Preparing For & Sustaining Love

Love-Life Learning

What have you already learned about your adult love relationships? What do you need to unlearn and re-learn to improve your love-life? These questions help initiate a conscious love-life by promoting new learning about adult loving. To learn something new and more useful about love in adulthood we must re-enter the learning process first by recognizing what we have already learned, recognize and challenge the limitations and distortions in that learning, while relearning something more suitable and effective for adulthood.

    What we have all learned about love throughout our lives has a tendency to be replayed over and over again beyond direct awareness. To break that disappointing cycle requires persistent reflection and new learning. What we have learned about love falls into the two very general categories: how prepared we are for love and how well we sustain love once it arrives. A preparation for love can be further divided into what we have learned about love as an emotional experience, about having a sense of individuality in love, and about intimacy in love. Sustaining love once it arrives involves what we have learned about communicating in love and whether or not it is possible to be independent in love.

preparation for love

Any preparation for a love relationship would have to involve an understanding of love as a human experience. Many people are looking for love, struggling with commitment, or living in a love relationship misguided by learned misconceptions and misunderstandings of what love truly is. For example they may avoid being vulnerable in situations where love is possible. Or they may avoid spontaneous experiences and practice over-controlling love-life situations whenever possible. Many people do not understand the importance of recovering from hurt with healing instead of defensiveness. Defensiveness in love often promotes the belief that people who love us should be controlled. When repeatedly disappointed it is easier to stay focused on what is absent rather than on what there is to give. We can also hang onto a view of love that generates unrealistic and unproductive ways of relating to others in love-life situations that require greater receptivity. These limited understandings of love are often learned in family of origin relationships or other interpersonal settings where the examples provided are limited by similar misunderstandings.

    Another important preparation for love takes place in a person’s developing sense of individuality. The more separate and individuated a person is the easier it is to love and be loved. A developed sense of individuality also makes it easier to weather the disagreements and contrasts that inevitably occur in a love relationship. When this sense of one’s own individuality does not exist a person will look mostly beyond the self for a source of personal definition. Contrary to popular culture where finding one’s ‘better half’ is encouraged, an undeveloped sense of individuality weakens a person’s capacity to give and receive love. The psychological qualities of personal individuality that are most important in love-life situations are a feeling of respect for oneself, the recognition of one’s own and other people’s individual uniqueness, and the capacity to relate without false selves.

    A capacity for interpersonal intimacy defined as the reciprocal exchange of love between two people is also an important area to develop in preparation for healthy loving. When the ability to be intimate has not been developed a preoccupation with receiving love exists with little or no sharing. Parent and child bonding motivations and narcissistic interests are mostly responsible for eclipsing the ability to co-participate in an enriching experience of mutual loving. Such a situation is usually discernable by the absence of ‘friendship’ in love. True friendship is founded on the mutual values of honesty, freedom, and equality. When these values have not been cultivated in a love relationship there are destructive experiences of dishonesty by omission or commission, interpersonal control instead of freedom, and dominance due to the absence of equality between lovers.

sustaining love

A love relationship will require sustenance to endure and repair itself. Communication has always been an easily identifiable necessity to deepen love and resolve the barriers to love. Unfortunately many people learn early in life to remain silent in love. They learn to protect themselves and their partners from hurt by not risking talk about painful love-life topics. The immediate consequence of this absence is a love relationship deprived of the type of consciousness that realizes love. Without consciousness there is a diminished probability of growth in a love relationship. Without it there is a deficit in the intimate mutual exchange of knowledge and information implied in the meaning of the word consciousness.

    But the act and practice of communication is only the beginning. Once this type of loving connection is formed with another the next step is to determine what to talk about. There are two essential areas of communication in a growing love relationship. The first is to establish a mutual dialogue on the topic of how a couple communicates to each other, and the second involves the influence of families of origin. The importance of these two topics exists solely in the opportunity to have an honest mutual conversation about defensiveness and the influence of others. Many attempts at connection in a love relationship fail precisely because of defenses and influences. People in love often if not always feel the need to protect themselves from hurt and follow the emotional guidelines provided by others. In so doing, layers of distance are created that make an exposure to vulnerability, a tolerance for differences, and a reconnection in love barely possible. Whatever risks are taken to tolerate and establish an honest dialogue, a committed couple moves toward the shared ability to heal and re-heal their love relationship over time.

    The last area of essential learning in a sustained love relationship involves the practice of independence. Taken quite literally, independence means an active and enduring effort to keep dependency in an ongoing resolution. By dependency I mean any and all agendas to recreate parent and child bonding attachments in an adult love relationship. Love-life independence means learning to live in a love relationship without being dependent. Unrealistic attempts to realize parent and child bonding desires in an adult love relationship will usually lead to a failed relationship over time. And sometimes it is simply a matter of time before this effort erodes whatever realistic love exists between two people. Unfortunately some people can sustain this kind of unrealistic hope for a lifetime. The love-life consequence of course is a depleting experience of love because of a lifetime commitment to revisiting, recreating and/or escaping a disappointing past.

    An independent love-life is practiced over time. Most people have to deal with unrealistic expectations at some level over the course of their love-lives because of the intensity of parent and child bonding disappointments. An independent love-life involves the practice of differentiating oneself from everyone else’s love-life. It is quite easy to unconsciously love in adulthood like someone else loved in our life. Representing ourselves through the love experiences of others may seem like a short-cut but it only results in continued love-life disappointment. It is tempting for example to unconsciously behave in our love-lives like our parents who have in most cases had the strongest emotional impact on us. Owning our own love-life is the liberated outcome in this practice of differentiating ourselves from other people’s love-lives.

    The choice of who to love is another essential ingredient in this effort to liberate our love-life experience from dependency. Personal choice has always been an expression of independence. The choice to love someone regardless of whether and to what extent he or she is in love is no different. Choice as an expression of independence is the initial step toward personal commitment in a love relationship. It is in the experience of choosing to love that a person strengthens and liberates his or her capacity to love. The choice to love someone ensures that experiences of unilateral loving will occur in a particular love relationship.

    Finally, independence involves learning to accept a loved individual in all of his or her uniqueness. Love is a very special and specialized experience. In a committed love relationship this uniqueness is directly experienced even more so. The act of accepting the individuality of a lover means that his or her characteristics, whether positive or negative, will be tolerated until such time as they are modified by the person himself/herself. Of course this acceptance is always tempered by the existence of love and respect in the relationship. I am certainly not advocating a situation where a lover’s acceptance is self-defeating or masochistic in any way. Acceptance under the conditions of love and commitment is simply put an act of love. Relearning the basic steps toward this most cherished of human experiences is fortunately for us all a possibility in conscious adulthood.