Falling in love is as natural as death. Staying in love is as natural as good diet and healthy exercise.
We can eat, exercise, and love well in the short run, but over the long haul of everyday modern living, we tend to shoot ourselves in the foot. That's because, like toddlers, we try to do these things in the wrong part of our brains.
Below are two of the major ways we shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to love.
Toddler-Love Mistake #1: The Illusion of Sameness
The biggest mistake we make in love is assuming that our partners' experience is the same as ours and that events and behaviors should mean the same to them as they do to us.
The illusion of sameness allows us to create some measure of safety in the face of the awful vulnerability that new intimate connections evoke. To ward off feelings of inadequacy, we talk ourselves into pleasant delusions:
"Our hearts beat as one."
"We're soul mates."
"We're so close that we complete each other's sentences."
"She really believes in me."
"He really gets me."
The illusion of sameness is sometimes disguised in the rhetoric of universal equality, regardless of gender, race, religion, etc., as if we marry a gender or race or religion, rather than unique individuals. Universal equality is a noble sentiment much abused by those who confuse equality with sameness and who feel uncomfortable with differences.
The price of whatever safety and security we get from the illusion of sameness is an inability to see our partners apart from our feelings about them. Partners who want to feel like soul mates (and partners of those who insist that we're all the same) will eventually feel invisible, unheard, criticized, controlled, and betrayed, if not abused.
The Limitations of Empathy
A severe limitation of empathy in intimate relationships is its susceptibility to the illusion of sameness.
Empathy is identification with the feelings of another. We empathize with our partners based on our ability to identify with what they feel, which means that they must feel something like we would in similar circumstances. Think of how often you've heard a statement like, "I would never have done what he did," or "How could she have possibly felt that way?" or "I could not have reacted like (he/she) did." The subtext of most domestic quarrels is, "You must be more like me and see the world the way I do, even if it means giving up who you are."
Empathy is insufficient in love. Sustaining commitment requires appreciation of differences and a higher order compassion for vulnerabilities we do not share.
There's No "Me-Harmony"
Lovers who suffer the illusion of sameness will eventually discover that their partners are not like them, simply because we don't seek versions of ourselves to love. (A copy of yourself dressed up to like someone else would be so incredibly boring that you might as well live alone.) Besides having different parents, your partner almost certainly has a different core vulnerability, different temperament, different experiences, different hormones or hormonal levels, different trajectory to his/her emotional development, different gender socialization, and different support networks, all of which will cause him or her to give different emotional meanings to the same events and experiences.
These differences are a large part of what attracts lovers, as they seem to add to their world-view and expand their experience of being alive. But in the second year of living together, couples who love in the wrong part of the brain begin quarrelling about the same qualities that attracted them in the first place. For toddlers in love, the illusion of sameness is more important than the people they love.
For relationships to last in the modern world, we must respect our differences and tolerate those we cannot appreciate. We must outgrow narcissistic projections about sameness and stop trying to coerce our partners into experiencing the world the same way we do.
Toddler-Love Mistake #2: Thinking we know how to do modern intimate relationships
Toddlers in love think they know everything there is to know about how to make intimate relationships flourish. This mistake seems to afflict women more than men, only because women tend to be better at other kinds of relationships. In general, women have deeper, more resilient, and longer lasting friendships than men. They are usually better at relationships with children, unless the father is the custodial parent. But women are no better than men at knowing how to make intimate relationships work. Though most come to realize this, many continue to shoot themselves in the foot by expecting their husbands to be like their girlfriends. They seem convinced that what works with girlfriends should work with a man, and would, if he weren't so stubborn, selfish, or defective.
In reality, there is no way that any of us could know how to make a modern intimate relationship work. Biology has not prepared us for its special challenges, tradition is hopelessly outdated, and pop-psychology gives little more than platitudes or oversimplified and contradictory advice.
It's time to outgrow the illusion that you know how to make love work!
Once relieved of the burden of defending your preconceptions and prejudices about how relationships should be, you are free to apply your intelligence and creativity to learning how to love the unique person you married.
The most loving thing we can say to our partners is, "Teach me how to love you."
More ways that toddlers in love shoot themselves in the foot will be described in future posts.
CompassionPower
