Written by Eric Anfinson, Radiant Living Therapist
I’ve been working as a couples and sex therapist for some time now and I feel compelled to write about something that I see cause so much pain in the people I work with. The sad thing about this topic is that with healthy education we could drastically reduce the harm it causes. I’m talking about the very dangerous emotion of love. Now don’t get me wrong, love is incredible.
To quote the classic love story Moulin Rouge: “Love is like oxygen, love is a many splendid thing, love lifts us up where we belong.” Love is wonderful, but where I take issue is with the end of this quote where the speaker Christian says “All you need is love.” It is my strong belief that we have all been lied to about just what exactly love is and how it functions within a relationship. Today we’ll break down what love is and isn’t, and how to set yourself up for a happy, healthy, and loving relationship.
What’s Love Got to do With it?
I could not pretend to be able to give a complete definition of what love is. Love is infinitely complicated and varied. There are many different kinds of love and each one functions differently. What I do want to take a look at today are the lies and limitations of love, specifically within romantic relationships. I hate to disagree with the Beatles but love is not all we need. The message of “all you need is love” is a great starting place for this conversation.
I think most people get messages growing up about the importance of love. Love can overcome any obstacle, heal any wound. If you love enough everything, will be ok. This specific belief causes endless harm. I see it used for manipulation, “If you really loved me we could get through this.” I see it trap people in horrible situations, “I know he hurts me but I love him.” We are cultured to put so much weight and value on this idea of love that we let it overshadow even obviously unhealthy situations.
To make this problem even larger, we pretty much have no control over who we fall in love with.
We are just as capable of falling madly for someone who treats us terribly as someone who treats us well. We might fall for someone with drastically different values than us, or someone who lives on the other side of the country. Perhaps even someone who isn’t ready for a relationship, or often the most difficult, someone who is a wonderful person but isn’t a good fit for us.
The problem with our current perception of love is that it can overcome any of these challenges, and it simply can’t. Many of these issues stem from core values that don’t change. If I know I want to be a father and my partner knows she doesn’t want to be a mother, there’s no middle ground. We can bring the manipulation back in if we want, “If you really loved me you’d have a kid with me, you know how important this is to me,” but she can say it right back “If you really loved me you wouldn’t make me have a child I don’t want.” Obviously, we need to compromise and make sacrifices for one another but there are some things we can’t and shouldn’t compromise on. These typically fall to what we call the “Big Five” Family, Kids, Religion, Money, and Sex. If we can accept that there are things love can’t solve then we can start looking for a love that doesn’t need someone to change.
You’d think that people would’ve had enough of silly love songs:
Compatibility is the necessary second ingredient in a successful relationship. With love and compatibility, you have an incredible shot at a happy and lasting relationship. This is where many people struggle. It can be easy to fall for someone pretty quickly. I’ve certainly fallen in love in less than a month before. The problem is that this is the time when love feels the most urgent and intense, and this often causes us to ignore or outright write off red flags in the relationship. I think having intense feelings for someone, recognizing incompatibility, and choosing to end the relationship might just be the second hardest thing in dating. The first is actually finding the right person.
So how do we know if we’re compatible with someone?
As I said the “Big Five” are a great place to start. When talking about each we want to discuss the value attached to it. What does money mean to you? Is it freedom? Security? Adventure? What does family really mean to you? Do you put family in front of your partner? When and why? What is sex? How do you connect physically, how often, and in what way? None of these questions has a single right answer. Each of us has our own right answer, but that answer has to line up with our potential partner. It’s ok to have differences, we’re never going to find a carbon copy of ourselves, but we need to be close enough that it doesn’t cause conflict.
On the love side of compatibility, we can look at the love languages.
You don’t need to line up exactly with your partner here either but it can certainly make giving and receiving love feel much easier and more intense. Another thing to pay attention to with the love languages is how much love you like to give and receive. If my partner and I love each other equally but I like to give and receive a lot of affection, and she’s the opposite, she’s going to feel smothered and I’m going to feel neglected. Again, obviously, there’s room to work and compromise, but we’re not going to change fundamental aspects of who someone is. If my partner just isn’t a super affectionate person, no amount of loving me is going to change her nature. Furthermore, neither of us should have to change. We should find people we love AND are compatible with so we can both feel loved for who we are, not who our partners want us to be. I do want to note this could never be foolproof and it is possible for people to deceive us, or for a couple who was compatible to grow apart. But those are solvable topics for another blog.
Come What May:
There are several things I want people to take away from this. The first is that love is a powerful and amazing thing, and you can’t have a happy relationship without it. The second thing is that you need more than love. You also need compatibly, and this is just the start. Once you find both, you need to care for them, nurture them, and put in the work to keep them healthy. It’s not like once you’ve found these your set for life, but it’s a dang good way to start.
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