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This is one of a
series
of articles in self-study
Lesson 4 - choose and evolve nourishing relationships. This
subseries focuses on impro-ving primary relationships. It
adds to articles proposing how to make
three wise courtship decisions with and without kids from prior un-ions.
“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 ex-pect 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 mil-lions of average couples find these needs hard to fill.
basic
premises about
resolving any relationship problem
Expand your awareness by getting undistracted, and taking this...
"Love Inventory"
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 felt
loved 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 anotherperson 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 can describe the
difference between healthy love and
codependence (relationship
addiction). ___ ___
27) I look forward to
discussing this inventory with my partner now. ___ ___
28) I feel some mix of
calm, centered, energized, light, focused,
resilient,
up, grounded, re-laxed, alert, aware, serene,
purposeful, and clear, so
my
true Self probably
filled out this in-ventory. (If not, a well-meaning
false self may have distorted your answers).
Have you ever taken a “love inventory” like
this before? What are you thinking and feeling?
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
experience as a therapist is that many
American adults have survived a
low-nurturance child-hood 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)
care
about and love other people,
and/or to (b) accept love from others.
Mates'' 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
these Lessons honestly, you’ll sense whether this applies to either of you partners.
The ideas below invite you to clarify
(a) what you believe about 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 a mix of respect, admiration, acceptance,
empathy, companionship, trust, interest, comfort, a communion of souls or spirits, and
sexual- sensual desire. A related dynamic is needing 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...
you want to make the time, and
have the
skills, to communicate
effectively together about your needs.
Lesson 1 and
Lesson 2 here provide
practical options for helping each other
empower your Selves (capital "S"), strengthen your
awareness, and negotiate filling your respective needs.
Premise 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 disap-pointment and frustration.
If you mates cherish the
memory of your courtship romance and work to evolve a deeper love together,
you may be content.
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 relationship, it’s beyond our scope here.
Personal and shared discomforts can occur in any of these four domains.
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 equal-ly?
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 re-ality to reduce past and
present pain.
Your
dominant personality
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)
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 ex-pressions, 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 be-tween “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 (shamed),
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 Children 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 en-couraged 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? ___
Now
let’s use this foundation to explore (a) your surface “love” problems, (b) possible primary
problems causing them, and (c) some action options.
Surface “Love” Problems
Premise: surface relationship
problems are
symptoms of underlying primary needs. See if you’re
ho-ping to
fill
one or more of these surface needs:
I need to
feel more loved by my mate more often.
My partner
says or implies that s/he needs to feel more loved by me, and I
need to know what to do about that.
I’ve fallen
out of love with my mate, and need to decide what to do about that.
My partner
says s/he doesn’t love me as much or at all, or s/he says s/he does, but
her/his actions say otherwise. I need to clarify my feelings, needs, and options.
One of us desires and/or loves another
person, and feels torn, guilty, ashamed, and scared. Variation: one of
us has had, or is having, a romantic/sexual
affair. I need
to know what to do.
Some other significant marital love
need.
If either of you
partners is experiencing one or more
of these now, the bad news is: you’re stressed! The good news is: you may
reduce your stress in ways you’re not aware of. For example…
Primary "Love" Problems
See if any
items below “resonate.” One or both of you…
1)
is ruled by
a false self
and is unaware of it, denies it, or doesn’t know what that
means
or what to
do about it.
If so, one of you may have a
bonding disorder and
not know it. One of many symptoms of this is
denying that
you have a marital problem, and focusing on a child, an ex mate,
money, work, health, and/or something else. Another symptom of
false-self
wounds is confusing love with pity, duty,
need, ex-citement, power, flirting, rescuing, and/or lust.
A symptom of false-self
dominance is one or both of you doesn’t feel enough genuine
self love yet, and doesn’t (want to) know that, or what to do about it.
Restated: the primary problem may be that one or both of you is a
shame-based person in protective
denial.
See Lesson 1.
A
related stressor
may be that because your attempts to
problem-solving are usually
frustrating
and unproductive, you’re avoiding each other (i.e. avoiding the risk of discomfort)
unconsciously or covertly. Restated: the way you two try to
problem-solve has become another problem. Reality check: see if any of
these communication
dynamics are familiar.If so, see Lesson 2.
And/or either of you may be...
4)
blocked in
grieving some
major
losses
(broken bonds). This
can hinder healthy new bonding, and may dilute or
numb feeling or expressing your love. See Lesson 3.
And/or one or both of you...
5) really
needs moreprimacy
(specialness), acceptance, respect,
trust,
empathy,
honesty, sensual/sexual satisfaction, intimacy, excitement/adventure,
and/or
companionship -not more "love;"
and
wounds, unawareness, or something else
has been blocking your satisfying these needs well enough.
And/or one or both of you may…
6)
prize
something consistently higher than your relationship, and may or may not acknowledge that to
yourself or your mate. A major symptom of this is your not wanting to
make enough undistracted couple-time. A possible
symptom of this is one of you working a night shift and the other tolerating and
justifying (or preferring) that.
And if you're a
stepfamily, perhaps either or both of you…
7)
put a child
ahead of
your mate and marriage too often. The flip side of this is one of you (a
steppar-ent) is too needy,
insecure and
distrustful, and your subselves
are oversensitive to or distorting your part-ner’s
need to nurture their child/ren.
Notice what’s not included as an underlying “love” problem: a child’s behavior or welfare, a
parent-child relationship, a legal
suit, money, sex, or an intrusive, needy, or domineering relative. Those can be
major surface problems, but don’t cause marital love problems!
So if you two have one or more of these
primary problems (unmet needs), what
can you do?
The Web address of this
two-page article is http://sfhelp.org/relate/mates/love.htm
"Love Inventory"