Romantic Love is Sacrifice?
What is Love? I think that’s a fair place to start by simply defining the emotion before I begin to work out my thoughts around it. However, before I get into the what I want to briefly talk about the why. A very close friend of mine out of the blue sent me a list of words describing what it means to be in love. It was a list of 66 words to be exact and I won’t list them all, but some words I think many would have on their own personal list such as passion, support and trust. What struck me the most is she also included: selfish, conflict and sadness. Those words really didn’t sit well with me. My intuition didn’t feel right having selfish, conflict and especially sadness as words to be used to describe romantic love. When I spoke with her about my hesitation accepting these negative emotions in describing love her response was “Real love has all the other things to make it thriving and functional. I think everything combined makes the love pronounced and worth it. Love takes everything”. Her answer fascinated me because what I get from her response is that love is a fight, love is very much pain as it is happiness and ultimately, she is mistaking the journey of forging a strong love as love itself. So, what is my definition of romantic love? Love is the transcendence of two people continuing to want to make the choice to better help or support someone achieve their own fulfillment in any context.
As I’ve said before working to achieve fulfillment or happiness (as I define it) is what we’re all trying to accomplish. Love is essentially the expression of that accomplishment or the support to achieving such accomplishment. When I’ve asked people who claim to be in love why do they love the person they are with? A common response I receive is “because they make me happy”. All positive emotions are combined to lead towards happiness which can transcend into love. The negative emotions we feel steams from the absence of love. I’ve recently been looking into research on many personality disorders and it is interesting how they’re linked to lack of love during adolescence. The absence of love does terrible things to us in any context. I’m not a stranger to that idea, in college I once said “Love is the addiction with the side effect of pain.” But, now I know that if love was an addiction then pain isn’t a side effect, it’s withdraw. Very much like my friend who made the list, when I talk to people about my view on love they often get confused that I’m speaking of the journey to establish love and/or the journey to strengthen love. Which just isn’t the case.
We’ve always viewed the world in a dualistic way. Ying and Yang, Good vs Evil, Right vs. Wrong, and Love vs. Hate. We wouldn’t understand an up without having a down. We wouldn’t really know a good movie until we’ve seen a bad one. How can we know what is right without any idea of what is wrong. Comparison gives us perspective, which changes our perception, which shapes our personal realities. This is where the confusion steams from in viewing the journey to love either negative or positive as love itself. Those of you already building a up a defense reading what I just wrote know I’m not discrediting that growing from negative experiences can strengthen love, in fact negative experiences are crucial for gaining perspective. I’m just not okay with calling those negative experiences love. When a couples love is strengthened from overcoming obstacles or differences that is done from the comparison of fearing or experiencing a brief absence of love and when its regained love is viewed at a higher level because we’ve gained perspective of its worth; where the cliché “didn’t realize what I had until it was gone” comes from. In the spirt of duality however, we must be careful because comparison can also cause a reverse effect and warp perspective in a negative way. It’s dangerous to continually compare what you don’t have to what you do, instead of what you do have and what others don’t. Classic example is looking at eight ounces of water in a sixteen-ounce glass and viewing the glass either as half empty or half full. Either view isn’t wrong, but one view does negate negative emotion better than the other. Let’s say the sixteen-ounce glass is our lives and the eight ounces of water is happiness. The glass is either half full or empty, but taking a pitcher of water and adding eight more ounces fills the glass. In my life it’s the perception of what can be added and not what has already been taken away. I pitch optimism because emotions can be as equally destructive as helpful and perception is a powerful tool to overcome being bested by emotion and that is even more so with a powerful emotion such as love. When I get on social media and see all these people that I shared a childhood with getting married, having children and starting families. I’m not sad by not having them myself, I’m excited for when I’m finally there. Our thoughts manifest our emotions good or bad, so negative emotions that are often linked to love such as jealousy, anger and sadness can easily wreak havoc on our state of minds and they waste a lot of energy that can be redirected to better things or emotions. If we work on how we structure our thinking and perception it can decrease negative emotion tenfold. I can say that with 100% confidence experiencing this first hand by spending a lot of my life choosing to focus on changing my perspectives to arrive at a situation where positive emotions can manifest over negative ones. I’m constantly trying to work on my own perception and working to better understand love in a way to try and reduce suffering from it. Which is why I view unconditional romantic love to be extremely dangerous. Anyone can agree that if someone you claim to love will continue to make choices to harm your personal fulfillment over enough time that love will fade. So, instead of putting in so much extra time that isn’t needed and putting yourself through personal turmoil by justifying it as unconditional love, you can reduce your personal suffering by already being aware that them making the choice to support your fulfillment is part of the equation for love once love is established.
I’ve always had friends throughout my life that’ve been in very unhappy relationships and continue to be in them because they’ve reasoned themselves in believing that love can be one sided. Yes he doesn’t do this or that, but I love him, so I continue on. I’m unhappy, but I can’t leave him because it will ruin his life. We split the bills and I can’t afford to be on my own. These perceptions of love will continue to cause us to suffer unnecessary. So why not change your perspective before we get to these points? Does your partner reason you out of your own perceptions? Watch out for false reasoning because it happens. That is why communicating and understanding our own reasons is so important. If you think of love only being achieved by giving and receiving it will be clear that love has nothing to do when the person you are with will continue to take away from your fulfillment. The idea of having to hold someone above water letting yourself drown is not okay. I take a lot of time reflecting in any failed relationship and constantly work towards being honest with myself and being aware of my own false reasoning. Getting outside options really does help. A metaphor I use a lot is that if you’re in the picture you only see the small lenses of the camera, but if you are taking the picture you see everything, so outside perspectives are important to work on better understanding your own.
Love is a dance between two people. Love isn’t absolute and it always changing. People can fall in love just as fast as they fall out of love, or love can change in its context. I may not love my ex’s in a romantic sense anymore, but I still love them in a friend context as in I hope the best for them and very much want any of my ex romantic partners to succeed in whatever quest towards their own happiness ends up becoming. If you haven’t ever read the love languages by Gary Chapman I recommend giving it a read. It will teach you that love not only has many different forms of being communicated, you learn that once love is established and is strongly communicated it’s simply a choice. We can choose to acknowledge and try to better understand what would help the people we love achieve happiness in all contexts and make the choice to help them do that and it’s vice versa.
Love doesn’t have to be a grind or struggle. Every break up that has been described to me can be stemmed to problems with communication and making choices to hurt rather than help. It’s the most important factor that love needs to survive. Once one communications what they need to feel loved (in whatever language they need to understand it in), it becomes the other’s choice to help or hinder. With myself personally I’ve always had a high number of close female friends in my life, so when I have a significant other I hold intimacy and affection at a very high level because that is the clear divide between romantic vs. friendship love. I will openly admit that no person will be 100% equal and compromising will be a part of any form of love, but even with compromising it should never be a grind or struggle. I’m not okay with manipulating the idea of romantic love to support the pain that is caused from a person you believe loves you, by your love for them. We also have a fear of change to consider as well. The power of fearing change is a dangerous one. The more we connect our lives with someone the harder it is to detach from them once we learn they are hindering rather than helping. Another reason why unconditional love is trouble because it promotes longevity when it shouldn’t be there. Why use love to justify that pain? That pain is really from the lack of love being received by the choices made by your partner. It’s freeing once this idea is understood. The understanding of love should be to continually try to work towards helping each other to not only continue having romantic happiness, but also to achieve happiness in all other contexts. If that isn’t in play then it isn’t love. Clichés are clichés because they hold some value of truth. So when I say “it is better to have loved than never loved at all” its because we all know what love has the potential to be and instead of viewing the love as gone, we should gain perspective and realization that love is in motion and love can be found again and think about how much you will appreciate it this time around because you have experienced a lack of love to gain comparison and a new perception. I will be the first to admit that I’m human and emotions are powerful. Lust, compassion, and infatuation can easily be mistaken for love, but focusing on the idea that love is to make the choice to help achieve one’s happiness can be a tool for real clarity on establishing and maintaining love.
How do we start the establishing process for love? Love needs the catalyst of attraction or “spark” as it is often called to begin. Attraction is broken down in two parts: a physical attraction and mental attraction. Physical attraction in our current culture heavy outweighs the mental in the initial birth of romantic love, but mental attraction plays a very vital role in the longevity of love. Mental attraction also has the power to potentially change the perception of physical attraction. I start to notice in myself how people get more or less physically attractive once a mental attraction has been established. The big mystery is how that attraction either mental or physical is felt, given and/or received. Science has taught us that a melody of different chemicals fire in the brain when we experience the journey towards love and love is blind because we actually don’t fully understand exactly why these chemicals and or hormones fire when they do (for more on that here is the article I’m referring too click here).
This is where my personal problem with the beginning stages in finding romantic love lies. We don’t have any real control over the how, when, what, or why, we can only recognize if attraction is or isn’t there. If that is all we have to gage initial attraction, we have to follow this trial and error process until an attraction is reciprocated. One could argue hints with vocal and/or physical mannerisms can be found, but even that isn’t always consistent or expressed. In less someone who is attracted to me is blunt about it, the odds of me picking up on it are very slim. I focus on mental attraction first because it is the less invasive form and can be done simply by non-motive driven conversation. Physical attraction isn’t the same because we have to make our intentions clear and that can time lead to awkward situations or annoyances. The number of times I’ve talked to my female friends about such encounters describe them as hindrances more than anything else. I’ve seen this happen firsthand of how constant unwanted attention can have negative effects on my female friends. I’ve also heard many stories about friendships ending over not feeling attraction for those that have admitted feeling attraction for them. Most women I’ve talked to won’t even consider trying to see if a friendship could transition to romantic love for the fear of losing the friendship entirely. At first I couldn’t understand that point. On the surface learning if I can be friends with someone and establishing a strong mental attraction to someone seems positive for working towards finding a long term partner, but I had to do some more digging on why that isn’t the case. I’ve interviewed a few of my female friends for this and was surprised by the commonalities between what all of them had to said. A lot of issues of the “trial and error” approach is the culture of men and how they choose to court. Men have this false sense of entitlement if their advances on a woman are not shared. They often ignore a turned down advancement and proceed to continue to try again and again even when “no” has been clearly communicated. Women rightfully so move towards anger or annoyance to make their stance crystal clear and then are berated for doing so. The way men go about communicating attraction is often overly sexual and/or creepy. The biggest problem described to me is how men unnecessary react with anger or jealousy when a woman doesn’t feel a romantic way towards them. Wither this is an ego problem or a male culture problem with men on average not being very in touch with their own emotions I don’t know, but it seems that most men overall aren’t civil or respectful to a turned down advancements and blame the person who is turning them down. I now understand why women are so angry. This sounds horrible and men really need to work at fixing what is broken with our perceptions. Because of this many women even if physical attraction is present will not take the risk of losing a friendship. The amount of incidents that were described to me involving everything I’ve just laid out have been staggering. I’ve understood that if someone isn’t attracted to me it isn’t their fault at all. Why blame someone and end a friendship for something that is out of their control. I know rather naive of me, but with never dealing with these situations they’ve never put it in my forefront. I encourage anyone who is turned down male or female (because I’m sure it could easy work the other way too) to understanding there simply wasn’t any chemicals being fired from the person who turned you down. Take that and let bygones be bygones. Why do you have anger towards that person? Why have it ruin friendships? Why must we succumb to negative emotions and let them dominate our thinking?
This is important because if our beginning stage of romantic love is this flawed, it will continue to be flawed as it grows and will keep causing unnecessary pain and suffering. If we only rely on physical attraction, we take a very large gamble to hoping a mental attraction is there. Dating seems to be the tool we use to gage mental attraction, but if the courting game is flawed, then a man can adjust who they are for the prospect of a solely physically encounter. A friendship is a wonder way to establish mental attraction without the song and dance of potential deception. Torment and dread can happen because we can spend so much time and energy trying to make it work and continuing to try establishing a mental attraction when it may not be there and what then? Do we continue to hope that connection will shine through, or that our partners can change and continue to interlock your life with someone to make it so much more difficult to leave if it does go array? Do we use love to justify staying with someone even when that love that we use to justify is the only thing keeping you in it? As I’ve touched at the start of this post perception is everything. I’m not trying to say we shouldn’t try, but there must be a point when we must realize that sometimes being selfish isn’t a bad thing especially when you use being selfless to justify your own pain. Maybe letting someone go will be the best thing for them, especially if you can understand sadness allows us to further appreciate happiness when we have it. Kahlil Gibran said in his book The Prophet “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Let’s not look at having to break up with someone as a failure, but more of an understanding of the choice to help your happiness isn’t there and with each failed relationship you can gain better understand how to properly articulate what you would need to be happy with your partner. I challenge that establishing and maintaining love between two people doesn’t have to be complicated if communication is strong and the active choice to always work towards achieving each other’s fulfillment is there or am I the only one?
As I’ve said before working to achieve fulfillment or happiness (as I define it) is what we’re all trying to accomplish. Love is essentially the expression of that accomplishment or the support to achieving such accomplishment. When I’ve asked people who claim to be in love why do they love the person they are with? A common response I receive is “because they make me happy”. All positive emotions are combined to lead towards happiness which can transcend into love. The negative emotions we feel steams from the absence of love. I’ve recently been looking into research on many personality disorders and it is interesting how they’re linked to lack of love during adolescence. The absence of love does terrible things to us in any context. I’m not a stranger to that idea, in college I once said “Love is the addiction with the side effect of pain.” But, now I know that if love was an addiction then pain isn’t a side effect, it’s withdraw. Very much like my friend who made the list, when I talk to people about my view on love they often get confused that I’m speaking of the journey to establish love and/or the journey to strengthen love. Which just isn’t the case.
We’ve always viewed the world in a dualistic way. Ying and Yang, Good vs Evil, Right vs. Wrong, and Love vs. Hate. We wouldn’t understand an up without having a down. We wouldn’t really know a good movie until we’ve seen a bad one. How can we know what is right without any idea of what is wrong. Comparison gives us perspective, which changes our perception, which shapes our personal realities. This is where the confusion steams from in viewing the journey to love either negative or positive as love itself. Those of you already building a up a defense reading what I just wrote know I’m not discrediting that growing from negative experiences can strengthen love, in fact negative experiences are crucial for gaining perspective. I’m just not okay with calling those negative experiences love. When a couples love is strengthened from overcoming obstacles or differences that is done from the comparison of fearing or experiencing a brief absence of love and when its regained love is viewed at a higher level because we’ve gained perspective of its worth; where the cliché “didn’t realize what I had until it was gone” comes from. In the spirt of duality however, we must be careful because comparison can also cause a reverse effect and warp perspective in a negative way. It’s dangerous to continually compare what you don’t have to what you do, instead of what you do have and what others don’t. Classic example is looking at eight ounces of water in a sixteen-ounce glass and viewing the glass either as half empty or half full. Either view isn’t wrong, but one view does negate negative emotion better than the other. Let’s say the sixteen-ounce glass is our lives and the eight ounces of water is happiness. The glass is either half full or empty, but taking a pitcher of water and adding eight more ounces fills the glass. In my life it’s the perception of what can be added and not what has already been taken away. I pitch optimism because emotions can be as equally destructive as helpful and perception is a powerful tool to overcome being bested by emotion and that is even more so with a powerful emotion such as love. When I get on social media and see all these people that I shared a childhood with getting married, having children and starting families. I’m not sad by not having them myself, I’m excited for when I’m finally there. Our thoughts manifest our emotions good or bad, so negative emotions that are often linked to love such as jealousy, anger and sadness can easily wreak havoc on our state of minds and they waste a lot of energy that can be redirected to better things or emotions. If we work on how we structure our thinking and perception it can decrease negative emotion tenfold. I can say that with 100% confidence experiencing this first hand by spending a lot of my life choosing to focus on changing my perspectives to arrive at a situation where positive emotions can manifest over negative ones. I’m constantly trying to work on my own perception and working to better understand love in a way to try and reduce suffering from it. Which is why I view unconditional romantic love to be extremely dangerous. Anyone can agree that if someone you claim to love will continue to make choices to harm your personal fulfillment over enough time that love will fade. So, instead of putting in so much extra time that isn’t needed and putting yourself through personal turmoil by justifying it as unconditional love, you can reduce your personal suffering by already being aware that them making the choice to support your fulfillment is part of the equation for love once love is established.
I’ve always had friends throughout my life that’ve been in very unhappy relationships and continue to be in them because they’ve reasoned themselves in believing that love can be one sided. Yes he doesn’t do this or that, but I love him, so I continue on. I’m unhappy, but I can’t leave him because it will ruin his life. We split the bills and I can’t afford to be on my own. These perceptions of love will continue to cause us to suffer unnecessary. So why not change your perspective before we get to these points? Does your partner reason you out of your own perceptions? Watch out for false reasoning because it happens. That is why communicating and understanding our own reasons is so important. If you think of love only being achieved by giving and receiving it will be clear that love has nothing to do when the person you are with will continue to take away from your fulfillment. The idea of having to hold someone above water letting yourself drown is not okay. I take a lot of time reflecting in any failed relationship and constantly work towards being honest with myself and being aware of my own false reasoning. Getting outside options really does help. A metaphor I use a lot is that if you’re in the picture you only see the small lenses of the camera, but if you are taking the picture you see everything, so outside perspectives are important to work on better understanding your own.
Love is a dance between two people. Love isn’t absolute and it always changing. People can fall in love just as fast as they fall out of love, or love can change in its context. I may not love my ex’s in a romantic sense anymore, but I still love them in a friend context as in I hope the best for them and very much want any of my ex romantic partners to succeed in whatever quest towards their own happiness ends up becoming. If you haven’t ever read the love languages by Gary Chapman I recommend giving it a read. It will teach you that love not only has many different forms of being communicated, you learn that once love is established and is strongly communicated it’s simply a choice. We can choose to acknowledge and try to better understand what would help the people we love achieve happiness in all contexts and make the choice to help them do that and it’s vice versa.
Love doesn’t have to be a grind or struggle. Every break up that has been described to me can be stemmed to problems with communication and making choices to hurt rather than help. It’s the most important factor that love needs to survive. Once one communications what they need to feel loved (in whatever language they need to understand it in), it becomes the other’s choice to help or hinder. With myself personally I’ve always had a high number of close female friends in my life, so when I have a significant other I hold intimacy and affection at a very high level because that is the clear divide between romantic vs. friendship love. I will openly admit that no person will be 100% equal and compromising will be a part of any form of love, but even with compromising it should never be a grind or struggle. I’m not okay with manipulating the idea of romantic love to support the pain that is caused from a person you believe loves you, by your love for them. We also have a fear of change to consider as well. The power of fearing change is a dangerous one. The more we connect our lives with someone the harder it is to detach from them once we learn they are hindering rather than helping. Another reason why unconditional love is trouble because it promotes longevity when it shouldn’t be there. Why use love to justify that pain? That pain is really from the lack of love being received by the choices made by your partner. It’s freeing once this idea is understood. The understanding of love should be to continually try to work towards helping each other to not only continue having romantic happiness, but also to achieve happiness in all other contexts. If that isn’t in play then it isn’t love. Clichés are clichés because they hold some value of truth. So when I say “it is better to have loved than never loved at all” its because we all know what love has the potential to be and instead of viewing the love as gone, we should gain perspective and realization that love is in motion and love can be found again and think about how much you will appreciate it this time around because you have experienced a lack of love to gain comparison and a new perception. I will be the first to admit that I’m human and emotions are powerful. Lust, compassion, and infatuation can easily be mistaken for love, but focusing on the idea that love is to make the choice to help achieve one’s happiness can be a tool for real clarity on establishing and maintaining love.
How do we start the establishing process for love? Love needs the catalyst of attraction or “spark” as it is often called to begin. Attraction is broken down in two parts: a physical attraction and mental attraction. Physical attraction in our current culture heavy outweighs the mental in the initial birth of romantic love, but mental attraction plays a very vital role in the longevity of love. Mental attraction also has the power to potentially change the perception of physical attraction. I start to notice in myself how people get more or less physically attractive once a mental attraction has been established. The big mystery is how that attraction either mental or physical is felt, given and/or received. Science has taught us that a melody of different chemicals fire in the brain when we experience the journey towards love and love is blind because we actually don’t fully understand exactly why these chemicals and or hormones fire when they do (for more on that here is the article I’m referring too click here).
This is where my personal problem with the beginning stages in finding romantic love lies. We don’t have any real control over the how, when, what, or why, we can only recognize if attraction is or isn’t there. If that is all we have to gage initial attraction, we have to follow this trial and error process until an attraction is reciprocated. One could argue hints with vocal and/or physical mannerisms can be found, but even that isn’t always consistent or expressed. In less someone who is attracted to me is blunt about it, the odds of me picking up on it are very slim. I focus on mental attraction first because it is the less invasive form and can be done simply by non-motive driven conversation. Physical attraction isn’t the same because we have to make our intentions clear and that can time lead to awkward situations or annoyances. The number of times I’ve talked to my female friends about such encounters describe them as hindrances more than anything else. I’ve seen this happen firsthand of how constant unwanted attention can have negative effects on my female friends. I’ve also heard many stories about friendships ending over not feeling attraction for those that have admitted feeling attraction for them. Most women I’ve talked to won’t even consider trying to see if a friendship could transition to romantic love for the fear of losing the friendship entirely. At first I couldn’t understand that point. On the surface learning if I can be friends with someone and establishing a strong mental attraction to someone seems positive for working towards finding a long term partner, but I had to do some more digging on why that isn’t the case. I’ve interviewed a few of my female friends for this and was surprised by the commonalities between what all of them had to said. A lot of issues of the “trial and error” approach is the culture of men and how they choose to court. Men have this false sense of entitlement if their advances on a woman are not shared. They often ignore a turned down advancement and proceed to continue to try again and again even when “no” has been clearly communicated. Women rightfully so move towards anger or annoyance to make their stance crystal clear and then are berated for doing so. The way men go about communicating attraction is often overly sexual and/or creepy. The biggest problem described to me is how men unnecessary react with anger or jealousy when a woman doesn’t feel a romantic way towards them. Wither this is an ego problem or a male culture problem with men on average not being very in touch with their own emotions I don’t know, but it seems that most men overall aren’t civil or respectful to a turned down advancements and blame the person who is turning them down. I now understand why women are so angry. This sounds horrible and men really need to work at fixing what is broken with our perceptions. Because of this many women even if physical attraction is present will not take the risk of losing a friendship. The amount of incidents that were described to me involving everything I’ve just laid out have been staggering. I’ve understood that if someone isn’t attracted to me it isn’t their fault at all. Why blame someone and end a friendship for something that is out of their control. I know rather naive of me, but with never dealing with these situations they’ve never put it in my forefront. I encourage anyone who is turned down male or female (because I’m sure it could easy work the other way too) to understanding there simply wasn’t any chemicals being fired from the person who turned you down. Take that and let bygones be bygones. Why do you have anger towards that person? Why have it ruin friendships? Why must we succumb to negative emotions and let them dominate our thinking?
This is important because if our beginning stage of romantic love is this flawed, it will continue to be flawed as it grows and will keep causing unnecessary pain and suffering. If we only rely on physical attraction, we take a very large gamble to hoping a mental attraction is there. Dating seems to be the tool we use to gage mental attraction, but if the courting game is flawed, then a man can adjust who they are for the prospect of a solely physically encounter. A friendship is a wonder way to establish mental attraction without the song and dance of potential deception. Torment and dread can happen because we can spend so much time and energy trying to make it work and continuing to try establishing a mental attraction when it may not be there and what then? Do we continue to hope that connection will shine through, or that our partners can change and continue to interlock your life with someone to make it so much more difficult to leave if it does go array? Do we use love to justify staying with someone even when that love that we use to justify is the only thing keeping you in it? As I’ve touched at the start of this post perception is everything. I’m not trying to say we shouldn’t try, but there must be a point when we must realize that sometimes being selfish isn’t a bad thing especially when you use being selfless to justify your own pain. Maybe letting someone go will be the best thing for them, especially if you can understand sadness allows us to further appreciate happiness when we have it. Kahlil Gibran said in his book The Prophet “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Let’s not look at having to break up with someone as a failure, but more of an understanding of the choice to help your happiness isn’t there and with each failed relationship you can gain better understand how to properly articulate what you would need to be happy with your partner. I challenge that establishing and maintaining love between two people doesn’t have to be complicated if communication is strong and the active choice to always work towards achieving each other’s fulfillment is there or am I the only one?
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