Monogamy
Love - Why bother?
06/05/08 23:21 Filed in: Psychology of Love
I shall probably talk about love, love relationships and some sort of commitment or conjugal bond (like marriage or loving intimate committed cohabitation) as if they were synonymous here. I am doing this as I believe that some committed relationship is a natural progression of love between two people. I am not sure that I can take a clear value position on what is possible and I can only express my feelings and beliefs about what I personally find desirable and attractive.
So are love and love relationships, the new blue light case of the age? There is a welter of statistical data that suggests that love and commitment are in a state of terminal decline if one looks at love through a lens of marital outcomes. Divorce rates have soared. In the USA, more than 50% of marriages end in divorce. In the UK, the numbers are very similar. A Rutgers University survey reported that a mere 38 per cent of Americans who are married describe themselves as actually being happy in that state. If one includes married and unmarried people in relationships, the numbers do not improve by the inclusion of committed cohabiters, they get worse.
I read a book recently by a woman called Laura Kipnis called "Against Love: A Polemic". Ms. Kipnis is a professor in media studies at an American university. She systematically destroyed any notion of love and marriage in that book although I did not feel it was so revealing, nor so clever. A real concern I had was that she did not even see the pressures on love: the idea that it may be blown up as the universal answer for everything, that people entering marriage may believe that love is all and the cure to all ills, that our problems about love and marriage might be the result of all the romantic images our culture pushes at us minute-by-minute, day-after-day. She also moots that adulterers are quasi-utopian rebels who might liberate us all! Really?
Kipnis offers nothing in place of love other than debasement. One comes away with a feeling that all she feels about is sex and that the world might be free and happy as a copulating tribe of monkeys. I would hate to point out to Ms Kipnis that Gibbon monkeys are monogamous.
In all of the anti-love and marriage material I read before writing this, Kipnis's book was the worst. It looks and sounds radical and even alludes to Karl Marx. I have some respect for Marx whose work is often trotted out like some simplistic utopian nonsense but I do believe he was a very great philosopher too. There is something in the core of Marx like a belief that the value of people means little or nothing without the respect of other human beings and that this is needed in order for people to attain their full expression. In many ways, I have much time for Marx, but then, unusually, my education required that I read his books also. Very few people have.
To use the words of Betty Friedan, Kipnis makes marriage look like a concentration camp. But I don't just want to shoot her down in flames either as she makes some very valid points.
She does describe a notion of people living together in marriage becoming rule-bound, of becoming drowned in a sea of petty dictatorship and household tyranny. I have seen it. I suspect we all have. There are rules for loading the dishwasher, not dropping socks on the floor, leaving the bathroom door open; the meaningless domestic drudgery and dross of day-to-day existence becomes everything. We enter marriage feeling love, passion and "till death us do part". So why the problems and what changes?
Ms Kipnis should have an inkling; after all she is a widely published author and a professor of media studies. Love is not merely an emotion that exists inside us. How we love is an integral part of our belief systems, of our consciousness, and of our culture that forms part of consciousness. Our beliefs are upheld by our families, our friends, the media, art and literature, politicians, churches and corporations as well as our experience. Some of these institutions may be failing us.
There are strong vested business interests in love, marital and sexual difficulties too, like the pornography trade, Viagra, therapy, alcohol and drugs industries. The pornography trade worldwide is massive! It is said to generate revenues of more than US $60 billion annually and makes up 12% of all internet content. How sad is that?
In the UK, the Office of National Statistics cites couples' high expectations as the reason for an upswing in divorce. But are high expectations really such a bad thing? Personally I would encourage them. I believe that we ought to expect more and better from many areas of our lives. In some ways, marriage might be used as a vehicle, a power-based strategy for enforcing compliance within a society riddled with infinite petty rules, meaningless and violent politics and the seemingly hateful piety of many religions. It might be these social and political dimensions of marriage that are stultifying, emotionally deadening and harmful.
I do believe there is hope for deep loving monogamous relationships. I have thought a lot about whether I really believe lasting, enduring, satisfying love relationships are possible. I have thought deeply about people I have known whom I know have emotionally successful relationships. I have read some academic research too about what factors tend to be present in relationships that endure and succeed. I have some of my own feelings and beliefs too that come mainly from experiencing past pain, difficulties and reflecting on my past relationships. I know I now have the capacity for what I believe to be a better sort of love. But I am flawed and fallible and very far from perfect but I have learned many lessons too.
Here I will talk about consciousness to mean the individual psyche. I do believe there is another dimension of consciousness of which we are all a part, a kind of collective psyche or social consciousness. I have touched on the notion of collective consciousness before and I believe it to be the ultimate expression of the connectedness of humankind and its relation to its world. In common with Marx, I believe that people both make, form part of and are influenced and made by this social dimension of consciousness.
Also I believe that individual consciousness is accessible to us all and that by bringing our individual consciousness into focus we might choose to change or enhance our lives. This self-understanding is not something that many practice; many people I meet are almost totally unconscious. Their world is one where things happen to them, they are not responsible, and life is "just like that". They have no control over their existence since they have done little or nothing to understand anything of what they feel, how they behave or how they perceive or understand.
But my real point here is that for us to feel satisfied in love we first have to understand the view of love we carry around in ourselves. We all have views, feelings and our own set of metaphors (implicit subjective stories) about love. Until we understand what they are, we are unable to be satisfied with love as we need to understand what we are seeking and what will make us happy. It's an obvious truism, but the surprise for me is always the number of people who are simply unable to articulate their beliefs about love.
To be aware and be able to be a fully functioning loving person requires that we face up to past pain. I have written this once before in my blog entitled "love and sex" but it's so important I am going to repeat it here: "Without facing and healing our past pain we cannot truly love. We may need and want to do all sorts of other stuff to avoid doing this... But to move towards love is to perhaps to treat yourself as one might need to treat others. True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.
This means that you need to take responsibility for yourself and the world around you. It also means that you don't beat yourself up mercilessly for your past mistakes. Love also means finding responsibility and compassion.
To heal means that you have to see your life for what it truly is. It is being honest about your emotional pain and all the dreadful mistakes and errors that you have made in trying to hide from your despair. Then you have to listen to that despair with compassion and tenderness and let it tell you its own whole story. Only then will your heart be transformed. Only then can you move freely towards love…Running from your despair into some dark corner of your unconscious to be seduced by sex and perversion will only result in even more emptiness, despair and pain."
Going on to another of the points I seem to have made inadvertently already by the inclusion of this quote: To have enduring, satisfying love, means one takes responsibility for oneself, for your loved one and in every other aspect of your life. Doing blame, passing the buck or evading the issue will not cut it. If you don't do responsibility, you cannot do love. It's as simple as that.
I just want to re-emphasise a point here too. It's the one about listening to your past pain with tenderness and compassion. This is so important. I have seen many people fail to face past difficulty and pain simply because their approach was to engage in emotional self-flagellation. If you beat yourself up, it hurts and sooner or later you will give up on looking at the truth of your pain, because it simply hurts too much.
I wanted to mention doing love relationship endings too. Hopefully most people know of the importance of doing loving endings. There is something about a loss in love that feels the same as any bereavement. As with any bereavement, it's important to do mourning. Mourning a loss is our way of coming to terms with it. It's fine to weep and cry. If one avoids that mourning it just adds to the baggage of past pain and that means that one will need to come back to that sadness later in order to love another. If one doesn't do the mourning, it will come back to bite us in our next relationship as unresolved feelings belonging to the past move from our unconscious into the present and cloud our feelings and affect our behaviour towards our new loved one. Anyone who has been on the end of the totally inexplicable behaviour of someone else in a close relationship will know what this feels like. Do not take it personally; it's probably not about you at all. Talk gently to your partner about it, then maybe he or she will be able to bring it back into consciousness and deal with their feelings about their past difficulty. Do not give up either, no matter how irrational the other person becomes (and people operating from unresolved feelings in the unconscious can be very irrational); be loving and support them in understanding their feelings.
One more thing, it is likely and possible that the person operating with unconscious unresolved difficulty will project those feelings on you and say that you are the cause of the difficulty. It may be hurtful too but if you have a good self-concept and good self-esteem you will recognise this projection when it happens. You will perceive easily that the problem does not belong to you but to someone else in your lover's past. It can be anyone, even a parent and need not be threatening if it is handled well. If the person has a lot of unresolved past difficulties and little consciousness of their feelings it may not bode well for the future of your relationship.
Another factor which I am sure affects the survival of love relationships is the longevity of physical and sexual relations. Touch and tactile senses are very important. I believe that hugs and cuddles are an essential part of healthy living too! It saddens me that we recognise a child's needs for physical affection, for hugs and cuddles then "grow up" and do not recognise that these needs remain in us as adults. So many people feel that hugging and cuddling belongs to the world of the child. It's not true, everyone loves a hug and a cuddle so get hugging and cuddling right now!
On sex, there are so many ways to keep its excitement alive. Sexual desire will wane if sex with another becomes the same old boring routine time after time. The passion of romance will not support sexual relations forever. But be inventive about times, places and methods…different ways of doing sexual arousal too, different types of foreplay. Now I'm getting really excited. Where's that cat?
Some lovely late friends of mine, two German Jewish people had the most amazing sex life for the whole of their lives as far as I knew. Certainly they were still going strong well into their seventies and they had first met in WW II. They were so funny; they had so many special qualities including a completely unabashed openness so I would often get to hear about their latest (sexual) adventures! They were both very successful in the media business, in film and television and used often to fly across the Atlantic to the USA. Apparently if it was a night flight and the cabin lights were dimmed, they would cover themselves with the blankets and touch each other's intimate parts. I don't think that's all they did as they loved the expenses paid trips in business class where they were be able to "be naughty, quietly and slowly, of course." I was feeling a little sad earlier today at my own lost love and these lovely people came to mind. They taught me so many lessons, many of which I write about here. They knew something about facing past pain too. They had tons of past pain. The Nazis had slaughtered many of their family and they both had fled to the UK before the outbreak of WW II. The dreadful irony was that they were both imprisoned as Germans in a British concentration camp on the Isle of Man. It was where they met. They felt no bitterness, no hate at all, but I do remember drinking champagne with them on more than one occasion to celebrate the odd accomplishment of Simon Wiesenthal in bringing Nazis to account.
This is getting very long again so I'm going to string a whole lot of qualities together that I believe are essential to have in a lasting loving relationship: Trust, caring, intimacy, companionate love, respect, humour and some healthy excitement from time-to-time!
I've never been sure about the trust word and have always felt that love assumes its meaning and much more, but trust is essential. Distrust is damaging and corrosive of love.
On caring, intimacy and companionate love, I've talked about all those before. Caring carries with it the more profound emotions of forbearance, forgiveness and understanding. They are wonderful to experience and all may grow in time unlike the shallowness of romantic illusions that fall away over time. Companionate love is the endearing quality of deep friendship that I find both attractive and desirable in my own love relationships.
Excitement is new and I have added humour to my list that I believe to be more important. Research has shown that excitement experienced jointly with one's loved one can enhance intimacy. I believe we all need some, fun, excitement and humour to keep our relationships alive. There is nothing as refreshing as the ability to laugh and in particular, laugh at oneself. I do it all the time!
There's another new word here and that is respect. Respect is one of the most necessary components in any healthy relationship, whether it is a friendship, love or marriage. Respect is not given; it's earned as is trust. To respect also means that we have to behave in a manner that is respectful. To do trust also means that we have to be trustworthy.
There is one very last point I want to make and that is crucial to be able to learn to resolve relationship conflicts constructively, Many people, especially men, do walking away from conflict and that does not work either. We need to learn about how not to escalate conflict and keep right away from hurling insults at partners too. Both are damaging and harmful. It is naïve to believe that crises, conflicts, differences and anger will not arise in love relationships from time-to-time. The important thing is to create a safe haven for the expression of those feelings and work quickly and constructively…lovingly to resolve differences and difficulties.
That's the end of what I see and believe to be important. Notice that physical or sexual attraction does not appear anywhere here. Obviously those forms of attraction might play a part in our choice of mate but it is not something I see as being of prototypical importance in love.
I am going to finish now, but first I want to say that these are my criteria for what I need in a loving, enduring, satisfying relationship. I also believe they may be generalisable and very healthy. But I recognise it may present others with something of a problem. It makes mate selection very difficult but at least I have said explicitly what my beliefs and wants in love are. I understand my own feelings in love completely. I wish my mate to feel that what is most important to me in love is also important to her.
So are love and love relationships, the new blue light case of the age? There is a welter of statistical data that suggests that love and commitment are in a state of terminal decline if one looks at love through a lens of marital outcomes. Divorce rates have soared. In the USA, more than 50% of marriages end in divorce. In the UK, the numbers are very similar. A Rutgers University survey reported that a mere 38 per cent of Americans who are married describe themselves as actually being happy in that state. If one includes married and unmarried people in relationships, the numbers do not improve by the inclusion of committed cohabiters, they get worse.
I read a book recently by a woman called Laura Kipnis called "Against Love: A Polemic". Ms. Kipnis is a professor in media studies at an American university. She systematically destroyed any notion of love and marriage in that book although I did not feel it was so revealing, nor so clever. A real concern I had was that she did not even see the pressures on love: the idea that it may be blown up as the universal answer for everything, that people entering marriage may believe that love is all and the cure to all ills, that our problems about love and marriage might be the result of all the romantic images our culture pushes at us minute-by-minute, day-after-day. She also moots that adulterers are quasi-utopian rebels who might liberate us all! Really?
Kipnis offers nothing in place of love other than debasement. One comes away with a feeling that all she feels about is sex and that the world might be free and happy as a copulating tribe of monkeys. I would hate to point out to Ms Kipnis that Gibbon monkeys are monogamous.
In all of the anti-love and marriage material I read before writing this, Kipnis's book was the worst. It looks and sounds radical and even alludes to Karl Marx. I have some respect for Marx whose work is often trotted out like some simplistic utopian nonsense but I do believe he was a very great philosopher too. There is something in the core of Marx like a belief that the value of people means little or nothing without the respect of other human beings and that this is needed in order for people to attain their full expression. In many ways, I have much time for Marx, but then, unusually, my education required that I read his books also. Very few people have.
To use the words of Betty Friedan, Kipnis makes marriage look like a concentration camp. But I don't just want to shoot her down in flames either as she makes some very valid points.
She does describe a notion of people living together in marriage becoming rule-bound, of becoming drowned in a sea of petty dictatorship and household tyranny. I have seen it. I suspect we all have. There are rules for loading the dishwasher, not dropping socks on the floor, leaving the bathroom door open; the meaningless domestic drudgery and dross of day-to-day existence becomes everything. We enter marriage feeling love, passion and "till death us do part". So why the problems and what changes?
Ms Kipnis should have an inkling; after all she is a widely published author and a professor of media studies. Love is not merely an emotion that exists inside us. How we love is an integral part of our belief systems, of our consciousness, and of our culture that forms part of consciousness. Our beliefs are upheld by our families, our friends, the media, art and literature, politicians, churches and corporations as well as our experience. Some of these institutions may be failing us.
There are strong vested business interests in love, marital and sexual difficulties too, like the pornography trade, Viagra, therapy, alcohol and drugs industries. The pornography trade worldwide is massive! It is said to generate revenues of more than US $60 billion annually and makes up 12% of all internet content. How sad is that?
In the UK, the Office of National Statistics cites couples' high expectations as the reason for an upswing in divorce. But are high expectations really such a bad thing? Personally I would encourage them. I believe that we ought to expect more and better from many areas of our lives. In some ways, marriage might be used as a vehicle, a power-based strategy for enforcing compliance within a society riddled with infinite petty rules, meaningless and violent politics and the seemingly hateful piety of many religions. It might be these social and political dimensions of marriage that are stultifying, emotionally deadening and harmful.
I do believe there is hope for deep loving monogamous relationships. I have thought a lot about whether I really believe lasting, enduring, satisfying love relationships are possible. I have thought deeply about people I have known whom I know have emotionally successful relationships. I have read some academic research too about what factors tend to be present in relationships that endure and succeed. I have some of my own feelings and beliefs too that come mainly from experiencing past pain, difficulties and reflecting on my past relationships. I know I now have the capacity for what I believe to be a better sort of love. But I am flawed and fallible and very far from perfect but I have learned many lessons too.
Here I will talk about consciousness to mean the individual psyche. I do believe there is another dimension of consciousness of which we are all a part, a kind of collective psyche or social consciousness. I have touched on the notion of collective consciousness before and I believe it to be the ultimate expression of the connectedness of humankind and its relation to its world. In common with Marx, I believe that people both make, form part of and are influenced and made by this social dimension of consciousness.
Also I believe that individual consciousness is accessible to us all and that by bringing our individual consciousness into focus we might choose to change or enhance our lives. This self-understanding is not something that many practice; many people I meet are almost totally unconscious. Their world is one where things happen to them, they are not responsible, and life is "just like that". They have no control over their existence since they have done little or nothing to understand anything of what they feel, how they behave or how they perceive or understand.
But my real point here is that for us to feel satisfied in love we first have to understand the view of love we carry around in ourselves. We all have views, feelings and our own set of metaphors (implicit subjective stories) about love. Until we understand what they are, we are unable to be satisfied with love as we need to understand what we are seeking and what will make us happy. It's an obvious truism, but the surprise for me is always the number of people who are simply unable to articulate their beliefs about love.
To be aware and be able to be a fully functioning loving person requires that we face up to past pain. I have written this once before in my blog entitled "love and sex" but it's so important I am going to repeat it here: "Without facing and healing our past pain we cannot truly love. We may need and want to do all sorts of other stuff to avoid doing this... But to move towards love is to perhaps to treat yourself as one might need to treat others. True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.
This means that you need to take responsibility for yourself and the world around you. It also means that you don't beat yourself up mercilessly for your past mistakes. Love also means finding responsibility and compassion.
To heal means that you have to see your life for what it truly is. It is being honest about your emotional pain and all the dreadful mistakes and errors that you have made in trying to hide from your despair. Then you have to listen to that despair with compassion and tenderness and let it tell you its own whole story. Only then will your heart be transformed. Only then can you move freely towards love…Running from your despair into some dark corner of your unconscious to be seduced by sex and perversion will only result in even more emptiness, despair and pain."
Going on to another of the points I seem to have made inadvertently already by the inclusion of this quote: To have enduring, satisfying love, means one takes responsibility for oneself, for your loved one and in every other aspect of your life. Doing blame, passing the buck or evading the issue will not cut it. If you don't do responsibility, you cannot do love. It's as simple as that.
I just want to re-emphasise a point here too. It's the one about listening to your past pain with tenderness and compassion. This is so important. I have seen many people fail to face past difficulty and pain simply because their approach was to engage in emotional self-flagellation. If you beat yourself up, it hurts and sooner or later you will give up on looking at the truth of your pain, because it simply hurts too much.
I wanted to mention doing love relationship endings too. Hopefully most people know of the importance of doing loving endings. There is something about a loss in love that feels the same as any bereavement. As with any bereavement, it's important to do mourning. Mourning a loss is our way of coming to terms with it. It's fine to weep and cry. If one avoids that mourning it just adds to the baggage of past pain and that means that one will need to come back to that sadness later in order to love another. If one doesn't do the mourning, it will come back to bite us in our next relationship as unresolved feelings belonging to the past move from our unconscious into the present and cloud our feelings and affect our behaviour towards our new loved one. Anyone who has been on the end of the totally inexplicable behaviour of someone else in a close relationship will know what this feels like. Do not take it personally; it's probably not about you at all. Talk gently to your partner about it, then maybe he or she will be able to bring it back into consciousness and deal with their feelings about their past difficulty. Do not give up either, no matter how irrational the other person becomes (and people operating from unresolved feelings in the unconscious can be very irrational); be loving and support them in understanding their feelings.
One more thing, it is likely and possible that the person operating with unconscious unresolved difficulty will project those feelings on you and say that you are the cause of the difficulty. It may be hurtful too but if you have a good self-concept and good self-esteem you will recognise this projection when it happens. You will perceive easily that the problem does not belong to you but to someone else in your lover's past. It can be anyone, even a parent and need not be threatening if it is handled well. If the person has a lot of unresolved past difficulties and little consciousness of their feelings it may not bode well for the future of your relationship.
Another factor which I am sure affects the survival of love relationships is the longevity of physical and sexual relations. Touch and tactile senses are very important. I believe that hugs and cuddles are an essential part of healthy living too! It saddens me that we recognise a child's needs for physical affection, for hugs and cuddles then "grow up" and do not recognise that these needs remain in us as adults. So many people feel that hugging and cuddling belongs to the world of the child. It's not true, everyone loves a hug and a cuddle so get hugging and cuddling right now!
On sex, there are so many ways to keep its excitement alive. Sexual desire will wane if sex with another becomes the same old boring routine time after time. The passion of romance will not support sexual relations forever. But be inventive about times, places and methods…different ways of doing sexual arousal too, different types of foreplay. Now I'm getting really excited. Where's that cat?
Some lovely late friends of mine, two German Jewish people had the most amazing sex life for the whole of their lives as far as I knew. Certainly they were still going strong well into their seventies and they had first met in WW II. They were so funny; they had so many special qualities including a completely unabashed openness so I would often get to hear about their latest (sexual) adventures! They were both very successful in the media business, in film and television and used often to fly across the Atlantic to the USA. Apparently if it was a night flight and the cabin lights were dimmed, they would cover themselves with the blankets and touch each other's intimate parts. I don't think that's all they did as they loved the expenses paid trips in business class where they were be able to "be naughty, quietly and slowly, of course." I was feeling a little sad earlier today at my own lost love and these lovely people came to mind. They taught me so many lessons, many of which I write about here. They knew something about facing past pain too. They had tons of past pain. The Nazis had slaughtered many of their family and they both had fled to the UK before the outbreak of WW II. The dreadful irony was that they were both imprisoned as Germans in a British concentration camp on the Isle of Man. It was where they met. They felt no bitterness, no hate at all, but I do remember drinking champagne with them on more than one occasion to celebrate the odd accomplishment of Simon Wiesenthal in bringing Nazis to account.
This is getting very long again so I'm going to string a whole lot of qualities together that I believe are essential to have in a lasting loving relationship: Trust, caring, intimacy, companionate love, respect, humour and some healthy excitement from time-to-time!
I've never been sure about the trust word and have always felt that love assumes its meaning and much more, but trust is essential. Distrust is damaging and corrosive of love.
On caring, intimacy and companionate love, I've talked about all those before. Caring carries with it the more profound emotions of forbearance, forgiveness and understanding. They are wonderful to experience and all may grow in time unlike the shallowness of romantic illusions that fall away over time. Companionate love is the endearing quality of deep friendship that I find both attractive and desirable in my own love relationships.
Excitement is new and I have added humour to my list that I believe to be more important. Research has shown that excitement experienced jointly with one's loved one can enhance intimacy. I believe we all need some, fun, excitement and humour to keep our relationships alive. There is nothing as refreshing as the ability to laugh and in particular, laugh at oneself. I do it all the time!
There's another new word here and that is respect. Respect is one of the most necessary components in any healthy relationship, whether it is a friendship, love or marriage. Respect is not given; it's earned as is trust. To respect also means that we have to behave in a manner that is respectful. To do trust also means that we have to be trustworthy.
There is one very last point I want to make and that is crucial to be able to learn to resolve relationship conflicts constructively, Many people, especially men, do walking away from conflict and that does not work either. We need to learn about how not to escalate conflict and keep right away from hurling insults at partners too. Both are damaging and harmful. It is naïve to believe that crises, conflicts, differences and anger will not arise in love relationships from time-to-time. The important thing is to create a safe haven for the expression of those feelings and work quickly and constructively…lovingly to resolve differences and difficulties.
That's the end of what I see and believe to be important. Notice that physical or sexual attraction does not appear anywhere here. Obviously those forms of attraction might play a part in our choice of mate but it is not something I see as being of prototypical importance in love.
I am going to finish now, but first I want to say that these are my criteria for what I need in a loving, enduring, satisfying relationship. I also believe they may be generalisable and very healthy. But I recognise it may present others with something of a problem. It makes mate selection very difficult but at least I have said explicitly what my beliefs and wants in love are. I understand my own feelings in love completely. I wish my mate to feel that what is most important to me in love is also important to her.
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