Two Mistakes We Make In Love
People know love is important, but many don’t know how
Today
was a full day at work, and when I got back to my apartment and
considered what I wanted to post, I breathed deeply and thought, “I just
want to write something pretty.”
“Something pretty” is how you got an image with ivy on it today.
And it’s also how you got some citations from The Art of Loving, which
I read over the weekend and was, as promised, one of those rare books
that rises to the top as “good.” And, sure, “pretty.” And while it reads
a little more sullenly that I was feeling, I still ran my fingers
through some of the good parts, right there in chapter one, to share
them with you here.
People know that love is important.
I
believe this. I believe that people subscribe to the promises of love,
and I believe that we are, for the most part, optimists on the subject.
(Even those of us who are jaded are only jaded because we were (and deep
down still are) optimists.)
But
people often mess up the doing of love, and to that I gently take you
by the shoulder and scoot you a little to the left. Because: most of us
are doing this wrong.
People like love
But in the wrong way.
“They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love — yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.” — Fromm, The Art of Loving
All
of us, it seems, instead aspire to “fall into it,” to find ourselves
swept up in the feelings we see portrayed (and, to an extent, project)
in everything we consume about love, and we end up feeling more strongly
about our idealization of love than we do about love itself.
We typically suffer from one if not both of the following mistakes about “love:”
1. Most people love primarily as “being loved,” rather than “loving.”
Hence
the focus, for the vast majority of us, is on getting the most we can
out of the transaction — and even those who position ourselves as
“lovers” or “givers” are subconsciously (and in a self-sabotaging
manner) really just looking to get (in this case, “appreciation,” “admiration,” or, simply, “love.”)
They
think this exchange is honorable, but in reality it’s just the other
side of the same coin, all of us looking to “get love,” and most of us
“giving” something that looks and feels like “love” simply in order to
get it back.
Many
of us are consumed with the “fairness” of the exchange, wanting to talk
in terms of who does “more,” and keeping score as though we’re
opponents — or business partners — and not a single organism, where self
love is love is self love.
At
this point, people always want to @ me to talk about self love vs.
selflessness vs. selfishness, because so many of us make the mistake of
misinterpreting “self love” to mean “selfish.” In reality, nothing could
be further from the truth. On the contrary, selfish people always lack real
self love and are overcompensating for it. Love is all or nothing — we
cannot love one person (either our partner or ourself) at the expense of
the other. Love doesn’t work that way. Love builds on itself, and all
of us are interconnected. So only when we truly love ourselves can we truly love
another, and only when we do a good job of giving ourselves love and
taking care of our own needs (without using others) can we enter into
relationships with full hearts.
2. Most people assume love is an endpoint or feeling — rather than an ongoing decision and action.
They
experience a fleeting feeling and are quick to call it “love,” and the
biggest problem with doing so is that the minute that feeling fades (and
it always does), we assume we’ve “fallen out of love”
“This
attitude — that nothing is easier than to love — has continued to be
the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to
the contrary.”
Love takes work — but
we’re so often slow to treat it as such. We’d rather endure
half-hearted arrangements and let things fall apart, chalking it up as a
fluke error or poor partner choice. And then we enter the next
relationship, sights set high but with nothing to show by way of mindset
improvement (other than blind optimism and/or a degree of jadedness.)
“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love. If this were the case with any other activity, people would be eager to know the reasons for the failure, and to learn how one could do better — or they would give up the activity. Since the latter is impossible in the case of love, there seems to be only one adequate way to overcome the failure of love — to examine the reasons for this failure, and to proceed to study the meaning of love.” — Fromm, The Art of Loving
The
meaning of love — healthy love — being a rich and complex question, but
something undeniably built on emotional health and respect for one
another as individuals, not just as warm bodies who fill the role of
“our boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/partner/spouse/etc.”
It
means entering into relationships without a list of qualifications or
expectations, especially around how we anticipate our partner “making us
happy” or, equally, how we strive to “make them happy.” It’s simply
being happy together, while fully understanding that it is not our
partner’s job to make us happy — or ours theirs.
The meaning of love is to grow together, not hold each other in one spot.
In that sense, it can seem to go against our lizard-brain desire for
security and stability. Mature love supports and inspires and promotes.
Mature love is breathing and living/
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