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This is one
of a Web of linked articles at sfhelp.org that
offers perspective on and practical solutions for common family-relationship
problems. Based on
29 years'
clinical research, this series of
Project 8
articles
focuses on resolving
problems between committed
adult partners.
To learn about this
non-profit Web site and
the author, go here. This
article and series are part of a mosaic of ideas, so the more you read, the
more sense they'll all make.
Before continuing, reflect - why are you reading this -
what do you
need?
“I love you not so much for who you
are as for how I feel when I am with you.”
- quoted by Franklin McCormick
Sociologist
Andrew Cherlin
writes that in Western cultures, marrying for
love vs. for economic,
practical, and political reasons, just became fashionable in the 19th
century. Yet that's the media-hyped reality most people take for
granted as we begin the 21st century.
This suggests that your parents,
you, your mate, and any ex mates were conditioned to expect your spouse to fill your primal needs to give and get enough
love and to feel
lovable. The tragic U.S. divorce epidemic
testifies how millions of average couples find these needs hard to fill.
This article explores
options if a spouse doesn't feel
loved well enough by her or his mate. It offers...
an attitude status-check,
perspective on how
self-love
develops - or doesn't,
summaries of probable
surface and
primary "love" problems, and...
Expand your awareness by getting undistracted, and taking this...
#
Status check
Rate each of these items 1 (I
totally agree) to 10 (I totally disagree). Option: after focusing on you,
re-do this status check and use the second blank to guess how your partner or
someone else would
answer. Then ask her or him to answer, and compare results.
1) I am worthyof being loved now
without any qualification. __ __
2) I know from life experience what being
truly loved feels like. __ __
3) I have feltloved well enough, recently.
__ __
4) My recent actionsdemonstrate
that I love myself as deeply as anyone else now. __ __
5) I deserveto be loved now
because of who I am, vs. what I do. __ __
6) I amfully capable now of _ feeling and
_ expressing real love for another person. __ __
7) I'm clear on the difference between
liking a person and loving them. __ __
8) My feeling loved can only come from
another living thing __ __.
9) I can clearly discern between feeling
needed or desired and feeling loved
now. __ __
10) I canclearly tell the difference now
between genuine love and _ pity, _
dutiful concern
(obligation), and _
dependence. __ __
11) Giving or receiving love always
involves some pain. __ __
12) Each of my earliestprimary caregivers
genuinely loved themselves. __ __
13) I got enough genuine (vs.
dutiful) loveas a young child.
__ __
14) I can recognize the
difference between love and respect
15) You can’treally love another
person unless you feel genuine
self-love.
__ __
16) The oppositeof self-loveis
shame. __ __
17) I can care about another person
without loving them. __ __
18) Love must be spontaneous, vs.
expected, requested, or demanded. __ __
19) Adults can choose to change their
abilities to (a) feel, (b) express, and (c) receivelove if they
really want to. __ __
20) I can lovesomeone without
respecting or liking them. __ __
21) I'm clear how
loving a person differs from loving what they do. __ __
22) Romantic love is temporary, and
differs from mature adult love. __ __
23) Mates married before God must love each other, no matter what. __ __
24) Normal adults can love and hate
a person or themselves at the same time. __ __
25) My mate and I are each able
to form healthy
bonds
with each other and other selected people. __ __
26) I look forward to discussing this
inventory with my partner now. __ __
27) I feel some mix of calm,
centered, energized, light, focused, resilient,
up, grounded, relaxed, alert, aware, serene,
purposeful, and clear, so
my
true Self probably
filled out this status check. (If not, a well-meaning
false self
may have distorted your answers).
Have you ever taken a “love inventory” like
this before? How would you describe what you’re feeling right now?
Now
explore what
you and your mate believe about “love and marriage.”
Your beliefs
shape whether your love expectations of yourself and each other are
attainable or not. Compare your beliefs to these...
Premises about Love and Marriage
My
clinical and personal experience since 1981 is that a high percentage of
American adults have survived a
low-nurturance
childhood and bear significant psychological
wounds. Many don’t
(want to) know that, what
their wounds
mean, and/or how to
reduce them.
Sometimes these wounds combine to block kids' and adults' abilities to (a)
bond with (care
about, love) other people,
and/or to (b) be nourished by (accept) love from others.
Partners' mix of wounds
and key
unawarenesses raise the odds that romance-dazed,
needy men and women
will choose the wrong
people to commit to,
for the wrong
reasons, at the wrong
time. If you’ve worked
at
Projects 1-7 honestly, you’ll sense whether this applies to either of you partners.
The ideas below invite you to clarify
(a) what
you believe about re/marital love, and (b) what you need from whom. Your and
your partner's love-related beliefs, needs, expectations, and fears determine
your current love satisfaction. See how you feel about each of these
opinions:
1) Marital love is reallya blend
of primal needs for respect, admiration, acceptance,
empathy, teamwork and companionship,
trust, interest, comfort, a communion of souls or spirits, and
sexual- sensual desire. Another powerful component is the need to feel
consistently special ("primary") to the person you’ve chosen.
Various people can
fill combinations of these needs for you. Ideally, your nuptial ceremony
celebra-ted you mates each deciding that your partner filled most of these needs
better than any other person you knew up to then.
2) Love grows or fades over time as you
mates age, the world and your
priorities change, and each of your
marital needs are filled well
enough or not. Major factors are whether you each are...
(a) want to make the time and
(b) have the
skills to communicate
effectively together about your needs.
Family
Project 1 and
Project 2
here provide
practical options for helping each other
empower your Selves (capital "S"), strengthen your
awareness, and negotiate filling your respective needs.
3) Romantic love drew you to each
other during courtship. If you each married the
right persons, for the
right
reasons, at the right time, this marvelous feeling mellows into a deeper mature love. Longing to
keep or regenerate the unique thrill and sparkle of fresh romantic love
usually yields disappointment and frustration.
If you mates cherish the
memory of your courtship romance and work to evolve a deeper love together, you may be content.
Premise 4) There are four love “domains” in your
primary relationship:
me loving me,
you loving you, and
each of us loving the other. The fourth domain is...
a communion with and reverence for a
nurturing
Higher Power. Though
this domain affects your
serenity and marriage, it’s beyond our scope here.
See this for
perspective.
Love-discomforts can occur in any of these four domains and/or in others - like
relationships with kids, parents, friends, and pets. Our focus is on you two
partners.
More premises about marital love...
5)
Your
(a) need for adult love and
(b) your ability to feel lovable and loved
are greatly shaped by your first several years of life. You can’t change what you experienced
then, but you can understand and heal from it, if you weren't loved well
enough..
Do you feel that healthy infants are
born with the ability to love themselves and other entities equally?
Needing, feeling, and expressing love for other living things is a normal
human response that grows automatically if the environment is
wholistically
nurturing.
6)
You and your mate are each somewhere on
a line between “very well loved as a young child,” and “very
unloved as a young child.” Your subjective opinion of where you fall on
this line may be accurate or not. If you weren’t loved well enough, you’ve
probably “forgotten,” denied, repressed, or numbed that reality to reduce past and
present
pain.
Your
ruling subselves may (idealistically) expect your
mate to provide your
inner kids with the love they never got. If you were
loved well enough, your inner subselves are probably longing for and
expecting your mate to provide the same selfless adoration, care, and
willing sacrifice. Either way, these needs are primal, not rational
or
responsive to logical discussion, hints, threats,
requests, or demands!
Premise 7) Liketrust, respect, empathy, and forgiveness,
love can only be given spontaneously. Therefore manipulating,
requesting, pleading, or demanding that you or your mate love yourselves or
each other more is a self-defeating ”
Be spontaneous!" paradox.
8)
Your adult experience of love and your
expectationsabout it are limited by your life experience so far. If
you’ve experienced little altruistic (selfless) love from other people,
your perception of what “love” is and feels like is less than if you have
been well and truly loved.
So adults emotionally
neglected as young kids
can believe that
pity, sexual desire, companionship, needing, and/or controlling (“I know
what’s best for you, so do what I say.”) are “love.” These false-self
reality distortions will always cause
inner-family and marital
discord.
9)
Relatively few adults think about who they’re relying on to fill their blend
of current love-needs: their Higher Power, themselves, their mate, their
children, kin, friends, co-workers, mentors, one or more therapists or
coaches, and/or animals. You and your mate can each control only one of these
love-sources: yourself.
Pause, breathe, and reflect on these premises about marital love. If you or
your partner disagree with any of them, what do you believe? Again,
your beliefs will shape your shared needs and expectations about exchanging
love.
Sages through the ages proclaim “You
can’t love another until you fall in love with yourself." If you agree
with this, then giving and receiving more love in your marriage can start with…
Your Quest for
Self Love
As
an infant, you learned well before
coherent thoughts and speech whether you
felt loved (lovable), and whether you had to do something to
get that delicious “good-Me” feeling (conditional love). You were a blank
slate, and grew a “good Me / bad Me” sense from your perceptions of your
caregiver’s facial expressions, sounds, touches, and actions.
Your first experience
was “My love-feeling comes from outside me – from another person.”
Your responses reflected need and/or
pleasure, not love (yet). Growing “mature” includes
rebalancing your initial love-dependence on external sources with self-love: accepting
+ respecting + liking + trusting + enjoying + cherishing yourselfwithout anxiety, guilt, or
shame. This is hard, specially if your caregivers didn’t steadily
encourage you to do this, and/or they didn’t genuinely love themselves.
Reality check: can you think of one or
more people whom you feel obviously loved themselves as well as other
people? What is it about them, specifically, that merits your
opinion?
We start life feeling stupid, clumsy, needy,
confused, weak, and inept, compared to caregivers and older children (remember?).
Their behavior
around us, over time, forges an unconscious early feeling between “I am good / lovable / worthy” and “I am bad / disgusting /
worthless.”
Your early decision about being lovable or
not was self-centered and purely subjective. You couldn’t discern and
compensate for your caregiver/s feeling...
unlovable themselves (wounded),
over-distracted by other things,
inept at knowing and filling your immediate and long-term
developmental needs,
periodically overwhelmed and unsupported; and so on.
As
you mates each grew in your early years, your
personality developed several inner
kids
(Vulnerable subselves) and a Nurturer /Loving-Mom
or Dad subself. Part of
satisfying adult love and friendship is our inner kids feeling warmed and comforted
by the Good Mom or Dad subselves in our partner, and vice versa.
We can provide some
parental love for our and our mate's inner kids, but it’s usually
conditional and less certain. If inner kids' cravings for parental love, patience, and acceptance
dominate your relationship ("I feel like often my spouse is a third kid in our
house"), unbalance and discontent grow.
Focus for a moment on the adult in your life
for whom you have felt the strongest non-erotic love. Concentrate on the
feelings you have or had for this marvelous person. Get a sense of
how you came to feel that way about them.
Can you consciously identify what
it is about her or him that merits this unique feeling? Now look in
the nearest mirror. Do you feel the same emotions for the person
you see? Were you consistently encouraged to love yourself without
guilt, shame, or ambivalence, as a child?
# Reality Check - on a scale of 1 (I
feel no guilt-free love for myself) to 10 (I'm able to love myself as much
as I love other special people in my life), how would you rate your current
self-love? ___ How would you rank your mate's level, recently? ___
+ + +
From this foundation,
let’s explore (a) your surface “love” problems, (b) possible primary problems
causing them,
and (c) some action options. Do you need a break first?
The Web address of this
two-page article is http://sfhelp.org/08/love.htm
Premises about Love and Marriage
Continue with