Psychological Love Life Defenses: 4. Avoiding Love Altogether
Avoiding love relationships is the ultimate love life defense because the individual is out of the game, so to speak. The most effective way to manage the disappointment and hurt that is possible in a love life is to avoid love relationships altogether. For many individuals, this is the conscious or unconscious plan as a consequence of love life hurt that is unresolved. The anticipation of hurt is strong enough to sacrifice a committed love life in order to protect oneself from further emotional pain. People are certainly free to make this defensive choice, however, I believe the underlying issues and motivations need to be clarified and understood.
Avoiding a love life because of the anticipated difficulty and hurt, is in most instances, a “decision” that is made because of past experience. Nobody, or should I say, most people don’t want to feel bad over and over again as a consequence of repetitive love life disappointments. Reaching a point where the idea of falling in love is thought of as problematic and overwhelmingly painful is tragic to say the least. In my love life research, the extreme form of love avoidance, becomes resignation. Resignation in this context is a mental state wherein the individual feels justified in assuming that there is no place for love in his or her life.
The problem with love avoidance that has morphed into resignation, is that it is never without reservations, and potentially painful ones at that. I discovered this reality as a consequence of publishing a post on this website/blog at its inception titled, Living Without Love in Your Life. Innocently enough, I wrote this post, the first time, as an effort to help those individuals who had given up on love and sought the safety of being single and not in love. I just didn’t expect the avalanche of commentary that came as a consequence of publishing it. Commentary that resulted in two revisions of the post as a consequence of what I was learning about avoidance from the people who where experiencing it and took the time to write me.
On the face of it, I learned that there are many people who have opted for defensive avoidance in their love lives and are struggling with resignation. From what I read, there are many individuals with good hearts, with love to give, suffering from loneliness, and feeling trapped in the avoidance that promised them emotional safety. I was moved to the point of trying to figure out how to really help men and women who are stuck in this precarious place in their love lives. So far, this mission has helped sustain my continued interest in researching love life issues and develop the most effective way to heal an unhealthy love life. This work is ongoing and there is lots more to do.
I have found that avoiding an emotionally intimate love life is a product of unconscious learning from earlier unhealthy relationship experiences. Observing or experiencing an intolerance for the emotion of love can teach a child, adolescent, or young adult to avoid engagement believing that the risks are too great, instead of teaching the love life skills required to manage and resolve the emotional difficulties that emerge in any and every love relationship. Too often we unconsciously replicate the relationship experiences we’ve had without conscious awareness that it is happening. The familiarity of the experienced unconscious replication is just too familiar to be questioned and changed.
I believe the personal recognition that something is wrong in this population of love avoidant individuals is inherently an opportunity to reverse and undo the effects of unhealthy relationship experience and learning. If only we could provide the adulthood correctivve learning that would enlighten and support an avoidance individual’s efforts to strengthen their tolerance for the complexities of love without having to avoid. I continue to believe that this website offers a respite and opportunity to those individuals brave enough to educate themselves and work on risking the possibility of love in middle-age and later life.
Comments welcome…
Dr. Thomas Jordan, clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, psychological disability consultant, speaker, and author of the award-winning book, Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life. Presentations and telehealth Love Life Consultations available upon request. Contact: 212-875-0154 or drtomjordan@lovelifelearningcenter.com for inquiries. Visit my speaker page at lovelifelearningcenter.com/speaker
