, went about life quietly, not feeling the need to talk much, just “knowing”, and certainly never raising their voices. His reluctance to argue drove Deb crazy because she never felt heard by him, which translated into feeling he didn’t care and further into not being “enough” for him. At the same time, her rages made Lance feel the end was near, which was frightening for him, and he protected himself by withdrawing even further.
When they could see how their different styles evolved and how their beliefs about arguing differed (to him it was disastrous, to her it was normal and no big deal), they were starting to have some chance of getting to the next stage of love. They also seemed to take heart from hearing me talk positively about the role of conflict and resolution in making relationships stronger. Conflict is part of the package, with the most successful couples the ones who can argue well.
Okay, so we’ve covered the phases of love that don’t last. What about the one that does? I will write about that in my next post. Till then, I wish you love and the ability to receive it.
