Not too long ago I realized that I had to clean out garbage files on my computer on a regular basis in order to keep it functioning at its best. Machines generate byproducts that have to be cleaned. Your love-life is not a machine but it surely requires upkeep for maximum efficiency. Unfortunately a lot of people still think of their love-lives as maintenance free. Nothing new to learn and no problems to fix, the version you leave your family of origin (the factory) with is expected to work well forever without upgrades or maintenance. If this were the case, I wouldn’t be in business. One of the big reasons love-life psychologists exist is because people don’t bother to tune-up their love-lives.
The two items that are vital to the long term maturity and maintenance of a meaningful love relationship are the conjoint practice of communication and independence. At first glance they may appear at odds and perhaps they are in some ways. Communication is about connection. Ideally, it is about reaching your partner to participate in a dialogue of meaning and feelings. This is not to say you always have to talk in depth to your partner. It might get a bit tiring to do this all the time. The communication I am talking about is frequent but not constant. It grows in the context of a love relationship because two people realize, like with a computer, they will inevitably collect thoughts, feelings, and actions that will complicate and contaminate their love relationship. There is a time to clean, so to speak, by expressing the emotions and thoughts that have been generated in a relationship and it can only be done together.
Independence Independence
Independence
Let’s think some more about communication. In love people can talk about anything and they usually do. The communication I am talking about has more to do with ‘how’ two people in love talk to each other than the ‘what’ or content of their conversation. More problems are created and remain unresolved because of the dysfunctional way two lovers can communication with each other. For starters, if you are going to be in love you should expect to be defensive. Defensiveness is the mind’s way of protecting itself from additional hurt and disappointment. If you can’t control something outright defensiveness is the next best thing. Nobody gets to control love and this is why there is so much defensiveness in our love-lives.
The defenses we use in love can range from the thoughts we have, to the feelings we have, to the actions we take that have self-protective objectives. Just about anything can and will be used defensively. The problem with love-life defenses is that they block the communications needed to constructively solve the problems and mend the hurts that can create distance in a relationship. So here’s the deal. In order to effectively talk about problems a couple has to communicate about their mutual defenses as well. You can’t do the former without the latter. What I mean is, until a couple acknowledges the ways their mutual defenses mess up their communication it will always be negatively affected by defenses.
Talking about defenses can be a bit of hard work. Most people do not enjoy having their psychological defenses exposed, never mind discussed. This sort of thing takes us right back to the vulnerability that has to be tolerated to be in love in the first place. Humility and honesty help of course. Equality also comes in handy, and the freedom to speak sincerely regardless of your partner’s response is also helpful. A mutual discussion of each other’s defensive efforts to control communications and their impact will clear the air but expect a bumpy ride getting there. You would have to say to yourselves that talk like this is good for the relationship no matter what. Interactions like these go under the heading, ‘Honesty in Love’ with reminders that if you don’t have honesty you don’t have much. Practice believing that love is not always smooth and effortless. Convince yourself that a relationship can on occasion be upsetting to do the work that love requires.
Sorry to say that talking about your mutual defensiveness is not the only unsettling conversation you are going to have if you want to sustain a deeper intimacy with your lover. The other big area of experience that needs a dialogue is the effects of each other’s family of origin on the relationship. Of course you can say that I’m a nut and you have better things to talk about. A lot of people will probably agree with you. The only problem is if you don’t talk about your respective families more of your experience growing up gets played out in your love-life. For good or for bad this is what always happens like it or not. The only way to avoid this intrusion of the past is to make family of origin influences conscious in dialogue with the other person it happens with, your lover. If there was love in your childhood you obviously have less to worry about. If there was mostly disappointment why risk the replay. Your love relationship is not just someone to spend time with so you won’t be so alone. It’s much more than that. It’s an opportunity to grow, change, and learn. If it’s not, expect some trouble.
Conversations about each other’s side of the family and how they influence thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the relationship can provide information that helps you avoid making the same fatal mistakes over and over again. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t repeat some part of childhood in his/her love-life. We use what we know, plain and simple. When we leave home we unconsciously take our family experiences with us in the form of needs, expectations, love-life self-esteem, and/or the kinds of psychological defenses we use to stave off any more love-life hurts. Our partner witnesses the transformations as the relationship endures. It is common to start out one way and end up another once noxious family of origin influences take hold.
Let’s consider a common example. I have met people who were free and passionate when they were single and living together. Once they commit to each other or marry, they become overly sensitive and emotionally closed with negative consequences for the relationship. The same thing can happen over time even if the couple does not marry or commit. As if time and familiarity (a word with its root in the word family) ensures that the family of origin’s influence will come to the surface, ready or not. The family of origin pattern of how to be in love whether constructive or destructive is there waiting to be activated. The only hope we have of doing anything about this fact of life is to move the whole thing into consciousness and regular dialogue.
An original meaning of the word consciousness, by the way, is the mutual exchange of information or knowledge. Shared perceptions divided by the fact that both of you are in love makes for a potentially strong learning experience. Sharing information is the way people learn and solve problems in a love relationship anyway. Sharing perceptions about the influences of each other’s family of origin is a particularly potent form of love-life learning. What is the objective? The objective is to point out the differences between who you and your partner are, as unique individuals in love right now, from all the other influences of people in your lives past and present.
Once those influences are identified they can be accepted, modified or deleted. Your love partner becomes an ally in helping you identify what you might be carrying around from the past. He/she is in the best position to help you make this differentiation because he/she is the closest to you. But first you have to put away your fear that this kind of openness will hurt your love relationship rather than help it. So what if your partner left you because you wanted to be honest and open (vulnerable) about such meaningful things with him or her? If he/she left over this, look at it this way, he/she did you a favor.
Along with sustaining love with the right kind of communication, you can also sustain love with the matured practice of independence in your relationship. Matured means not the kind of pseudo-independence or running away we hear so much about these days. Real independence does not take us away from intimacy. Quite the contrary, it brings on a deeper intimacy. The reason why a person runs away from closeness or hides from love is not because he is independent but because he is dependent. When you are independent you are no longer afraid of what others can say to you or take from you. You don’t need someone else to support your insecure sense of yourself. Your partner can be who he is while you live openly as the person you are. An independent person is genuinely intimate and knows he or she has love to give. When you are truly independent you have differentiated your love-life from everyone else’s, you have chosen to give your love to somebody special, and you have accepted the person you love for who he/she is without trying to change him/her.
Communication as a sustaining love-life activity is interpersonal. It takes place between the lovers involved as an interpersonal dialogue. On the other hand, independence as a love-life practice that sustains love is a personal experience with wide ranging interpersonal consequences to be sure. The practice of love-life independence always involves the differentiation of one love-life from everybody else’s. I discussed this theme earlier in relation to the communication of family of origin patterns. To differentiate your love-life means to identify it as uniquely your own creation different from everyone else’s. How other people influence our love-lives can be subtle and hard to discover. The influence exists as patterns of living both psychological and physical with their origin in childhood and adolescence. We take these patterns from home as if they were meant to guide us now that we are separate from the family. The implication of course is that the offspring (that’s you and me) have not done their thinking and deciding for themselves. This is what I mean when I said that your love-life is not your own. It becomes your own when you have acknowledged your ownership because it meets your own particular needs and wants not what someone else thinks you should need and want.
It’s very easy to borrow someone else’s love-life, especially if you love or loved the person from whom you borrowed it. In many ways it’s a matter of family loyalty. I also find that disappointment in love earlier in life creates a greater likelihood of repetition. In other words, we tend to repeat the love-lives of people who disappoint us in love the most. If you don’t heal it, then it has a high probability of being recreated again. Like when somebody comes from a divorced home and never really deals with the feelings of loss divorce created. The chances of getting divorced are high only because of the fact it is familiar and has a lot of unresolved emotion in it. We are often drawn to what is unfinished and has hurt us. So getting your very own psychological love-life going is very important. And remember the solution to this difficulty does not have to be so complicated. Once a consciousness for this stuff occurs, it’s easier to pick and choose the right actions to take in your love-life.
The great thing about love-life independence is the more independent you are the more you are able to engage in what is called ‘selfless loving’ without feeling cheated or used. When people are disappointed in their love-lives starting from at the beginning, it is easy to be focused on getting what you feel you deserve from others. The love you did not get is coveted and waited for, becoming a measure of how satisfying a relationship really is. When this is the case the focus is on getting love rather than giving love. The problem with this love-life orientation is that you can’t really satisfy childhood or adolescent needs for love in an adult love relationship. No adult lover wants to parent another adult and give up his or her own need for love without deep resentment. You could literally spend a lifetime looking for childhood love that is now out of date and no longer available.
Once this love-life fact is accepted and properly grieved, meaning the sadness of loss is acknowledged, felt and expressed, love-life independence becomes possible. It becomes possible simply because giving the love you have becomes more important and meaningful than getting the love you lost. Without a dependence on getting love a person is freer to give love selflessly. This is the most advanced state of loving there is, and it is only possible when a person has become independent. In addition to declaring your own love-life freed from the influences of others, independence in love can be expressed in the act of choosing to love. This is when you consciously make a decision to love someone simply based on the feeling of love that exists inside of you. This is what a real commitment to love looks like. It’s exclusive and for one person only. I choose to love you and no other. Congratulations, you have made a commitment to a deeper love. You can only do this when you are no longer dependent on resolving past disappointments in love and free to give the love you feel.
As an independent person in love, your greatest gift of love to the person of your choice is an acceptance of who he or she is as a person. It is so very common in love to want your lover to be better than what he or she is now. We often have a mental image of what form that should take. It is really just a selfish desire secretly meant to extinguish past love-life disappointments. This desire for better can be so subtle as to be only discernable in a feeling of disappointment that reoccurs from time to time.
When acceptance is given in love you stop trying to satisfy yourself by changing your partner. You stop trying to mold him or her into someone who will match your ideal. You get to love your partner separately and selflessly. If I think I will be happier or more satisfied with someone else but I am too afraid to risk loneliness, I can try to change my partner into what I think I should have. In truth this is only a defense. When I stop looking for someone else in love with you, I have found both myself and you in this relationship. I am now independent and can give a selfless gift of love to you or move on to find someone more compatible with my desires.
I hope this article has shown you how to take good care of love when it arrives. If you want a better love-life, over time work with your love-life psychology through these methods of sustaining love. The quality of love in your life depends upon your love-life psychology. Review it, bring it up to date, and by all means own it. Remember, you can only give yourself to someone else if you have an independent self to give. You can only know your partner as a unique individual in your life if you separate enough from your past to experience your own and someone else’s true presence. You can only be independent in your love-life if you let go of your dependency on fixing the disappointments of your past love-lives by getting someone else to make up for what you did not get.
When you are ruled by the past and someone else’s preferences for your love-life, you are not free to love. When your ability to choose love is forfeited because you are dependent on someone else’s judgment and choices, you are not free to love. If you must change your lover to match your own expectations you cannot meet anyone new since technically you are so focused on repeating your old experiences that you are not free to love. In a healthy love relationship you also get a chance to keep finding a new truer version of yourself with your partner, as he/she gets a chance to keep finding a new truer version with you. This is one of the priceless rewards you get for doing the work of sustaining love in your life.
