LOVE / RELATIONSHIP / LIFE

After All, Love is Thrilling and Conquers All. Right? Wrong!❤️

Love may make you feel better about your relationship problems, but it doesn’t solve any of your relationship problems

With science proving that true love is possible, I’ve decided to look at the psychological components that allow love to bloom or fade.

In our culture, many of us serenade to love. Fairy stories about dazzling princes and swooning princesses have filled the collective imagination for ages. Philosophers and poets hail it as some elevated and romanticized cure-all for life’s ills. We bow to the altar of love in our movies and glorified stories, celebrating it in our history as the final hope to cure our pain and life’s enduring skirmishes.

❤️(If you are not a Medium subscriber, use this link to read this article)❤️

Those of you familiar with the BeeGees’ who ask how deep love is. And the Beatles ask whether love is all you need. John Lennon wrote a song called “All You Need Is Love,” which was ironic because it came from a man who smacked both of his wives and ditched one of his children.

And because we salute love, idealize it, and overestimate it that once at the end of that blissful haul, we’re astonished when our relationship fails. One thing you can be sure about is that you won’t get to 30 years by gazing into each other’s eyes.

Humans have been trying to identify and explain love since the world’s first blinked its eyes. Most of us tend to think about love as that gooey feeling we get when we’re in the presence of a particular person.

You know the signs: butterflies in the stomach, unable to focus on anything but the other person.

People have lamented for centuries about love shifting from passionate to companionate, which could be at once satisfactory and sad. Couples experience that shift differently, a tidal-like movement of closeness and drifting apart, closeness and drifting apart. While the passion fades for some, others retain the flames burning, while others can rekindle the fires.

Yes, you want to find someone who causes your heart to do summersaults, and your farts smell like cotton candy. Yet, being in love should come with a warning label that those possessed may suffer from decreased clarity or good sense. And any logical perspective you’ve ever possessed will disappear when viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses.

The thing is that you can fall in love with various people throughout your life. You can fall in love with people who are bad and good for you. You can fall in love when you’re young and old. You can fall in love in unhealthy ways and healthy ways. So, you see, love is not unique. Love is not exceptional.

Cynics will try to convince you that love doesn’t exist, while clueless romantics believe everyone would be better if paired with soulmates. In her book, Love 2.0: Creating Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection, psychologist Dr. Barbara Fredrickson declares that everything we know about love and living happily ever after is wrong.

She posits that love isn’t just what we understand from songs or see on screens. It’s not just a labyrinth of intimacy, sexual desire, and longing or a way to portray the closeness we experience with relatives and friends. She says that love is not a hard-fought or hard-won reward at the end of an epic search for our soulmate.

We need to disengage from some of our most valued thinking about love. The concept is that love is exclusive, lasting, and unconditional. These intensely held beliefs are often more wishes than reality.

What is or is not love?

Love is that micro-moment of warmth and connection you share with another living being. The first impression lasts a fleeting moment. Fredrickson suggests that a charge of emotional current exists between people that can be observed in the body. These moments can transfer between any two people — romantic partners, friends, relatives, or even strangers.

Love, as your body defines it, is not limited, not something to be reserved for your soul mate, inner circle, kin, or so-called loved ones. Love’s reach turns far wider than we’re typically coaxed to imagine.

Even so, love’s timescale is far shorter than we usually think. It’s far more fleeting than most of us would care to acknowledge.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

When we believe that “all we need is love,” we’re more likely to overlook structural values such as reverence, humility, and loyalty toward the people we are concerned about. After all, if love resolves everything, then why trouble with all the other stuff — you know, all of the hard stuff?

Love alone is not enough. It’s the knowledge that healthy relationships involve more than pure emotion or passion. It’s not based on pleasant emotions or good feelings that might result from a physical attraction. We know or should know that there are things in our lives and relationships that are more important than being in love.

True love ❤️is to be kind to your spouse even when the spouse is being surly. It means a person believes in preserving and protecting marriage itself.

Love is an emotional process.

Being like-minded is a logical process.

And the two don’t bleed into one another very well.

Idealizing love is the cause of developing unrealistic anticipations about what love looks like and what it can do for us. These idealistic expectations then incapacitate the very relationships we hold dear in the first place.

Many of us have fallen in love with somebody who mistreats us, who makes us feel like s**t, who has such a degraded life themselves that they are likely to yank us down with them. It’s also possible to fall in love with somebody with different ambitions or life goals contradicting our own, who embrace different philosophical beliefs or worldviews that clash with our perception of life.

When I think of all of the disastrous relationships I’ve seen — they felt that “spark,” so they just plummeted in head first. Forget that she was an acid-dropping bisexual necrophiliac, and he was a born-again Christian alcoholic. But it just felt fitting. You know?

And then eight months later, when she’s tossing his shit out onto the street, and he’s busy praying to Jesus for her redemption, they finally stare at each other, these two lonely and unrecognizable strangers, and ask themselves,

“Where did it go wrong?”

The truth is, it went way, way wrong before love even began.