Your Love Life Is In Your Mind

My love life research has taught me that our love lives are in our minds. What you’ve unconsciously learned about love relationships from the relationship experiences you’ve had in life is in control of your love life. As illustrated by the individual in the image pointing toward his own mind as he symbolically contemplates his love life.

Unfortunately, it also means you are not in control. The reality of this is observable in our relentless divorce rate: 40-50% for first marriages, 60% for second and 73% for third marriages. The only way to interpret the meaning of these percentages is to assume that a large number of people are making the same love life mistakes over and over again without an awareness that it is happening. Unhealthy repetition means unhealthy learning has taken place and is in control.

The simple fact is that we learn from past relationship experiences we don’t know have taught us what to believe about love relationships, how to behave in love relationships, and what to feel in love relationships. The implication being, in your love life experience, who you love, and how you love them is being determined by what you’ve learned and is beyond choice. This means that what we learn, when we are not aware of what we are learning or that we are even learning, shapes our current and future love life experiences according to that learning.

The people you fall in love with and the way you treat them, healthy or unhealthy, is in reality predetermined by what you’ve unconsciously learned. I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t sit right with me. After years of studying and treating unhealthy love lives I have seen first-hand how an unhealthy love life can dominant a person’s life and feelings for a lifetime. Tragic to say the least. I do believe that we can do much better than this if we would only view our love lives as an area of our lives that we can work on and in fact fix. I believe in this so strongly it has become an a preoccupation because of the emotional suffering I’ve witnessed that is an inevitable consequence of unhealthy learning about love relationships in an unexamined love life.

The good news of course is that learning is a user-friendly human activity. Our greatest asset and greatest liability at the same time. If and when we become aware of what we’ve learned about love relationships because of the string of love life disappointments we have had to endure, we can decide to unlearn what we’ve learned and learn something healthier about love relationships for a dramatically different outcome in our love lives. Then your love life is conscious and under your personal management, so to speak. You can decide whether the people you are attracted to are a good fit or some lingering replication of unhealthy relationship experience that took place in your life long ago. You can decide to change how you treat the person you are in love with because you’ve caught a glimpse of yourself reacting in a way that is destructive, abusive, or unavailable emotionally for a healthy love relationship. In short, because you see the problem, you can now decide to change it.

Think about the alternative. Unaware of what you’ve learned about love relationships from unhealthy relationship experience in your earlier life that now gets replicated over and over again recreating love life disappointments until you can’t stand it any more. Then comes the resignation. Forget love, it’s not worth the aggravation and hurt. Better off being alone and bitter. C’mon, all this emotional suffering and deprivation over a learning problem?

At this moment in human history, we are still under the spell of a Romanticism that teaches us that love is an idealized state of mind that is best left to Mother Nature. The idea of past and current learning having an important role in the recreation of love life experience is still too often disputed and/or overlooked. Unfortunately, if I stop the typical stranger on the street and ask, “Excuse me, what did you learn about love relationships?” I don’t expect a compassionate response.

Comments welcome. Share your love life experience.

Dr. Thomas Jordan, clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst, author of Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life.  Contact: 212-875-0154 or drtomjordan@lovelifelearningcenter.com for inquiries and explanations. Love Life Telehealth Consultations available by request.

Dr. Jordan

Dr. Thomas Jordan is a clinical psychologist, certified interpersonal psychoanalyst, author, professor, and love life researcher.

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