What Kind of Relationship Do You Form When You Fall in Love?
If you’re done making the same old love life mistakes in your disappointing love life and it’s time to really work on your love life….the most important question you have to answer is: What kind of relationship do you form when you fall in love? Is it healthy? Unhealthy? Is the relationship you form when you feel the emotion of love, emotionally intimate? Or is it the type of relationship that will inevitably erode or destroy the love you are presently feeling? If you don’t know what kind of relationship pattern is in control of your love life, you could be making the same mistakes over and over again recreating (without much awareness) a very disappointing love life. The bottomline…the relationship you form when you fall in love will determine the success of your love life…period.
The good news is…my research over years of studying healthy and unhealthy love relationships, has taught me that what you’ve learned about love relationships over the course of your life determines the type of relationship you will form in love. Now when I say “over the course of your life” I mean just that. From the very beginning of life we start learning about love relationships. The learning is unconscious to be sure, meaning you are not aware that you are learning about love relationships or what you are learning about them. Think of it this way, the first relationship you form, which is usually with a parent, is plain and simple a love relationship. OK, let’s define a “love life” as any and all relationships involving the emotion of life, starting from the beginning of life.
What you have learned about love relationships in your life will be stored in the backroom of your mind in what I like to call your Psychological Love Life. Typically, your Psychological Love Life will store the relationship experiences that have gotten into your love life and what you’ve learned from them. Your Psychological Love Life functions kind of like a “mental blueprint,” controlling the type of experiences you will have in your love life throughout your life. Most people are not aware of their Psychological Love Lives. They don’t know what is in them, and they are unaware of the ways it shapes their love life experiences, good, bad, healthy or unhealthy.
One of the saddest experiences I have had over these many years of study and treatment of people struggling with unhealthy love lives is to meet a person who has fallen in love several times over the course of their life and tragically formed the same unhealthy relationship each time ending in the same old breakup and disappointment. The person is now in their later years and resigned to living without love in their lives. The hard part for me is knowing that this is a learning problem that can be unlearned and corrected. There is nothing inherently wrong with such a person’s love life functioning. The only problem is that they have learned something unhealthy about love relationships that does not work in their love life and tragically, they are not aware of it, so they can’t fix it.
This tragic repetitive love life suffering, reflected in a relentless 50% divorce rate, can be fixed. And it doesn’t take years and years of treatment to do so. The first step is always to take an interest in working on your love life. Your love life is disappointing for a reason. When what we’ve learned doesn’t work, we can unlearn it and learn something better.
Comments, stories, reactions, all welcome.
Dr. Thomas Jordan, clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst and love life researcher, author of Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life. Love Life Consultations by tele-health appointment 212-875-0154.
