Loving Without Losing Yourself

Though I wasn’t aware of it, I had strong beliefs about love and marriage by the time I was fifteen. If school had taught me how to think, it was stories, music and the coded messages I picked up from the people around me that told me what I wanted emotionally and how to get it: I believed that one day, I’d meet a man who would understand me. I’d fall in love and never feel lonely or unloved again.

I didn’t own this story, as a part of me, because my conscious-self told me that showing such vulnerability and need could lead to humiliation. And, anyway, I didn’t want to be like my mother. Instead, I needed to be free. I kept this process mostly hidden, even from myself. Yet however banal and unconscious this story was, it expressed a powerful drive: the longing to feel loved and valued. At that moment, the only way to experience this seemed to be via falling in love.

How could he leave me, I did everything he wanted.

Now, there is more openness about sexuality and more acceptance of the different ways people connect to each other. However, love and intimacy is still mostly left for the individual to work out for themselves. Love is often viewed as something given to us by another person if we ‘do it right’. Intimacy is found in sleeping and living together. As a therapist, I’ve worked with those who feel betrayed by partners who won’t or can’t live up to their Hollywood movie dreams. There are others who stay in an unsatisfying relationship, without trying to change anything, because they believe they are responsible for their partner’s feelings and mustn’t rock the boat. Beliefs such as these, picked up unconsciously when young, are assumed to be the truth, an agreed norm held by every right-thinking person. A norm that has to be defended at all costs because if it goes the dream goes with it.

There are also expectations about how a relationship ‘should be’. These may differ from one culture to another but they share a common goal: to inspire love and harmony. One example is the expectation that a couple should be everything to each other: lover, best friend and companion – the centre of each other’s world. Individual wishes have to be sacrificed for this greater good. Like all such expectations, it is true but only sometimes. When followed, as an absolute, this ideal can lead to exclusivity and a kind of ‘closed for business’ attitude towards anything separate from the relationship.

Couples can also be held together by fear rather than love: the fear of being single for example or of upsetting someone. Others are kept together by convention. I worked with a woman who lived with an abusive husband for years until, one day, she found out he had been unfaithful; she threw him out within weeks and was proud of it. As though she believes abuse is acceptable but infidelity isn’t.

Beliefs, expectations, fears and conventions can define a relationship often without previous discussion or even an awareness of their effects. As a guide to life they suggest that good feelings come from the outside-in: when the right partner, job, and house are found – when the children are doing well, everyone will be happy and satisfied: true sometimes but only as one process in a larger reality: that of the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of those involved.

“I stopped all that when I got married.”

According to ‘Relate’, a UK counselling service for couples, after the honeymoon period comes the contest for the right of one of the partners to define reality: who is right and who is wrong. I remember living in a bedsit and listening to a particularly rigid version of this process going on next door.

“Don’t be stupid, course Sydney’s the capital of Australia!”

“You can’t wear that!”

It was painful to listen to. Here was a man telling a woman that he is cleverer than her and a woman who appeared to be letting him get away with it.

No-one is perfect

It seems to me that, however, much people differ in sophistication, understanding and culture, they actually have similar emotional needs: a yearning for unconditional love. We might, if we were lucky, have experienced this blissful state in the womb or as a baby. An ideal parent would maintain this level of love and keep their boundaries, through all that life and the child throws at them. By the time the child matured, it would carry this experience within: the ability to love him or herself unconditionally at the same time as respecting that they can’t always get what they want. The rest of us aren’t so lucky and, instead look for a soul mate, a lifestyle or a bank balance to fill the empty space.

I just want everyone to be happy.

Denying personal truths such as, “I want to have more sexual experience,” isn’t the way forward because it gives the desire more power, not less, plus the energy to leak out sideways in the form of addictions such as compulsive shopping, smoking, gambling, eating or having sex to fill the ‘not enough’ feeling inside. However, being who you are does not mean acting as though you are a child with no responsibility for anything that happens. You are responsible for your own orgasm and the consequences. There are grown-up ways of exploring sexuality, such as Tantra, and body-work. Ways that deepen the sexual experience by focussing on pleasure, technique and love, at the same time as the deeper aspects of body, mind and spirit.

To thine own self be true.

In the emotional world , the only truth you can commit to is your own, even though it can change in an instant and upset other people, reality needs to be counted in before a realistic commitment can be made; as does a compassionate and honest acknowledgement of individual needs and limitations. Beliefs about money, time, fidelity, families and love itself need to be talked about without criticism and with warmth and respect for any differences of perception. Therapy can help with this process.

I experienced an example of this, when, after a wedding, I was offered a lift from London to Manchester by a couple I hadn’t met before. On the way up the M1, we were talking about their plans to emigrate to Australia. These two young people were committed to each other and their future - were well organised too. But they were going round in circles and I sensed there was anxiety around the subject. I outed myself as a therapist and asked if they wanted to try something different. They rose to the challenge. I suggested that each of them, in turn, listened while the other explained all of how they felt about the move. It transpired that he was worried that she was getting cold feet about going, whereas she was actually feeling under pressure with the order in which they were doing things. Neither of them had felt able to talk about their worries and it was a relief when they realised what the real problem was. Instead of saying nothing and compromising by going along with something that didn’t feel right, they were able to negotiate a different plan taking everything into account.

The right to be who we are – sleep when we need to, eat when and what we want, choose what we wear, how we make love and how we socialise – doesn’t have to be compromised. Between adults, giving is a gift not a right, a gift most of us want to give if the recipient values and recognises the energy we put in. I believe that commitment means the focus is on making a relationship work for both people – not just one of them because the other gave up. For example, if one of a couple can’t stand housework he or she could take responsibility for his or her share by paying for a cleaner or by doing some extra childcare. Instead of hoping, demanding, avoiding or forgoing, the pros and cons can be fully discussed until both parties feel heard and understood. Love and freedom don’t have to be a contradiction in terms.

It is possible to find yourself in what you loved as a child and in the stories that move you. This isn’t about ‘good’ literature but whatever makes you weep, rage and delight. What inspires and what compels you to leave the room. Just because feelings and daydreams seem cheesy or kitsch to the logical self, it doesn’t mean they have no meaning or value. Love comes from compassion for the self: a curiosity about what you really want; in making imagination and playfulness part of the way you go about getting it. Life isn’t an exam to be passed or a rehearsal for a YouTube clip, it is here to be enjoyed with respect and a willingness to find the common ground of our humanity

Each generation and individual explores a different facet of how to love and understand each other. Underneath all the dramas and egos, at rock bottom, there is only the choice between love and fear.