Are You the One for Me?. Barbara Angelis De
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about leaving your husband?’
‘Not just about leaving him,’ Eileen said with tears in her eyes, ‘but guilty for not trying harder to make it work I feel like I abandoned him. Maybe if I had gone to more Al-Anon meetings myself, I would have understood him better, and he would have stopped drinking. Or maybe if I had been more affectionate, or satisfied him more, he would have given up the alcohol.”
The more we talked, the more obvious it was that Eileen was still punishing herself for what she saw as her failure to save her marriage. Eileen’s mother had always told her that ‘a good wife stands by her man through thick and thin,” and so Eileen felt that she was an inadequate wife. Eileen’s depression was brought on by her belief in Love Myth #1—that if she had just loved Raoul more, their marriage would have worked. The reality of love is very different from the myth. Of course, love is the foundation for a good relationship. But if a relationship is going to survive and grow, it needs a lot more than love.
Here’s the reality about Love Myth #1:
LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH TO MAKE A RELATIONSHIP WORK —IT NEEDS COMPATIBILITY AND IT NEEDS COMMITMENT.
The sad truth is, very few relationships end because the two partners do not love each other; they end because they are not compatible partners.
I know this from my own painful experience in several of my past relationships. Like many people with the wrong partner, I attempted to make up for the lack of compatibility by trying extra hard and loving with added intensity. But in the end, we were not compatible enough to live peacefully and happily together. For years I blamed myself, thinking that if I had loved more, the differences wouldn’t have mattered. Now I know I was wrong. Differences do matter, sometimes just enough to make a relationship challenging, but often enough to make it unhealthy and unfulfilling. Throughout the rest of the book we’ll look in more detail at how to tell if you are compatible with another person.
Love Myth 2
When It’s Really True Love, You Will Know It the Moment You Meet the Other Person
When you watch a romantic film, you see it.
When you listen to a romantic song, you hear about it.
When you are single and lonely, you dream about it.
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
I think we all secretly believe in ‘love at first sight,’ the idea that if it is really true love, you will know it the moment you meet the other person. Oh, there may be other kinds of love, but according to this Love Myth, true love will strike you like lightning.
I remember first hearing this myth as a young girl, and I longed to be swept away during a powerfully romantic moment in which I’d look into a man’s eyes and know instantly, and without a doubt, that this was my lifelong soulmate! I dreamed about ‘some enchanted evening,’ as the famous ballad from the play and movie South Pacific described it, when I would ‘find [my] true love … across a crowded room.’ Anything less than this kind of intense emotional recognition seemed a pale imitation of what I was sure true love should feel like.
You can call it ‘love at first sight’ or ‘instant chemistry,’ but the possible problems are the same if you believe in Love Myth #2:
1 You dwell on the intense connection or chemistry and avoid examining the rest of the relationship.
Skip, thirty-two, is a very successful entrepreneur, who met Marcia, a twenty-seven-year-old accountant, at a wedding. ‘My first. thought when I saw her,’ he told me, ‘was, ‘God, she is beautiful,’ and my second thought was, ‘I’m going to marry this woman.’ That night was probably the most romantic night of my life. It was a beautiful summer evening, and we danced together on an outdoor patio under the stars. Marcia even caught the bridal bouquet, and everyone kidded us about being next.
‘We dated each other for the next ten months, and then she told me she wanted me to make more of a commitment—in other words, to propose to her. I told her I needed more time, that I didn’t want to rush things, but she kept pressuring me until one day she gave me an ultimatum: marry her or she’d leave.
‘I knew something was wrong, because I just wasn’t happy, but whenever I’d question whether I was making a mistake, a little voice in my head would say, ‘How could she be wrong for you if you had ‘that feeling’ when you first saw her?’ I couldn’t answer that question, and I kept remembering how crazy I’d been about Marcia in the beginning. I told myself that my concerns were born from my unwillingness to grow up. So I married her.’
‘Are you still married?’ I asked Skip.
‘No,’ he answered with a sad grimace. ‘I left Marcia after two years. The truth was, our relationship didn’t live up to that first magical evening—Marcia is beautiful, but she is also very angry. She controlled me with her rages, and she drank too much, which made the blowups all too frequent. I put off breaking up with her for much longer than I should have, because I kept doubting my own feelings and thinking about how perfect things were when we met. I didn’t want to see the truth; the romantic picture was much nicer.’
Skip was a victim of Love Myth #2—he hid behind his intense first impressions of Marcia, and used them to fuel his fantasy of their relationship, rather than facing the reality of how unhappy he really was.
ARE YOU A ‘LOVE-AT-FIRST-SIGHT JUNKIE’?
2. You get addicted to flashy beginnings and miss opportunities for real, lasting love.
Alexia was a petite, striking thirty-six-year-old woman who owned a children’s clothing store. She came to me to decide what to do about her relationship with Kent. ‘I’ll tell you right away that in the past, my relationships haven’t been great,’ Alexia began. ‘I seem to have been attracted to these flashy, exciting men who end up leaving me or cheating on me or somehow hurting me. These relationships always seem so powerful when they start, and I feel so wildly and desperately in love, and then—POW!—I get hurt.
‘Last year I decided to swear off men entirely, and then I met Kent. He is the cousin of a good friend of mine, and a bunch of us started spending time together on the weekends. I liked Kent from the moment I met him, but never considered dating him because he wasn’t ‘my type.’ We became really good friends, talking for hours on the phone at night, sharing things with one another we’d never told anyone else. It got to the point where we called each other several times a day and spent most of our free evenings together.
‘Suddenly one night while we were driving back from seeing a movie, Kent leaned over and kissed me on the lips. At first I was shocked and thought, ‘You shouldn’t be kissing him—he’s your friend!’ But then I started getting into the kiss and realized that I liked it. Kent looked at me and confessed that he’d been wanting to kiss me for months and that he thought he was falling in love with me.’
‘How did you feel about that?’ I asked Alexia.
‘Totally confused. Excited, frightened, all mixed up. Kent was supposed to be just a friend, not a lover. He’s not the kind of guy that I picture myself with.’
‘And what kind of guy is that?’
Alexia looked a little embarrassed as she replied sarcastically, ‘Oh, you know, the kind that sweeps me off my feet and then knocks me down again.’
‘Alexia,’ I answered, ‘your relationship with Kent sounds healthy. I don’t think you’ve ever known what healthy love is supposed to feel like.’
Alexia believed so strongly in the Love Myth of love-at-first-sight that she was invalidating her growing feelings for Kent. She couldn’t imagine that love could be real if it didn’t hit her over the head in the first five minutes of the relationship. Like many ‘love-at-first-sight junkies,’ Alexia was addicted to the instant high of infatuation