What is wrong with your love-life? If you say something like I’m too old, too young, don’t have enough money, not educated enough, job is not good enough, wife cheated on me, I’m single parent, or recently divorced you are overlooking the real reason for your love-life disappointment. Let me put it to you this way, the real reason for your love-life problems is not in the circumstances of your life or the people in it. The real reason is you probably never upgraded ‘love-life psychology.’ By love-life psychology I mean the psychological pattern that determines the thoughts and feelings you have and actions you take when you are trying to find love, commit to love, or leave an expired love relationship. If you didn’t know you even had a love-life psychology, you’ve been probably looking everywhere but inside yourself for the answer to your love-life problems.
Once you are convinced that you have a love-life psychology and it determines the fate of your love-life, you will be well on your way to creating an improved love-life experience for yourself. Most people experience a lot of defensiveness when they think about changing the psychology of their love-lives. Why can’t what we learned about love in childhood and adolescence guarantee a loving and satisfied adulthood? It usually doesn’t because much of the time we learn love-life lessons from someone else’s failed or limited love-life. These lessons from the past are never tailored to our own unique circumstances. It could be your parents or other family members who showed you by example. In other instances, you might form a love-life pattern from your earlier love-life disappointments, or a combination of the two. From hurtful love-life experiences we learn to expect and avoid more hurt in ways that keep us stuck in repetition and defensiveness. To keep your love-life fresh you have to periodically review your love-life psychology. This involves a review your love-life needs, your expectations of a lover, your feelings about yourself in love, and the psychological defenses you are using in your love-life to protect yourself from hurt.
Love-Life Needs
What are your love-life needs? In a general sense they are the feelings of need that you experience for or in a love relationship. They can be developed or undeveloped, dependent or independent, mature or immature, depending on your current state of mind. If your love-life needs are immature, your adult love-life will be heavily influenced by parent-child forms of need. There is a tendency for past experiences with love dating back to when you were a child or adolescent to still be shaping the experiences you have in your love-life. This could prove troublesome because parent-child love-life needs do not fit very well into adult love relationships. In adulthood, intimate reciprocal love relationships where there is an equitable give and take, work the best.
Love-life needs stop developing from the time you start trying to get adult lovers to make up for the love you did not get at some earlier point in your life, when the emphasis was on getting love rather than giving it. This kind of immature love-life need will start developing again once you become conscious that it has stopped growing in the first place. Admitting to oneself that something like this exists is sobering to say the least. But if you don’t, there is a good chance that your undeveloped love-life need will contaminate every love relationship you have resulting in repeated love-life disappointments. We all need to accept that we can’t make up for the love we didn’t get in childhood and adolescence by getting it in our adult love relationships. Once this is accepted, the feelings of grief and sadness that come can eventually set you free to have a more realistic love relationship in the present. This love-life sadness should be tolerated and shared whenever possible. It is an emotional sign that the required healing is trying to take place.
It also helps to know and believe that you are really not as dependent on someone else’s love to survive as you might ordinarily think and feel. Most people are taught to look away from themselves and toward others for the emotional resources required to survive hardships in life. As a result of that training we lose track of our true emotional potentials and become focused on always getting what we need from others. Some of us rediscover that the human heart is built in such a way as to be able to survive the disappointments of love earlier in life. When this happens a person’s orientation begins to shift from getting love to make up for past losses to giving love to others. No matter how emptied you feel because of complications you experienced in your earlier love-life, you still possess the capacity to give love. Whether or not you rediscover this resource in the course of your life will depend upon how much consciousness you can tolerate. The most rewarding experience in life by far is to rediscover your capacity to give love selflessly to another.
Love-Life Expectations
What you expect from your partner in love has a powerful effect on what you get in love. To make matters more complicated, the love-life expectations I am referring to may be working beyond your direct awareness. It is very common for people to repeat the same disappointing activities in their love-life over and over again. This usually happens because there is something unfinished in a person’s love-life that gets unconsciously recreated. Psychologically speaking, if an experience of love created hurt feelings that are unresolved we tend to recreate that experience across love relationships. This just might be the mind’s way of trying to go back to something that happened in the past in an effort to resolve it. The problem is that the resolution of past hurt we are seeking does not take place by trying to change what has happened in the past, but by grieving our disappointments and moving on from them.
Love-life expectations can also take the form of an effort to ‘complete’ something in ourselves by getting the love we think we need from someone else.
The origin of this expectation is usually an emotional emptiness again from earlier love-life disappointments often beginning in childhood or adolescence. Trying to get other people, in this case lovers, to complete something inside of you by getting them to give you the love you think you need is a set up for more disappointment. No one really gets a chance to make up for lost love in this way. A current lover should never be made responsible for replacing a love lost earlier in your life. Beyond the unfairness of giving someone new this responsibility, the chances of it happening are nil. For the simple fact that time has passed and you are no longer a child. Adult love relationships require the reciprocity of needs to remain healthy and grow. An adult lover cannot parent his or her lover without resentment and unhealthy feelings of self-sacrifice. Being in an adult love relationship requires a commitment to intimacy in the form of mutual loving and the satisfaction of need. Anything less, only recreates the conditions for the repetition of earlier love-life disappointments in the relationship.
Another form of unhealthy love-life expectation is to hope that a lover can be
a source of ‘correction’ in one’s love-life. Similar to seeking completeness, expecting correction means you feel cheated by earlier love-life losses and you secretly or not so secretly want your lover to make up the difference owed to you. As in striving for completeness, correction also breeds resentment and unhealthy forms of self-sacrifice if it is coveted during the course of a love relationship. When striving for past love-life corrections take the place of reciprocal forms of adult intimacy in a relationship it is only a matter of time before conflict and disappointment emerge. Past love-life disappointments get corrected by being grieved and accepted as the unfortunate limitations they really are. Whether or not we have to continue be limited by them in adulthood is the important question.
Love-Life Self-Esteem
Are you lovable? This may seem like a strange question. Strange because people do not ordinarily ask themselves this kind of question unless something is critically wrong. The answer to this question will tell you a lot about your love-life self-esteem. How you really feel about yourself has a lot to do with the quality of your love-life. For example, if you don’t feel lovable it will be hard to accept someone else’s love. You have already passed a negative judgment on yourself so there has got to be something wrong with anyone who attempts to love you. A closely related problem is a negative perception of the love you have to give, if any. Negative love-life self-esteem tends to contaminate both how lovable you feel and the perceived quality of the love you have to give.
One of the more common love-life problems that emerge when self-esteem is low is an unhealthy tolerance of abusive people in your life. When your self-esteem is low it is easy to lose self-respect and the respect of others. A person will stop standing up for herself which permits certain people to take advantage. In fact, low self-esteem enables mistreatment to continue long past the point where a more self-respecting person would draw the line. Once you get it in your mind that your love relationship is abusive either emotionally, physically, sexually or financially, change is just a few steps away. At this point a little support from people who can understand your need to either get out of the relationship or set limits is vital. Remember, once your attitude toward the abuse shifts to a more realistic perception of your partner’s emotional impotence, change is inevitable. The abuse does not continue when a mistreated person recognizes the ways she has been setting up the role of victim by seeing herself as only fearful and powerless.
Love-Life Psychological Defenses
Psychological defenses can be both offensive and defensive. You’ve heard the saying the best defense is a good offense, right? Some people go on the attack right away at the first hint of fear. Others build great walls of defense against what they perceive to be the inherent dangers in love. For some, psychological defenses are best applied as self-protection when looking for love. For others, it is best to stay out of commitment so that an escape is possible once the going gets rough. Too many fish in the sea, right? Wrong, the problem is that psychological defenses limit the extent of intimacy that is possible in a person’s love-life. Take your pick, love or defense you can’t have it both ways. If you picked love, you have some anxiety to look forward to because that is what happens to us when we shed defenses. Everybody gets temporarily weak in the knees or a little shaky, all signs that love-life vulnerability is now in charge of your responses, and contrary to popular opinion, so far so good.
If you prefer to stay defensive in your love-life here is what you have to look forward to and why. Anything and everything we think, feel, and do can be used for defensive purposes. When we are being defensive we are protecting ourselves from something else, be it dangerous or not. Of course when something is not dangerous and we are still compelled to protect ourselves from it there is a problem. This kind of problem is common whenever love is the issue. This is because we all know what it is like to be hurt and disappointed in our love-lives on some level starting in childhood. So early on in life we develop a facility for protecting ourselves from further hurt and disappointment. Unfortunately, in love there is a cost for defensiveness. Many of the feelings involved in love require states of mind and heart that cannot be directly felt when you are defensive. Defensiveness trades off sensitivity for safety and security. In a love relationship this can be very detrimental.
Defensive behavior can be simply defensive or offensively defensive as mentioned earlier. This means you can either protect yourself by reacting to the aggressiveness of others defensively or offensively. When someone converts fear or hurt into anger or rage they are practicing the dubious art of defensive offensiveness. In love, people engage in defensive love-life behaviors like always avoiding certain love-life experiences, or controlling the experiences they do have in their love relationships, or making sure they always pick the same type of partner. Whatever it is, the underlying purpose is to control an experience that would threaten what is known or familiar whether or not it is healthy or satisfying. When love-life behavior is not defensive it promotes openness and risk-taking.
People retain all kinds of defensive beliefs in their love-lives. Everyone has a philosophy of love acknowledged or not. Some of us have a defensive love-life philosophy that constricts and controls love-life experiences. In many instances defensive beliefs are stereotypic generalizations made to avoid the assumption of predictable problems in love. It is common to believe that certain people are eligible partners because they possess certain characteristics that other people do not. The problem with this kind of defensive thinking is the judgment involved. Love is never bound by such beliefs. Other human motivations such as an interest in power certainly are. The important thing is to become aware of whatever beliefs and behavior are curtailing or worse interfering with love in your life. We all struggle with our personal commitments to ways of life that diminish our ability to love and be loved. Consciousness and tolerance for something new helps us outgrow what is blocking our development in this area of our lives.
Last but certainly not least is the role of feelings and emotions in our love-lives. Feelings can be used for defensive purposes like everything else. For convenience I have placed the feelings that are most commonly active in an experience of love on a continuum. Roughly speaking there are positive love-life emotions and negative ones, emotions that encourage and support an experience of love and emotions that do not. On the negative end of our continuum we have ‘resignation.’ As a love-life emotion resignation is extremely defensive. Its purpose is to deaden love-life need and love-life hurt. In this regard it does an excellent job. When love-life resignation sets in, a person feels very little need and takes no further risks with love. Resignation is common after a deep hurt or after many repeated love-life disappointments or failures. A common indication that resignation exists is, no longer believing there are any available partners left.
Anger and its twisted cousin rage are further along on our continuum of love-life emotions. Anger is also a very defensive emotion but not as defensive as resignation. The one advantage to anger is that the angry person is still feeling some kind of hope and fear about love. That is why he or she is angry. Otherwise the deadening defensiveness of resignation would take over. Regardless, anger is still defensive enough to interfere with the vulnerability required to be in love. In an angry state of mind love is diminished in favor of power. Toward the middle of our continuum is love-life frustration. In a frustrated state there is much more hope than fear and avoidance. Frustration is mildly defensive as a negative love-life emotion and focused more on manipulating love. People who are committed to controlling love in any way are subject to love-life frustration. As a negative love-life emotion, frustration is only a short step away from the more positive love-life emotion I will call ‘hurt.’
You might wonder how hurt became a positive love-life emotion given it intuitively appears negative. To be hurt in love is to be involved and vulnerable.
There is a degree of openness in hurt. It’s not defensive and it’s more amenable to love. In fact, it is impossible to be in love without experiencing hurt feelings at some point or another. The fact of separate people in a love relationship guarantees it. Our task as lovers is not to try avoiding unpredictable hurt. Our task is to retain a faith in our capacity to heal love-life hurt when it happens without being self-destructive. An even more positive love-life emotion is ‘sadness.’ Sadness is a natural attractant. People who have the capacity to feel sympathy for others are moved (e-motion) by sadness. It is an emotion that opens the heart and encourages feelings of love. The relationship between sadness and love is very interesting. In one sense, sadness reminds us that nothing is permanent least of all love. Mixed with sadness, love has the ability to heal the broken heart.
Lastly, there is anxiety and joy. I mention these two positive love-life emotions together because I think they have an interesting and often ignored relationship.
Again you might wonder why anxiety makes it to the positive end of our continuum. I am not talking about clinical anxiety as an illness. I am talking about anxiety as a common state of mind that emerges when something new is happening or about to happen. Anxiety is not a bad thing. It’s a reminder that we prefer to keep ourselves safe and in predictable if not controllable circumstances of life. When the known transforms into the unknown there is going to be anxiety. A little or a lot, there is always some degree of anxiety in love. Joy is the ultimate emotion of love where a person is able to transcend the feeling of being alone in this world however temporary for a feeling of connection with something greater. In this instance, that something greater is the love between two people. The letting go of oneself in love is always unnerving. When the temporary state of joy is over there is always reality waiting. There is always the wish that joy would stay without the necessity of contrast with other emotions. These shifts create anxiety. The newness of love is very alive and joyful. For this many people will tolerate any kind of discomfort.
A conscious review of these various components of your love-life psychology will help you identify what needs to develop further. Remember, changing one part of your love-life psychology will inevitably change others. A review of your love-life psychology, supported by practice, initiates a leaning process that will transform your love-life from repeated disappointment to satisfaction and fulfillment. The only way to truly change your love-life is to make change on the psychological inside of your experience of love.