Challenges of Romantic Love

Romantic love is for grown ups; it is not for children. It is not for children in a literal sense, and also in a psychological sense; not for those who, regardless of age, still experience themselves as children.

Sometimes when people speak about romantic love they are really speaking about infatuation, which is quite another story. While love embraces the person as a whole, infatuation is the results of focusing on one or two aspects and reacting as if that were the whole. You see a beautiful face and assume it is the image of a beautiful soul. You see that this person treats you kindly and you assume the two of you have significant affinities. You discover that you have important values in one area and conclude you must be soul mates. When you awaken from the dream, it is hard to remember where your mind could have been.

The first love affair we must consummate successfully is the love affair with ourselves. Only then are we ready for other love relationships. If we do not love ourselves, it is almost impossible to believe fully that we are loved by someone else. It is almost impossible to accept love. It is almost impossible to receive love. No matter what our partner does to show that he or she cares, we do not experience the devotion as convincing because we do not feel lovable to ourselves.

If you enjoy a fundamental sense of efficacy and worth, and if, as a consequence, you feel lovable as a human being, you have a basis for appreciating and loving others. You are not trapped in feelings of deficiency. You have a surplus of life within you, an emotional wealth that you can channel into loving.

Without respect for and enjoyment of who you are, you have very little to give emotionally. You tend to see others primarily as sources of approval or disapproval. You do not appreciate them in their own right. But if you can learn to do so - and this is something that can be learned - you grow in self-esteem. And you begin to feel less needy. People with high self-esteem long to feel admiration; people low in self-esteem long to feel accepted.

There are reasons why love grows and there are reasons why love dies. We may not know everything on the subject but we know a great deal. Of the various factors that are vital for the success of romantic love, none is more important than self-esteem. Different persons experience different levels of self-esteem. The level of our self-esteem has a profound impact on our life and experience.

We cannot understand the tragedy of most relationship if we do not understand that the overwhelming majority of human beings suffer from some feelings of self-esteem deficiency. This means, among other things, that deep in their psyche they do not feel they are enough. They do not feel lovable as they are; they do no feel it is natural or normal for others to love them. They do not necessary hold these attitudes consciously. Self-concept determines destiny. Or to speak with greater restraint and precision, there is a strong tendency for self-concept to determine destiny.

Imagine that an individual feels, perhaps beneath the level of conscious awareness that he or she significantly lacks worth, is not lovable, and is not a person who can inspire devotion for any sustained length of time. Simultaneously, this individual desires love, pursues love, hopes and dreams to find love. He finds a woman he cares for, she seems to care for him, they are happy, excited, and stimulated in each others’ experience - and for a time it seems that his dream is to be fulfilled. But deep in his psyche a time bomb is ticking away - the belief that he is inherently unlovable.

This time bomb provokes him to destroy his relationship. He may do this in any number of ways. He may endlessly demand reassurance. He may become excessively possessive and jealous. He may behave cruelly to test the depth of her devotion to him. He may make self-depreciating comments and wait for her to correct him. He may tell her he does not deserve her and tell her again and again and again. He may tell her that no woman can be trusted and that all women are fickle. He may find endless excuses to criticize her, to reject her before she can reject him. He may attempt to control and manipulate her by making her feel guilty, thereby hoping to bind her to him. He may become silent, withdrawn, preoccupied; throwing up barriers she cannot penetrate. Nothing she could ever do is enough to make him feel loved. Whatever she offered, he wanted more. Whatever she said, he wondered if she meant it.

After a while, perhaps, she has had enough; she is exhausted; he has worn her out. She leaves him. He feels desolate, depressed, crushed, and devastated.

Suppose that, despite his best efforts, he cannot drive her away. Perhaps she believes in him, sees his potential. Or perhaps she is a masochistic streak that requires that she be involved with such a man. She clings to him; she keeps reassuring him. Her devotion grows stronger, no matter what he does. She simply does not understand the nature of life as he perceives it. She does not grasp that no one can love him. In continuing to love him, she presents him with a problem: She confounds his view of reality. He needs a solution. He needs a way out. He finds it. His response is to begin wondering whether he had set his own standards too low. More and more he questions whether she was good enough for him. “How can I love this woman who is inferior even to me, who has been so easily supped onto loving me?”. Or he tells himself that she bores him. Or he tells himself that he is now in love with someone else. Or he tells himself that love does not interest him. The particular choice does not matter; the net effect is the same: in the end, he is alone again – the way he always knew he would be.

Then, once more, he can dream of finding love - he can look for a new woman so that he can play the drama all over again.

It is not essential, of course, that his relationship ends so conclusively. A literal separation may not be necessary. He may be willing to allow a relationship to continue, providing both he and his partner are unhappy. This is a compromise he can live with. It is as good as being alone and abandoned - almost.

Suppose, to give another example, that a woman decides a man could not possibly prefer her to other women. Her self-concept cannot accommodate such a possibility. At the same time, being human, she longs for love. When she finds it, what does she typically proceed to do?

She may continually compare herself unfavorably to other women. She may go out of her way to make absurd presentations at superiority, denying and disowning her feelings of insecurity. She may keep pointing out attractive women to see how he will respond. She may torment him with her doubts and suspicious. One way or the other, she creates a situation that results in her lover’s becoming involved with someone else. Of course she suffers acutely. She is desolate. But her situation is gratifying beyond words. She has creating the very state of affairs she always knew would come out. By making that which she most feared happens she had retained a sense of being in control.

If self-esteem is confidence in one’ appropriateness to life, then we can readily understand why men and women of high self-esteem tend to expect success and happiness and why, as a consequence, they are likely to create these conditions for themselves. Men and women of low self-esteem tend to expect defeat and suffering, and their lives are shaped accordingly. No one can understand the course of his or her life who does not understand the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. They are the central dynamic of our existence.

If we hold a negative self-concept of which we are unaware, if we hold self-sabotaging beliefs of which we are unconscious, we are their prisoner. Only when we become conscious of our self-sabotaging beliefs do we become able to change our behavior.

As we see ourselves, so do we act. And our actions tend to produce results that continually support our self-concept. With a positive self-concept, this principle can work in our favor. With a negative self-concept, it results in disaster.

When we feel rejected, when we look at past relationships and see nothing but a string of disappointments, frustrations, and defeats, it is often illuminating to ask: Do I feel it is natural or normal for someone to love me? Or does it feel like an impossible miracle that could not happen? Or could not last?

The first requirement of happiness in romantic love is a vision of ourselves that contains the rightness of being loved, the naturalness of being loved, the appropriateness of being loved.

People who know how to make themselves happy in love relationships are people who are open to accepting love. And in order to accept love, they must love themselves. People who love themselves do not find it incomprehensible that others should love them. They are able to allow others to love them. Their love has ease and grace.

As we proceed we shall see more and more clearly how essential an accomplished self-esteem is in this aspect of life. To enjoy our own being, to be happy in a profound sense with who we are, to experience the self as worthy of being valued and loved by others – this is the first requirement for the growth of romantic love.

Contained in the experience of self-esteem is the sense of our right to assert our own interests, needs, and wants: the experience of feelings worthy of happiness. Many an individual feel that they do not deserve happiness, that they are not entitled to the fulfillment of their wants. Often there is the feeling that if they are happy either happiness will be taken away from them or something terrible will happen to counterbalance it, some unspeakable punishment or tragedy. Happiness, for such people, is a potential source of anxiety. While they may long for it on one level of consciousness, they dread it on another.

Many an individual, particularly if raised in a religious home, has been taught that suffering represent a passport to salvation, whereas enjoyment is almost certainly proof that one has strayed from the proper path. Or a child has been encouraged to feel, “Don’t be so excited. Happiness doesn’t last. When you grow up, you’ll realize how grim life is.” For such people, to experience themselves as happy may be to experience themselves as, in effect, out of step with reality, therefore in danger.

Now suppose that a man and a woman who share this orientation meet and fall in love. In the beginning, focused on each other and on the excitement of their relationship, they are not thinking of these matters; they are simply happy. But inside, the time bomb is ticking. It began ticking at the moment of their first meeting. Facing one another across a dinner table, feeling joyful and contented, one of them suddenly can’t stand it and starts a quarrel over nothing or withdraws and becomes mysteriously depressed.

They cannot allow happiness just to be there; they cannot leave it alone; they cannot simply enjoy the fact that they have found each other. Their sense of who they are, and of what their proper destiny is, cannot accommodate happiness. The impulse to make trouble arises, seemingly from nowhere, acutely from ‘the deep recess of the psyche,’ where antihappiness programming resides.

Their view of self, and of life, allows them, perhaps, to struggle for happiness - ‘sometimes in the future’ - perhaps next year or the year after. But not now. Not at this moment. Not here. Here and now is too terrifyingly immediate.

Right now, in the moment of their joy, happiness is not a dream but a reality. That is unbearable. First of all, they don’t deserve it. Second, it can’t last. Third, if it does last, something else terrible will happen. This is one of the commonest responses of people who suffer from a significant lack of self-esteem, of confidence in their right to be happy.

How many people have had the experience of waking up one morning and noticing that in spite of all sorts of problems, difficulties, worries, you feel wonderful, you feel happy, you feel delighted to be alive? And after a while, you can’t stand it, you have to do something. So you manage to fling yourself back into a state of misery. Or perhaps you are with someone you really care about and you’re feeling very contented, very fulfilled, and then feelings of anxiety or disorientation arise and you feel the impulse to stir up conflict, to make trouble. You can’t keep out of the way and allow happiness to happen. You feel the need to throw a little ‘drama’ into your life. The evidence is clear: for great many people happiness-anxiety is a very real problem - and a powerful barrier to romantic love.

Happiness-anxiety is itself not an uncommon consequence of the failure to achieve adequate separation and individuation. Poor self-esteem and inadequate separation and individuation go hand in hand; they are intimately linked. Without successful separation and individuation I do not sufficiently discover my own strengths; I can very easily persist in the belief that my survival depends on protecting my relationship with my mother and father, at the expense of enjoying the rest of my life.

Suppose that a woman has witnessed the unhappy marriage/life of her parents. It is not uncommon for a child to internalize a subtle message from mother or father to the effect, “You are not to be any happier in your marriage/life than I was in mine.” A woman with inadequate self-esteem, a woman who wants to be a ‘good girl,’ who feel the need to retain mother’s or father’s love at all costs, often proceeds very obediently either to select a husband with whom happiness is clearly impossible or to manufacture unhappiness in a marriage where happiness might have been possible. “I couldn’t bear to let mother see that I was happy in my relationship with a man. She would feel betrayed, she would feel humiliated. I might cause her to feel overwhelmed by her own sense of inadequacy and failure. And I couldn’t do that to her. But beneath this statements are other, clearly evident, feelings, “Mother might become angry at me. Mother might repudiates me, I might lose mother’s love.”

To be as unhappy as mother and father were, is to belong. To be happy may mean to stand alone against mother and father, perhaps against the whole family - and that prospect may be terrifying. For many persons, to be happy romantically means no longer to be a ‘good girl’ or ‘good boy.’ To be happy romantically means to separate from one’s family. This demands a level of independence that many individuals do not achieve.

If we feel that our relationships always seems to be unhappy, always seems to be frustrating, it is relevant to inquire:
Am I allowed to be happy?
Does my view of the life permit it?
Does my childhood programming permit it?
Does my life scenario permit it?

The growth of love in romantic relationships requires an appreciation of the fact that happiness is our human birthright.

If happiness feels natural to me, feels normal, I can allow it, can be open to it, can flow with it; I do not feel the impulse to sabotage and self-destruct. When there is an accepting attitude toward happiness, romantic love grows. When there is a fearful attitude toward happiness, romantic love tends to die. For some individuals, the simple act of allowing themselves to be happy, with the independence and self-responsibility that implies, may be the most heroic act life will ever require of them. How are they to proceed? How are they to do if happiness triggers anxiety?

When we feel happy, and that happiness triggers anxiety and disorientation, we must learn to do nothing, that is, to breathe into our feelings, to allow them, to watch our own process, to enter into the depths of our own experience while at the same time being a conscious witness to it and not be manipulated into behaving self-destructively. Then across time, we can build a tolerance for happiness; we can increase our ability to handle joy without panicking. Slowly, in this manner, we discover that a new way of being is possible. We discover that being happy is far less complicated than we had believed. We discover that, given half a chance, joy is our natural state. Then . . . romantic love is allowed to grow.

Autonomous individual understand that other people do not exist merely to satisfy their needs. They have accepted the fact that no matter how much love and caring may exist between persons, we are each of us, in an ultimate sense, responsible for ourselves.

Autonomous individuals have grown beyond the need to prove to anyone that they are a good boy or a good girl, just as they have outgrown the need for their spouse or romantic partner to be their mother or father.

They are ready for romantic love because they have grown up, because they do not experience themselves as waifs waiting to be rescued or saved; they do not require anyone else’s permission to be who they are, and their egos are not continually ‘on the line.’

An autonomous individual is one who does not experience his or her self-esteem as continually in question or in jeopardy. His or her worth is not a matter of continuing doubt. The source of approval resides within the self. It is not at the mercy of every encounter with another person.

In the best of relationships there are occasional frictions, unavoidable hurts, times when individuals ‘miss’ one another in their responses. The tendency of non-autonomous, immature individuals is to translate such incidents into evidence of rejection, evidence of not really being loved, so small frictions or failures of communication are easily escalated into major conflicts.

Autonomous individuals have a great capacity to ‘roll with the punches,’ to see the normal frictions of everyday life in realistic perspective, not to get their feelings hurt over trivia, or, even if they are hurt occasionally, not to catastrophize such moments.

Further, autonomous individuals respect their partner’s need to follow his or her own destiny, to be alone sometimes, to be preoccupied sometimes, not to be thinking about the relationship sometimes, but rather about other vital matters that may not even involve the partner in any direct sense, such as work, personal developmental needs. So autonomous individuals do not always need to be focus of attention, do not panic when the partner is mentally preoccupied elsewhere. Autonomous individuals give this freedom to themselves as well as to those they love. This is the reason why between autonomous men and women, romantic love can grow.

No matter how passionate the commitment and devotion autonomous men and women may feel toward the one they love, there is still the recognition that space must exist, freedom must exist, sometimes aloneness must exist. There is the recognition that no matter how intensely we love, we are none of us ‘only’ lovers - we are also, in a broader sense, evolving human beings.

Autonomous individuals have assimilated and integrated the ultimate fact of human aloneness. Not resisting it, not denying it, they do not experience it as a burning pain or a tragedy in their lives. Therefore they are not constantly engaged in the effort to achieve, through their relationships, the illusion that such aloneness does not exist. They understand that it is the fact of aloneness that gives romantic love its unique intensity. Their harmony with aloneness is what makes them uniquely competent to participate in romantic love.
When two self-responsible human beings find each other, when they fall in love, they are able, to a degree far above the average, to appreciate each other, to enjoy each other, to see each other for what he or she is, precisely because the other is not viewed as the means of avoiding the fact that each must be responsible for him- or herself. Then they can fall into each other’s arms, then they can love each other, then sometimes one can play the child and the other the parent - and it doesn’t matter, because it is only a game, it is only a moment’s rest; each knows the ultimate truth and is not afraid of it, has made peace with it, has understood the essence of our humanity.

Perhaps the essence of our evolution as human beings is to keep answering, on deeper and deeper levels, the basic question: “Who am I?” We answer that question, we define ourselves, through the acts of thinking, of feeling, and of doing - of learning to take more and more responsibility for our existence and well-being - and of expressing through our work and trough our relationships more and more of who we are. This is the wider meaning of the concept of individuation; it represents a lifelong task.

In the course of our life, our values, goals, and ambitions are first conceived in our mind; that is, they exist as data of consciousness, and then - to the extent that our life is successful - are translated into action and objective reality. They became part of the “out there,” of the world that we perceive. They achieve expression and reality in material form. This is the proper and necessary pattern of human existence. To live successfully is to put ourselves into the world, to give expression to our thoughts, values, and goals. Our life is unlived precisely to the extent that this process fails to occur.

It is a fact of reality that we human beings must live long-range, that we must project our goals into the future and work to achieve them, and that this demands of us the ability and willingness, when and if necessary, to defer immediate pleasures and to endure unavoidable frustrations.

Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. They are more willing to follow their own vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored spaces do not frighten them – or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power.

As human beings, we are linked to all other member of the human community. As living beings, we are linked to all other forms of life. As inhabitants of the universe, we are linked to everything that exists. We stand within an endless network of relationships. Separation and connectedness are polarities, with each entailing the other.

We are all parts of one universe, true enough. But within that universe we are each of us a single point of consciousness, a unique event, a private, unrepeatable world. Of course we interact: we learn from others; we speak a common language, we express our thoughts, describe our desires, communicate about our feelings; we influence and effect one another. But consciousness by its nature is immutably private. We are each of us, in the last analysis, a single point of consciousness - and that is the root of our aloneness.

No one can think for us, no one can feel for us, no one can live our life for us, and no one can give meaning to our existence except ourselves. Aloneness entails self-responsibility.

When we have not matured to the point of being able to accept the fact of our ultimate aloneness, when we are frightened of it, when we try to deny it, we tend to overburden our relationships with an unhealthy dependence that stifles and suffocates them. We do not embrace, we cling. Without air and open space, love cannot breathe. This is the paradox: Only when we stop fighting the fact of our aloneness are we ready for romantic love.

Without an “I” who loves, what is the meaning of love? First, there must be a self - then, the exquisite joy of one self encountering another. In love, the self is celebrated, not denied, abandoned, or sacrificed. For “I” to become “we” and yet remain “I,” is one of the great challenges of marriage.

There is tendency of immature persons to view others primarily, if not exclusively, as sources for the gratification of their own wants and needs, not as human beings in their own right, much as an infant views a parent. So their relationships tend to be dependent and manipulative. It’s encounter of two incomplete beings who look to love to solve the problem of their internal deficiencies, to finish magically the unfinished business of childhood, to fill the holes in their personality, to make of ‘love’ a substitute for evolution to maturity and self-responsibility.

In seeking to be completed by other one generally neglects the development of one’s own wholeness. This is a grievous error: the transformative experience comes from other person. We need to work toward wholeness that we wish the other person would fulfill in us. And we need to focus on the works that need to be done in the areas of our life and live as though our life is our soul mate.

There are many substitutes for wholeness - wealth, power, religion, chemical substances - any of which may momentarily distract us. But the real hunger underlying them is neither known nor satisfied - the hunger for an integrated wholeness. To heal - to integrate the disowned younger self - is to make us whole.

Once we realize what we truly need, we can begin to purposely create wholeness for ourselves and then seek relationships that will celebrate that wholeness. We must elevate the quality of functioning within ourselves to draw the mate suited to us at any particular time. That is to say, we receive what we need, based on what we are.

Perhaps one of the clearest requirements for a successful romantic relationship is that it be based on a foundation of realism. This is the ability and willingness to see our partner as he or she is, with shortcomings as well as virtues, rather than attempting to carry on a romance with a fantasy.

To deal first with the negative case: If I do not see and love my partner as a real person in the real world, instead I elaborate a fantasy about him or her, using the person merely as a springboard for my imagination and my wishes, then I am doomed sooner or later to resent the actual person for not living up to my fantasies. If I choose to pretend that my partner does not have the shortcomings he or she has, if I refuse to include the knowledge of those shortcomings in the overall picture of my partner, later I am likely not only to feel hurt, outraged, and betrayed, but also to cast myself in the role of a bewildered victim. “How can you do this to me?”

The truth is, of course, that on a deeper level, as we have already seen, we know whom we choose - but it is easy enough to deny and disown this knowledge when it seems desirable to do so.

One reason why so many men and women seems to fall in love with a fantasy rather than with the actual person they profess to love is that they have a great many disowned longings, disowned desires, disowned needs, disowned hurts, which they are consciously not aware of, while subconsciously seeking to satisfy, resolve, or heal.
A person unaware of his or her own deepest needs can respond to another on the basis of fairly superficial characteristics if some of those characteristics trigger the hope or belief that in the present relationship those needs can be fulfilled.

For example, a sensitive, intelligent man who was not popular with girls during his teenage years - perhaps he was too serious or too shy - may in his twenties meet a beautiful young woman who is in type and manner just the kind of girl that he never could have had in adolescence. He is fascinated, he is enchanted, and subconsciously he entertains the hope and expectation that if he can win her it would somehow heal the hurt and the loneliness of his adolescence; it would wipe away all the past rejections; it would fulfill all the unrealized dreams of those painful, lonely years. Such are consideration operating within him. It is easy for him to overlook the fact that he and this woman have nothing in common, neither values nor interests nor sense of life nor outlook on important matters, and that if he were somehow to win her, it would not be very long before she would bore him to death. If she does respond to him, if a relationship forms, there may be a great deal of passion and intensity in the beginning; but there is very little mystery as to why such ‘love’ will die.

What would it mean to say, “I love you,” if I neither see you nor know who you are nor exhibit any desire to do so? It can only mean, “Please don’t distract me with the reality of who you are. I am preoccupied with the dream of you.” Many people have an affair with or marry not a person but a fantasy – then resent the person for not being like their fantasy. They do not examine the mental processes that led to their selection of a partner. One of the ways I know you is by observing the ways you affect me. One of the ways I discover who you are is by identifying the ways I experienced myself in our interactions. If we’re willing to look without blinders, if we’re willing to see everything that’s there to be seen, shortcomings as well as strengths – and we still love passionately – that’s what it called mature, romantic love. If I do not know my own values, I am unlikely to be able to articulate what I value in you. If we are strangers to ourselves, others will be strangers to us.

To love a human being is to know and love his or her person. This communion presupposes the ability to see, and with reasonable clarity. Love without sight is not love but self-deception.

On the other hand, when and if we choose to see our partner realistically, not deceiving ourselves, love, if it is real in the first place, has the best of all opportunities to grow. We know whom we are choosing and we are not shocked when our partner acts in character. A very happy married woman said, “An hour after I met the man I married I could have given you a lecture on ways he would be difficult to live with. I think he’s the most exciting man I’ve ever known, but I’ve never kidded myself about the fact that he’s also one of the most self-absorbed. Often he’s like an absence minded professor. He spends a great deal of time in a private world of his own. I had to know that going in, or else I would have been very upset later. He never made any pretenses about the kind of man he was. I can’t understand people who profess to be hurt or shocked at the way their mates turn out. It’s so obvious what people are if you’ll just pay attention. I’ve never been happier in my whole life than I am right now in the marriage. But not because I tell myself my husband is ‘perfect.’ I think that’s why I feel so appreciative of his strength and virtues. I’m willing to see everything.” This is realistic romanticism, not fairy-tale romanticism. When passion and sight are integrated, love can flourish.

One of the characteristic of love relationships that flower is a relatively high degree of mutual self-disclosure - a willingness to let our partner enter into the interior of our private world and a genuine interest in the private world of that partner. This implies that we have created an atmosphere of trust and acceptance, but it implies more than that. It implies first and foremost, that each is willing to know and encounter him- or herself. This is the necessary precondition of the willingness for mutual self-disclosure. One of the greatest obstacles to the sustaining of romantic love: The widespread problem of human self-alienation. Self-alienation tends to make self-disclosure impossible.

The source of this self-alienation - or, as it might better be described, this unconsciousness - springs form several factors. To begin with the most simplest and most obvious:

Many parents ‘teach’ children to repress their feelings. They teach unconsciousness as a positive value, as one of the costs of being loved, found acceptable, regarded as ‘grown up.’ A little boy falls and hurts himself and is told sternly by his father, “Men don’t cry.” A little girl expresses anger at her brother, or perhaps shows dislike toward an older relative, and is told by the mother, “It’s terrible to feel that way. You don’t really feel it.” A child burst into the house, full of joy and excitement, and is told by an irritated parent, “What’s wrong with you? Why do you make so much noise?”

Children also learn to repress their feelings by example. Emotionally remote and inhibited parents tend to produce emotionally remote and inhibited children, not only through their overt communications but also by their own behavior, which proclaims to the child what is ‘proper,’ ‘appropriate,’ ‘socially acceptable.’

Those problems above, which originate in childhood, becomes built into the personality, built into an individual’s manner of being and of coping with life, so that, by the time he or she is an adult, a condition of self-alienation feels ‘normal.’ Yet that which is disowned and repressed does not ease to exist. On another level, it continues to operate within us. Only it is not integrated. So, to the extent that we suffer from self-disowning, we are in a chronic state of disharmony with ourselves. Yet in romantic love it is precisely the self that we wish to make visible and to share. Here what needs to be recognized is that the primary issue is not between me and the other. It is between me and myself.

If we are free to know honestly what we feel and to experience it, then we can decide with whom and in what context it is appropriate to share our inner life. But if we ourselves do not know, if we are forbidden to know, if we are afraid to know, if we ourselves have never encountered who we are - if we are self-alienated - then we are crippled and incapacitated for romantic love.

So much of the joy of love - so much that nurtures love has to do with showing and sharing who we are. Self-disclosure enhances the experience of visibility, makes possible support and validation, stimulates growth. Mutual sell-disclosure opens the door to many of the most precious values that we seek in romantic love.

If we have learned to lecture and reproach ourselves for ‘inappropriate’ feelings, emotions, and reactions, we almost certainly will treat others the same way. We will lecture and reproach our partner, we will lecture and reproach our children. We will encourage the person we love to practice the same self-disowning, the same self-alienation that we practice. This is one of the ways we kill love. This is one of the ways we kill passion. So we must ask ourselves:

· Do I create a context in which my partner can feel free to share feelings, emotions, thoughts, desires, without the fear that I will condemn, attack, launch into a lecture, or simply withdraw?
· And does my partner create such a context for me?

If we cannot answer these questions in the affirmative, we need not wonder at the failure of our relationship. If we can answer in the affirmative, we understand a great deal about its success. When a man and a woman feel free to share their desires, to express their wants, acknowledge their feelings, and communicate concerning their thoughts, with each confident of the other’s interest and engagement in the process, then they are masters of one of the most essential elements in fulfilled romantic love.

Romantic love relationships are made or broken by the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of communication. The essence of mutual self-disclosure is communication. And no element of communication is more important to romantic love than that of feelings and emotions.

Sometimes we feel hurt, we are in pain. We experience a desire to express our state to the person we love. We experience a need to talk about it, to express whatever is happening within us. What we want from our partner is interest, the desire and willingness to listen. We want our emotions to be taken seriously, to be respected. We do not wish to be told, “You shouldn’t feel that.” Or “It’s foolish to feel that.” We do not wish to be lectured. Very often the healing is achieved, or the solution is found through the simple act of expressing our pain. Nothing more is needed. We want our partner to understand that. And our partner needs the same understanding from us. When each can give the same understanding to the other, the bond of love is strengthened.

In fact, by talking about pain, by seeking to express it, a man or woman may activate disowned and denied pain in the partner, which first appear, very often, in the form of anxiety. Out of the wish to escape anxiety, the person cuts the speaker off. The partner does not intend to be cruel, does not really understand what is happening. But communication has failed, and the other may feel abandoned.

The greatest gift we can give a person we love is just to listen, just to be there, just to be available, without any obligation to say something brilliant, or to find a solution, or to cheer our partner up. But to be able to give that to another, we must be able to give it to ourselves. If we are harsh and moralistically judgmental toward our self, we will not treat our partner any better. Self-acceptance is the foundation of acceptance of others. The acceptance of our own feelings is the foundation of our acceptance of the feelings of others.

But suppose it is we ourselves who have somehow contributed to the pain our partner is experiencing. Nothing changes; the principle is the same. The appropriate response is to listen, to give our partner the experience of being heard, to show that we care, to acknowledge our error honestly if we have made one, and to take whatever corrective action seems appropriate. But first - to listen, to accept - not necessarily to agree with, but to accept our partner’s feelings for what they are, and in any event, not to turn into a punitive parent.

Sometimes we experience fear, our partner experiences fear. It helps to be able to express this fear, to talk about it, but often this is very difficult. Most of us have been taught that fear is an emotions to be hidden, to be concealed. We associate being afraid with humiliation. We associate it with ‘the loss of face.’ We associate ‘strength’ with pretending that we do not feel what we feel.

If we can express our fear with honesty and dignity, or listen to our partner’s expression of fear with respect and acceptance, something beautiful can happen. Two people can draw closer. The fear itself, through being accepted and expressed, through being discharged, can disappear.

But here again, we deal with the problem of self-acceptance: How much better can we respond to the fear in our partner than we respond to the fear in ourselves? Can we give our partner permission to feel that which we cannot give ourselves permission to feel? Kindness always begins at home - with kindness to the self.

If communication is to be successful, if love is to be successful, if relationships are to be successful, we must give up the absurd notion that there is something ‘heroic’ or ‘strong’ about lying, about faking what we feel. We must learn that if heroism and strength mean anything, to respect the facts, to accept that that which is, is.

Sometimes we are angry with our partner, or our partner is angry with us. This is entirely normal: it is part of life; it does not mean love has gone. To express anger honestly, to express feelings honestly, to describe what we see, or what we have observed, or what we think has happened, and to describe how we feel about it - clears the air, opens the door to productive communication.

This is entirely different from attacking our partner’s character (character assassination): “You’re always impossible!” “You did this only to hurt me!” “You’re arrogant!” Such expressions are intended not to communicate but to cause pain and in inspiring counteract but they do not succeed in achieving productive communication or conflict resolution.

There is an art to expressing anger. The art does not consist of denying or disowning anger. The art does not consist of smiling while inwardly burning. The art consists of being honest. Honest about what? About one’s own feelings.

If we wish to be in love relationship, we owe to our partner the freedom for him or her to express anger. We owe it to our partner to listen, not to interrupt, not to fight back, but to listen. After our partner is finished, after he or she feels satisfied about having said everything, then and only then is it appropriate to respond. Then, if we believe our partner has misinterpreted the facts, we can point that out. If it is clear that we are in the wrong, the solution is to acknowledge that.

Relationships are not destroyed by honest expressions of anger. But relationship dies every day as a consequence of anger that is not expressed. The repression of anger kills love, kills sex, and kills passion.

It is to our self-interest to know that if our partner is angry at us, he or she will tell us so. It is not to our self-interest to have one who never complains about things that hurt or anger him or her.

The willingness to share our pain, our fear, and our anger serves the growth of romantic love. Unwillingness to do so subverts its growth. So we must ask ourselves:

· To what extent do I create a context in which my partner feels comfortable sharing such feelings with me?

· To what extent do I feel comfortable sharing such feelings with him or her?

If you do not know how to deal sensitively and intelligently with your lover, taking a second lover will probably not enhance your wisdom. It will merely expand the area of your incompetence. Grown-ups carry their own weight – at work and in marriage.

Communication is the lifeblood of a relationship, and this includes, of course, not merely the communication of unhappy feelings, such as those we have just discussed, but also the communication of love, of joy, of excitement, not only the communication of emotions but also the communication of perceptions, thoughts, desires - in other words, the full range of our mental and emotional world.

To ‘share a life’ means far more than merely to live in the same house or to ‘keep company’ with someone; it means to share our inner processes, our inner experience, all that pertains to the self.

Expressing feelings of love and appreciation and desire is vital to the sustaining of a passionate relationship. And yet very often we observe that people are afraid to express such feelings, afraid, to put their feelings into words, afraid to show how much they care, how deeply they feel, so they invent transparently absurd rationalizations to explain their lack of communications. “I married you, didn’t I? What’s more is necessary? Doesn’t that show I love you?”

And stranger still, perhaps, there is often fear of being the recipient of expression of love or appreciation or desire. Often the person feels uncomfortable. Perhaps he or she feels undeserving. In fact, all that is required is to listen, to accept, and to be there.

But what should we do if we experience fear of such intimacy? The solution, as always, is to accept our feelings, to own the fear, to admit it honestly, to allow it to be experienced and expressed, so that it then becomes possible to move beyond it, not to be forever imprisoned by it. We need to ask ourselves:

· Can I accept my partner’s expressions of love? Of joy? Of excitement?

· Can I allow my partner to feel, to experience, and to convey such states, whether or not I am always fully able to share them? Or do I turn my partner off, as others once turned me off, as, perhaps, I have learned to turn myself off?

Small wonder that people who cannot handle the realm of emotion - either happy emotions or unhappy ones - complain that inevitably ‘passion dies.’

If I am afraid to know what I want or to express what I want unambiguously, then too often, rather than own the fear, I blame my partner; I feel hurt and resentment over the fact that my partner has failed to provide that which I have not taken responsibility for knowing what I want, let alone communicating it.

If you are afraid to know what you want or to express it unambiguously to your partner, to take responsibility for it, you might end up blaming your partner. You might feel hurt and resentment over your partner’s lack of ‘sensitivity.’ You aren’t a mind reader? Neither is your partner.

Often there is a great fear of knowing what we want and a greater fear that our partner will not care, will not respond. There is fear that we will put ourselves in his or her hands, to give the partner too much ‘power’ through letting the partner see our naked feelings and desires. There is a fear of self-alienation and there is fear of surrendering to love. There is fear of self-expression. Instead of communication, there is silence, and hurt, and resentment, and self-created loneliness.

We can readily understand how such a situation arises, we can readily understand why it is so common, when we realize how rare it is for a child to be taught that his or her wants matter, how rare it is for a child, even a child who is loved, to have the experience of being taken seriously as a human being, to have his or her feelings taken seriously. If we wish to succeed in romantic love, we need to be aware of the question:

· Do I know what I want?
· Am I willing to express what I want?
· And do I accept the fact that another person may not always be able to give me what I want? Can I allow for that? But no good purpose is served by being afraid to discover the truth.
It needs to be stressed, of course, that no one can always give us what we want, no one can always respond to us just as we would like and just at the moment we would like. No one else exists for the satisfaction of our desires. Honest communication, therefore, has a great deal to do with our willingness and courage to be who we are, to show who we are, to own our thoughts, feelings, and desires - to give up self-concealment as a survival strategy. But we cannot relinquish an error we are unwilling to recognize. So what is needed is a leap into honesty. Just as romantic love is not for children, so it is not for liars, or for cowards. Honesty and courage serve the growth of romantic love. Dishonesty and cowardice inevitably subvert it.

I am thinking of couples who have succeeded in sustaining love over long periods of time. Very commonly the two people will ask each other, “What do you think? What do you feel?” They will watch each other with genuine interest; they will lean forward with excitement, their eyes sparking with awareness. They enjoy communicating what they see or sense about the other. The excitement in their relationship is the reflection of an excitement existing within each of them as individuals.

We stay alive, psychologically, by staying in touch with our feelings, with our emotions, with our thoughts and longings and desires and judgments - with everything that pertains to the world of our inner experience. And we keep our relationship alive by sharing this inner world, by exploring it, by expressing it, by making it part of the lived reality of our existence. And this includes, as an essential feature, remaining sensitive to what we see in our partner and to how he or she affects us, the feelings and thoughts our partner inspires in us, all of which pertain to the issue of psychological visibility.

The desire for visibility is by no means an expression of a weak or uncertain ego, or low self-esteem. On contrary, the lower the self-esteem, the more we feel the need to hide, the more ambivalent our feelings toward visibility are likely to be: we both long for and are terrified by it. The more we take pride in who we are, the more transparent we are willing to be. The more transparent we are eager to be.

In successful romantic love, there is a unique depth of absorption by and fascination with the being and personality of the partner. Hence for each there can be a powerful experience of visibility which creates a powerful bond. It is supremely important to know how to make your partner feel visible: seen, understood, and appreciated.

Your desire for love from others is inseparable from your desire for visibility. Think about it. If someone professed love for you but when talking about what he or she found loveable named characteristics you did not think you possessed, did not especially admire, and could not personally relate to, you would hardly feel nourished or loved. You do not merely wish to be loved; you wished to be loved for reasons that are personally meaningful to you and that are congruent with your perception of yourself. Celebrities and beautiful people in general often feel invisible in spite of having numerous admirers precisely because they recognize that their fans are in love with their own fantasy of the person, not the real person.

We are told constantly that we must love everyone: Leaders of some religious movements declare that they ‘love’ followers they have never met. Enthusiasts of personal growth workshops and encounter-groups emerge from such experiences announcing that they ‘love’ all people, everywhere. I do not think their words and perception of their feelings are congruent. It is possible to feel benevolence and goodwill toward human beings one does not know or does not know very well. It is not possible to feel love. Love by its very nature entails a process of selection, of discrimination. Love is our response to that which represents our highest values. Love is a response to distinctive characteristics possessed by some beings but not by all.

Relationship can starve to death through silence, the absence of this flow of energy between two people, the absence of exchanging the experience of visibility. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to express one’s feelings when we are hurt or angry. If we fail to do so, after a time we bury more than hurt and anger; love and appreciation tend to be submerged as well. We become silent, withdrawn, and remote. In suppressing negative feelings, we also disown positive ones, building a protective wall of indifference. Our partner is now experienced not as a source of pleasure but as sources of pain against which we protect ourselves by numbness, we ‘shut down,’ refuse to give our partner the pleasure of feeling visible and appreciated. But then where does our relationship go from there? It becomes a dead end.

We all know that nothing gives us the experience of being loved as much as when we feel that we are a source of joy to our partner. The smile of pleasure on our partner’s face when we enter the room, a glance of admiration aimed at something we have done, an expression of sexual desire or excitement, an interest in what we are thinking or feeling even when we have not explained, a conveyed sense of joy from being in contact with us or simply from watching us – these are the means by which the experience of visibility and of being loved are created. And these are the means by which we create the experience for our partner.

One of the pleasures of romantic love that nurtures the relationship is talking about what you enjoy and appreciate in each other. When your lover conveys that you are a source of pleasure, you feel loved.

Among the many rewards of love is the opportunity to share your excitement and be nourished by the excitement of another.

There are many complex reasons for falling in love with someone. Not all of them are self-evident. One of the pleasures of lovers is seeking to identify on deeper and deeper levels the traits that inspire and excite them in each other. The process can go on for years and can be a source of increasing pleasure and intimacy.

The foundation of a relationship lies in basic similarities. The excitement of a relationship lies, to an important extent, in complementary differences. The two together constitute the context in which romantic love is born. When a man and a woman experience differences as complementary, they experience them as stimulating, challenging, exciting - a dynamic force that enhances feelings of aliveness, expansion, and growth.

In fact, one way we gain deeper insight into a love relationship is to ask ourselves:
What parts of myself does my lover bring me into fresh contact with?
How do I experience myself in this relationship?
What feels most alive within me in the presence of this person?
In what ways are we alike?
In what ways that we enjoy and are stimulated by – are we different?
In answering these questions, we can come to appreciate some of the most important reasons why we have fallen in love with a particular person.

Can anything be more inspiring than to allow our partner to see the excitement that he or she stimulates in us? Unfortunately, many of us were raised to conceal such excitement, to subdue and submerge it, to extinguish it in order to appear grown up - so we are afraid to let our partner see how much we feel, how much love radiates through us, how much pleasure our mate can inspire.

Or perhaps we want to express our excitement, we want to communicate it, and it is our partner who withdraws, who turns us off, who signals that such messages are better left un-communicated, even by the excitement that he or she ignites. But fear of excitement kills romantic love. If our partner is not comfortable with excitement, in the end he or she will not be comfortable with love, even the love we feel for him or her. And if we do not feel that our partner is the friend of our excitement, then no matter how much he or she may profess to love us, we cannot feel fully visible, we cannot feel fully loved, we cannot feel fully accepted - and we cannot even feel that our love for our partner is fully accepted.

Our partner manner of treating us is only a reflection of the manner of treating him- or herself, just as our manner of treating our partner is only a reflection of our manner of treating ourselves. If we cannot accept the excitement within ourselves, if we do not feel free to show it, how can we hope to do better by the excitement in anyone else?


Interlude: An Experiment in Intimacy

A homework assignment – an experiment in intimacy: A couple was to spend twelve hours together in the same room, entirely alone. No book, no television, no phone calls; not even any walks outside. No distractions of any kind. And no naps during this twelve-hour session, either. They were to arrange for someone to take care of their children for the day.

Ideally, the experiment should be conducted in a hotel room where they could get room service, so no time would be spent on preparing meals. Except for going to the bathroom, they were to remain together at all times.

They must agree that no matter what either of them says, nether will leave the room. They could sit for several hours in absolute silence if they chose to, but they must remain together.

They would be free, during these twelve hours, to talk about anything they wished, provided it was personal. It could be about themselves or about their relationship. But no talk of work, the children’s schoolwork, or any such subject. Their focus must remain on themselves.

The premise behind this assignment is that, when all avenues of escape are closed off, people will often experience real breakthroughs in communication. As the hours pass, they find themselves talking from a deeper and deeper place within themselves. The results are often a breakthrough in their understanding of each other. They have probably spent hundreds of hours talking in restaurants, but never talked about things they talk during those twelve hours.

A twelve-hour session of this kind, participated in at least once a month, can produce the most radical changes in the quality of the relationship. One of the changes is the unexpected discovery of communication skills they did not even dream they could possess. And the results are often far more powerful than those achieved through marriage counseling.

There is no aphrodisiac in the world so powerful and, in the end, so reliable, as authentic communication that flows from the core of one being to the core of another.

I am reminded of a famous actress-singer I once saw being interviewed on television. The interviewer commented on the astonishing number of projects and engagements in which she had been involved during the past several years. “I like to keep busy,” she smiled. The interviewer sighed gravely, “I’m the same way - always running from one project to another, always juggling twelve balls in the air. Why do we do it?” Her smile vanished, and she said slowly, thoughtfully, a little sadly, “For myself . . . I’m afraid that if I ever stop running, if I ever stop doing things all the time, if I ever get off the treadmill and allow myself to look inside . . . I’ll find out there’s nothing there.” Nodding in silence, eloquent understanding, the interviewer responded, “Yeah.” What made the interview significant was the subject willingness to articulate explicitly what millions feel but do not name.

If a human being is always on the run, always engaged in ‘doing something,’ he or she has little or no chance for self-encounter and self-exploration. We need time of stillness to enter into ourselves, to experience who we are, to revitalize ourselves. The same thing is true of two people in a relationship. A relationship needs time, it needs leisure.

A couple may run from the tennis court to the bridge table to the Saturday night dance at their club, and insist that they are truly sharing life, and not notice that they spend no time encountering each other. They are together, but they never meet.

You may ask, “How do you find the time for that intimacy?”
The answer is, “How do you find the time for your work?”
You may answer back, “That’s important.”
“Well, when and if you decide that love really matters to you as much as your work, when success in your relationship with the woman you love becomes as much imperative as success in your career, you won’t ask: How does one find time? As much as you won’t ask: How does one find time for work?

It is generally recognized that creativity requires leisure, an absence of rush, time for the mind and imagination to float and wander and roam, time for the individual to descend into the depths of his or her psyche, to be available to the barely audible signals rustling for attention. Space must be created in the mind to leap out of its accumulated ruts, to part from the mechanical, the known, the standard, and generate a leap into the new.

A person who schedules every moment of the day out of fear of ever being bored or having nothing to do is condemned to living on the surface of his or her mind, living superficially, living mechanically, living off the known and the familiar, because the new resides in the depths and, for entry into the depths, time without activity is needed.

Virtually all of the qualities and attitudes needed for the fulfillment of romantic love require maturity.

To nurture another human being, in the sense meant here, is to accept him or her unreservedly; to respect his or her sovereignty and integrity; to support his or her growth and self-actualization needs; and to care, on the deepest and most intimate level, about his or her thoughts, feelings, and wants. It is to create a context and environment in which a person can live and flourish.

To nurture another human being means to accept that person as he or she is, and yet to believe in the possibilities within that person still unrealized. It is to be honest with that person about our own needs and wants, and always to remember that the other person does not exist merely to satisfy our needs and wants. It means to express confidence in the person’s strengths and internal resources, and yet be available to offer help when it is asked for (and sometimes to recognize that it might be needed even when it is not being asked for). It is to create a context in which the person can experience that he or she matters, that the expression of thoughts and feelings will be welcomed, and yet to understand that there are times when what our partner needs is silence and aloneness.

Without any implication of immaturity, there exists in each one of us the child we once were, and there are times when that child too needs nurturing. We need to be aware of the child in ourselves and in our partner. We need to be in good relationship with that child. To nurture someone we love is to nurture the child as a valid part of who that person is. To nurture is to love not only our partner’s strength but also his or her fragility, not only that within our partner which is powerful but also that which is delicate.

It is this pattern of mutual caring and nurturing that we can observe between men and women who love each other and who know how to love. Out of the fullness of their own being comes their ability to nurture. Out of their sensitivity to their needs, they are sensitive to the needs of their partner. It is easy enough to understand why for such persons love grows. And it is also easy to understand why, in the absence of such understanding and such nurturing love tends to diminish, dry up, and die.

To be nurtured is to experience that I am cared for. Not to be nurtured is to be deprived of the experience that I am cared for.

Of all the nonsense written about love, none is more absurd than the notion that ideal love is selfless. What we love is the embodiment of our values in another person; properly understood, love is profound act of self-assertion. When we love, our concept of our self-interest expands to embrace the well-being of our partner. That is the great compliment of love: to declare to another human being that his or her happiness is of selfish importance to us. It would hardly be a compliment to tell a person we love that his or her well-being and happiness are not of selfish interest to us.

To help us understand this, let us ask ourselves whether we want our lover to caress us unselfishly, with no personal gratification in doing so, or do we want our lover to caress us because it is a joy and a pleasure for him or her to do so?
And let us ask ourselves whether we want our partner to spend time with us, alone together, and to experience the doing as an act of self-sacrifice? Or do we want our partner to experience such time as glory?

Even in the most intimate and loving relationships, we need to be aware of and to respect our own needs and wants. Not that compromise and accommodation have no place in a love relationship; obviously they have. But if too often I ignore or sacrifice my own needs and wants in order to please or satisfy you, I commit a crime against both of us: against myself because of the treason I commit to my own values - and to you, because in allowing you to be the collector of my sacrificial offerings I am allowing you to become someone I will resent. It is not self-sacrifice that romantic love requires, but a grown-up’s understanding of selfishness - rational or enlightened selfishness.

Our sexual responses are always an expression of the self, always an expression of who we are, but that is not necessarily how we experience them. It is generally recognized that anti sexual messages absorbed in childhood from parents and religious teachers encourage and exacerbate sexual self-alienation. The tendency then is to view sex as the darker and least acceptable side of the self.

When we enjoy healthy self-esteem, when we feel love of ourselves and in harmony with ourselves, then sex is a natural and spontaneous expression of our feelings for our partner, for ourselves, and for life. If we are not divided against ourselves, if we are not engaged in a constant struggle to ‘prove’ our worth or to ‘prove’ anything, then we are free to enjoy our own being, to enjoy the state of being alive, to enjoy and appreciate our partner; we do not experience a split between mind and body, between spirit and flesh, between admiration and passion. Then we truly think and feel that our partner is wonderful; we take pride in the direction of our sexual desires. When sex is experienced as an expression of our aliveness, of our joy in being, then a major road has been opened to the fulfillment of romantic love. Through the giving and receiving of sexual pleasure lovers continually reaffirm that they are a source of joy to each other. Joy is a nutrient of love: it makes love grow.

If sex involves an act of self-celebration; if, in sex, you desire the freedom to be spontaneous, to be emotionally open and uninhibited, to assert your right to pleasure, and to flaunt your pleasure in your own being - then the person you most desire is the person with whom you feel freest to be who you are, the person who you regard as an appropriate psychological mirror, the person who reflects your deepest view of yourself and of life. The essence of romantic love is this: I see you as a person, and because you are what you are, I love and desire you - for my happiness in general and my sexual happiness in particular.

When we love passionately, the act of sex is experienced as anything but ‘merely a physical act,’ because it is such a powerful vehicle for our expression of love. It is not only our bodies that meet in bed, it is our souls. Indeed, soulful relationship - the spiritual bonds between two people is a true joy and it brings fulfillment.

The admiration between two people is the most powerful support system a relationship can have, the most powerful foundation. Consequently there is the greatest likelihood that the couple will be able to handle the pressures and weather the storms that inevitably are a part of life and, therefore, sooner or later part of every relationship. This is important question to ask, “Do I admire my partner?”

In receiving admiration we feel visible, appreciated, loved, and thus reinforced in our love for our partner. In experiencing and expressing admiration, we feel pride in our choice of mate, confirmed in our judgment, and strengthened in our feelings of love. Two lovers who profoundly admire each other know a form of delight that is a continuing source of fuel to romantic love. When high-self-esteem people fall in love, admiration is most likely to be at the core of their relationship. They are most likely to admire and be admired. Small wonder that when a man and woman admire each other, love tends to grow.

A great deal of so-called war of the sexes is a result of a fear of rejection, abandonment, or loss. Often, men and women experience great resistance to owning how much they need each other, how important the opposite sex is for the enjoyment of life and the fulfillment of their own masculine or feminine potentialities. Often there is almost hatred of the fact that we need the opposite sex as much as we do.

Since people have already experienced painful feelings of rejection in childhood they are, in effect, ‘primed’ for catastrophe, ‘primed’ for tragedy when, as adults, they fall in love. They ‘know’ that love means pain, hurt, non-acceptance, and loss. In addition to childhood experiences they may have been emotionally bruised or battered in earlier love affairs. So they ‘know’ that love means torment.

Men and women need each other. That should make them friends. Instead, too often, it makes them enemies because of the fear and anticipation of being hurt. It is not the fear as such that causes the damage, but the denial of the fear, the refusal to own it and to deal with it honestly. Each senses this hostility in the other, and his or her own fear and hostility are subsequently reinforced. If it is a love affair, it is a love affair between two fortresses. When there is trouble between them the man or woman does not say, “I love you and I am frightened of losing you.” He or she says, “I am no longer so sure I love you.” It takes courage to say, “I’m afraid.” It is precisely men and women who are self-assured and self-confident who exhibit least anxiety in surrendering to love. It requires a high level of self-esteem and a strong sense of personal autonomy to express vulnerability.

We have recognized that change and growth are of the very essence of life. Two human beings, each pursuing separate paths of development, can encounter each other at a point in time where their wants and needs are congruent and can share their journey over a period of years with great joy and nourishment for both. But a time can come when their paths diverge, where urgent needs and values impel them in different directions.

There is an example of a romance between a twenty-two year old woman and a forty-one year old man. Looking at the older man, she saw a maturity she had never experienced in a man, combined with an excitement for life that seemed to match her own; looking at her, he saw in her eyes an appreciation of his excitement and a radiant excitement of her own that he had not experienced before. They fell in love; for a while they were ecstatically happy together. Time passed and frictions slowly and subtly developed between them. She wanted to be free, to play, to experiment - in a word, to be young; he wanted the stability of a firm commitment. Gradually they saw how different were their respective stages of development and, consequently, many of their wants and needs. They felt compelled to say good-bye. But was their relationship a failure? I do not think they would say so. Each one of them gave the other something beautiful, something nourishing and memorable.

We have heard so much about the gratifications and rewards of raising a family. Those gratifications can be very real. Who can deny the joy of creating a new life and watching it grow? But it is the other side of the story that now needs more attention.

Let us begin with the observation that, as recent studies reveal, many mothers, if given a second chance, would choose not to have children. This is hardly surprising. Of course once children are born they normally become attached to them and love them. This does not alter the fact, that, looking back over their lives, many women feel, “From what I know today, I see that I could have had a very different life and a more rewarding one had I chosen not to have children.”

And yet women are raised with the view that they are to achieve their destiny through the role of wife and mother. They are educated to define themselves solely in terms of their relationships - to a man and to children. In both cases, ‘femininity’ is associated with ‘service.’ The most important thing a woman has to learn in this context is that she has the right to exist. This is the core issue. She has the right to exist and she is responsible for her own life. She is a human being, not a breeding machine whose destiny is to serve others. In other words, women have to learn intelligent and honorable selfishness. There is nothing beautiful or noble about self-annihilation.

A great many women in recent studies have confessed that they struggled very hard to persuade themselves that they had ‘a maternal instinct’ in order to feel that they were ‘truly feminine.’ Then they go on to acknowledge that after having had three or four children they have to confront the fact that the notion is absurd and has no basis in their own immediate, honest experiences.

Life consists of making choices. Whatever choice we make, there will be consequences. Every choice creates its own problems and generates its own difficulties. “Take what you want, and pay for it.” Mature people project consequences in advance - and take responsibility for their actions. Sometimes, it is true, we cannot foresee all the consequences of an action; but if we choose to take it anyway, we need to be clear about our uncertainty and about the fact that consequences we may not like will follow.

Each one of us has many more potentialities and many more impulses than we are ever going to be able to actualize. Even if there are certain inherent impulses to become a mother, this does not mean that those impulses must be followed.

For example, we all probably experience sexual attraction for a great many people across the course of our lifetime. We do not make love to them all, we discriminate. We choose. We evaluate our responses and our inclinations in the light of our long-term goals and interests or we should. So it is essential to ask ourselves: In the total context of what I want from my life, how will children affect those goals? Am I prepared to give that which the proper raising of children requires?

Further, in considering the impact of children on a man/woman relationship, consider this: Couples are able to take a great many risks, in the interests of advancing their growth and development, that are far more difficult when they have children. For example, one can throw over a boring, unrewarding job and take a chance on some new ventures more easily if no one is involved but two adult individuals who are quite capable of taking care of themselves. But with children? The whole situation becomes different. How many great opportunities are passed by, how many chances are not taken, how much growth is stifled because a man or woman is afraid to make a move that might threaten the well-being of children? And if, because we have allowed too many opportunities to pass us by, our lives feel more and more weighted, more and more colorless, it is foolish to imagine that romantic love will remain unaffected.

Studies clearly indicate that contrary to the popular myth, children do not help a marriage but tend to make it harder for the marriage to proceed happily. Studies reveal that friction between couples tends to increase with the birth of the first child and the relationship between the couple begins to improve when the last child leaves home.

Another kind of problem is presented to romantic love when one member of a couple desires to have children and the other does not. Obviously this is an issue that is best resolved before marriage. A couple planning to get married should visualize where they see themselves being in five years, how they see their life, and then share their image of the future with each other. Sometimes they discover in this manner that they have very different goals, very different dreams. Care and thought must be given to negotiating those differences; otherwise it is almost inevitable that romantic love will be a casualty.

It is not hard to understand why two people who love each other would want to share the adventure of creating a new human being. I am hardly arguing that no one should have children. My argument is against having children as a matter of routine, or blind social tradition, or out of a sense of duty, or out of the need to prove one’s femininity or masculinity.
Particularly to be admired are those men and women who, choosing thoughtfully and responsibly to have children, know how to preserve the integrity of their love relationship against the demands of parenthood. To accomplish this is no easy task.

Sometimes couples fight; sometimes they feel alienated. Sometimes our partner may do something that hurts or exasperates us. Sometimes we or our partner want passionately to be alone for awhile. None of this is unusual or abnormal. None of it is inherently a threat to romantic love.

One of the characteristic of mature love is the ability to know that we can love our partner deeply and nonetheless know moments of feeling enraged, bored, alienated, and that the validity and value of our relationship is not to be judged by moment-to-moment, day-to-day, or even week–to-week fluctuations in feeling. There is a fundamental equanimity, an equanimity born of the knowledge that we have a history with our partner, we have a context, and we do not drop that context under the pressure of immediate vicissitudes. We retain the ability to see the whole picture. We do not reduce our partner to his or her last bit of behavior and define him or her solely by means of it.

In contrast, one of the manifestations of immaturity is an inability to tolerate temporary discord, temporary frustration, temporary alienation, and to assume in the face of distressing conflicts or difficulties that the relationship is finished.

We need the ability to remain in contact with the essence of our relationship in the face of temporary mishaps, conflicts, hurts, or estrangement. We need the ability to see the essence of our partner, past what our partner may be doing at this moment. We need not to step outside the moment but to see the essence of our relationship and our partner in the moment, even when the moment is not a happy one. Then, even our times of struggle can in the end strengthen love.

A man very much in love with his wife said, “No matter how upset she sometimes get with me - and believe me sometimes her eyes are really blazing - her face always shows that she loves me and that she knows it, even at that moment. I feel very good because the other day she said the same is true of me; she said my eyes always show that I love her, no matter what else I’m feeling.” Clearly this is one of the secrets of self-rejuvenating relationships.

When men and women embark on a career in their twenties or thirties that they intend to pursue across a lifetime, they rarely assume that the next forty or fifty years will be one smooth flight from triumph to triumph. If they have any maturity at all, they know there will be high points and low points, unexpected detours, unforeseeable problems and challenges, occasional crisis, and days when they will wake up in the morning wondering why they chose this particular career and whether they are really suited for it.

But when men and women embark on that journey called marriage (or any serous relationship), they tend to do so with far less realistic appreciation of the challenges and vicissitudes that awaits them. The decision to marry is, rationally, the decision to share a journey, to share an adventure, not to lock oneself away in some womblike, unchanging paradise. No such paradise exists.

It is sometimes argued that since so many couples suffer feelings of disenchantment shortly after marriage, the experience of romantic love must be a delusion. Yet many people experience disenchantment during their careers somewhere along the line, but it is not commonly suggested that the pursuit of a fulfilling career is a mistake. Many people experience some degree of enchantment in their children, but it is not commonly supposed that the desire to have children and to be happy about them is inherently immature and neurotic. Instead it is generally recognized that achieving happiness in one’s career or success in child-rearing is more difficult than is ordinarily supposed. Precisely the same should be drawn about romantic love.

Being romantic means treating the relationship as important, behaving in ways that underscore its importance. The fact that you and your partner love each other does not guarantee that you will be able to create a joyful and rewarding relationship. Love per se does not ensure maturity and wisdom; yet without these qualities love is in jeopardy. Love does not automatically teach communication skills, effective methods of conflict resolution, or the art of integrating your love into the rest of your existence; yet the absence of such knowledge can lead to the death of love. Love does not produce self-esteem; it may reinforce and nurture it, but it cannot create it; still, without self-esteem love is difficult or impossible to sustain.

The desire for permanence, especially when we are deeply happy, the desire to hold the moment forever, may be thoroughly understandable; but such an arrangement cannot be had. Stillness is impossible. The moment can be lived, but it cannot be captured. Not because love is impermanent - love can be the most permanent thing in our lives - but because change and motion are the most natural things in this universe. We must be in the moment, feel it, experience it, then let go, then move on - to the next moment and the next adventure.

Just as human being does not remain immutable but evolves through stages of development, so do relationships. And in each case, different stages have their own challenges and their own distinctive gratifications. When a new relationship is forming there is the excitement and stimulation of novelty; there is also the anxiety of not knowing whether or not the relationship will grow and prevail. Later, with greater security and stability, there is some loss of the excitement and novelty; there is the serenity of problems solved, of understanding achieved, and the joy of discovering that harmony contains its own excitement.

Sometimes, especially when problems that need to be faced and solved arise in a relationship, there is a turning away from the present and a longing for the past, a yearning for what cannot possibly recur.

Sometimes a couple break up, not because their growth and development require it, as they may tell themselves, but because one of them fought and resisted the process of the other’s evolution. One of them tried to freeze a moment that had already vanished. One of them lacked the flexibility and inner security to allow the emerging change to happen, to flow with it, to learn what new possibilities might open for both of them.

A man may have held the same job for fifteen years; suddenly or not so suddenly he is dissatisfied, he is bored, he feels unfulfilled, he wants a new challenges. His wife is bewildered and frightened. What will happen? Will they be as financially secure as they were in the past? Why is he losing interest in their friends? Why has he taken to reading so much? Is he going to become interested in other woman next? She panics. When he tries to explain his feelings, she does not listen. She is terrified of losing what she has. And out of her terror she proceeds to lose it.

Another example, a husband complains that his wife is scatterbrained that she cannot even balance her checkbook. He loves her, he says, but how he wishes she were more mature! Something happens; through some mysterious process of growth he had not noticed, she becomes more responsible. She takes an interest in his business. She asks intelligent questions. She decides to start a business of her own. He is devastated; what has happened to the wonderful little girl he was so happy with? She looks into his eyes and see the enemy of her self-realization. She wants his love, she wants their marriage, but she wants to be a human being too. Shall she revert to being a little girl again and hate her husband for the rest of her life? Shall she continue to fight for her own development and drive her husband away? These are the kind of hard and painful choices that many a couples has to face.

Every relationship has a system. And in a system when one part or component changes, the other parts and components must changes also or else equilibrium is lost. If one partner grows and the other partner resists growth, disequilibrium arises, then a crisis, then a resolution, or a divorce, or worse than a divorce: a long, slow process of disintegration made of dying love, bewildered anguish, and hatred. A waste of two lives in an empty marriage or relationship is a tragedy.

If we have the self-confidence and the wisdom to be the friend of our partner’s growth, then that growth need not be a danger or a threat. But if we set ourselves against it, we only invite tragedy. And by the same token, if we attempt to protect our relationship by aborting our own growth and evolution, again we invite tragedy. We deprive ourselves and our relationship aliveness. Life is motion. Not to move forward is to move backward. If I am not evolving, I am decaying. If my relationship is not getting better, it is getting worse. If my partner and I are not growing together, we are dying together.

Here again we can see the important of self-esteem to the success of romantic love. It is self-esteem that gives us the courage not to fight change, not to fight growth, not to fight the next moment of our existence. And the exercise of that courage in turn strengthens our self-esteem.

Our greatest chance at permanence lies in our ability to handle change. Love has the greatest chance to endure when it does not fight the flow of life but learns to join with it. If my partner and I feel that we are truly the friends of each other’s growth, then that is one more bond between us, one more force to support and strengthen our love. If we do have the wisdom and courage to be the friend of our partner’s dreams and aspiration, then we have the very best chance that our love will indeed be ‘forever.’

When a man and woman with significant spiritual and psychological affinities encounter each other and fall in love, if they have evolved beyond the level of problems and difficulties described in this study if they are beyond the level of merely struggling to make their relationship ‘work,’ then romantic love becomes the pathway not only to sexual and emotional happiness but also to the higher reaches of human growth. It becomes the context for a continuing encounter with the self, through the process of interaction with another self. Two consciousnesses, each dedicated to personal evolution, can provide an extraordinary stimulus and challenge to the other. The ecstasy can become a way of life.