Finding the Love We Want or Can Love Last?

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It’s a question as old as time — what does it take to make a fulfilling and lasting relationship?

What should we be looking for?

What can we expect?

Can we really expect anything?

Is eternal love just a marketing trick used to sell diamonds, chocolates and Hollywood rom-coms?

In order to answer this question we need to first understand why we enter relationships to begin with.

Why we come together

“There’s something missing from my life; cuts me open like a knife”.

This is precisely how Plato described the human existence and the human quest for love. For him love exists because humans were missing something from their lives — a key part of themselves.

In his “Symposium” Plato tells the story, narrated through the voice of the playwright Aristophanes, of how the longing for love was created in humans.

Once, the story goes, humans were fused together. They were round with two heads, four arms and four legs. Humans were in complete unity within themselves. There was no duality or internal strife. Some were male in both halves, some female, while others were male in one half and female in the other.

Humans were whole and powerful; so powerful that they perilously tested the might of the gods.

The gods were angered, so Zeus decided to teach humans a lesson in humility. He split them in half and destined them to spend their entire lives searching for their other lost half.

For Plato, this was the true meaning of love, finding the missing piece of the original self.

And that desire to fill the missing void is precisely what drives our subconscious, and often times, unconscious decisions when it comes to choosing partners.

In the book “Getting the Love You Want”, Harville Hendrix, a renowned couple’s therapist, states that we initially fall in love with people for whom we perceive will be able to restore that which we lost in the process of growing up. He argues that we all emerge from childhood unfulfilled in some way or another, even if we had caretakers who loved us and tried to meet all of our needs.

Our childhood is the process by which, for the sake of belonging and being loved and accepted by our caretakers and society in general, we are torn from our original essence. As a result we spend the rest of our lives trying, in any way we know how, to restore it.

This is precisely what drives us when falling in love and in deciding to start relationships — the belief that our partners will perform the role that our caretakers failed and in the process restore our lost sense of wholeness.

So basically, according to Hendrix:

“… we choose our partners for two basic reasons. (1) they have both the positive and negative qualities of the people who raised us, and (2) they compensate for positive parts of our being that were cut off in childhood. We enter the relationship with the unconscious assumption that our partner will become a surrogate parent and make up for all the deprivation of our childhood.”

When the honeymoon ends

For some time, this mutual illusion functions well.

At the start of the relationship, when the mutual attraction is the strongest, our brains release neurotransmitters that act as narcotics and make us feel safe and secure. Because we unconsciously choose partners who we perceive to resemble our caretakers, early lovers have a sense that they have known the other for a long time, even though they just met.

They feel as if they have come home, and have a sense of belonging.

Finally, they feel as if they can’t live without each other.

Our search for our original essence and lost part of ourselves is thus miraculously complete — just by the act of meeting and falling in love with another.

Love truly is an incredible force, but, unfortunately, that’s not how it functions.

And we come to realise this at some junction of our relationship. The veil of self-deception and intoxication lifts and we discover that the person next to us is not the saviour that we were waiting to come.

This person is not the all-sensing being that can intuitively tap into every need and desire we have and conform to all the behavior patterns that we have learned and inherited.

Instead, what we find standing next to us is a flawed and imperfect human being, equally struggling to address the hurts of their own childhood.

This is the point in the relationship when the honeymoon ends and the power struggles begin.

It must be them

When we start to realize that, despite loving the person we are with, we are still not getting the sense of wholeness we need, we come to the conclusion that the issue must be with the other person.

In our view, they are selfishly putting their own needs and desires before our own and they are deliberately denying us with what we want and need. The power struggle that ensues, according to Hendrix, has several stages.

The first is shock. We begin to doubt that this is the person that we fell in love with, that they changed somehow or, even worse, that we were deceived. But the truth of the matter is that we are dealing with the same person, it is our perspective and understanding of the person that has changed.

Next is the phase of denial — we devise excuses and justifications. But to no avail, we clearly see the negative traits of our partner and to make it even worse we start projecting our own negative traits on to them.

This then spirals into the next phase, which is bargaining. This is when we start to condition our love and presence to having our needs and desires met. This is probably the most damaging stage and one in which, if measures are not taken to end the vicious cycle of emotional blackmail, resentment and alienation, can spiral into the final most devastating phase, which is despair.

At this stage all hope of reconciliation has evaporated and to make it even worse the coercing, cajoling, the mutual hurting and blackmailing has destroyed most of the vestiges of love and compassion that formed the relationship to begin with.

Most never come back together after this point. As Hendrix points out:

“…what gives the power struggle its toxicity is the underlying unconscious belief that, if we cannot entice, coerce, or seduce our partners into taking care of us, we will face the fear greater than all other fears — the fear of death.“

Often people conclude that all this suffering was the result of committing themselves to the wrong people and that all that is needed is to leave that relationship, and find the “right” one. Find the ideal partner that will heal them and answer all their needs and desires.

But this denies the basic truth behind achieving a fulfilling and happy relationship.

Our sense of oneness and completeness has not been achieved because our partners are defective in providing it, or because they have some character default.

Our partners can’t provide what we need and desire, nor heal our wounds, because it was never in their agency to do so.

As Hendrix puts it:

“Unless (people) understand the unconscious desires that motivated their dysfunctional behavior in the first relationship, and learn how to satisfy those desires with the new partner, the second relationship is destined to run aground on the same submerged rocks.”

Moving beyond the needs of the child

As Jung once said: “Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly without crisis. There is no birth of consciousness without pain.”

All the suffering caused trying to be in a lasting and committed relationship comes from unmet longings stored deep within our brains, created when we were infants.

And when our deep infant needs are not met, we react just as infants do — we cry, we throw tantrums, we withdraw within ourselves, we nag, we do anything we can to draw attention.

Just as infants we feel we have deep emotions that need to be expressed, but we don’t express them in a conscious way.

The relationship becomes a battle of wills, rather than the willful expression of two people yearning for fulfillment.

Therefore, true happiness in a relationship can come only when we transition from an unconscious relationship to a conscious one.

A conscious relationship is one that, as Harville Hendrix describes:

“… fosters maximum psychological and spiritual growth; it’s a relationship created by becoming conscious and cooperating with the fundamental drives of the unconscious mind — to be safe, to be heard, to be whole.”

Hendrix, from his long years of experience in counseling couples and his own personal experience, concludes that there are ten basic elements needed to come in place in order for a relationship to become conscious.

The fundamental of these elements is the clear understanding and acceptance that creating a lasting relationship requires constant work.

We grow and evolve, and so must our relationships. This may mean that we need to part ways with our partner, but when done in a conscious way this can be achieved in a loving and compassionate manner.

But the other key elements include the following:

• We need to understand and accept that the purpose of a relationship is to heal wounds from childhood. Accepting this enables us to better understand what triggers us in our relationship and why we react the way we do. This way we can differentiate from an unresolved issue that we are projecting on our partner from an issue that really is caused by our partner or his or her behavior.
• We need to see our partner for what he or she truly is — another human being trying to find their own healing and completion. They are not our saviours; no one is.
• We are responsible for our needs and desires and that includes not only understanding them, but also finding ways to clearly communicate them.
• Conscious relationships foster interactions that come with intention. We are not only instinctively reacting to a perceived threat or offense from our partner, but we understand our motives and take the effort to understand our partner’s motives.
• A conscious relationship is about realizing that the needs of your partner are equally valid as your own. No one’s perspective is right or wrong, they are exactly that, a perspective formed from the unique experience and development of each individual. Rather than judge your partner, aim to understand them and encourage them to develop an understanding of their own needs and desires.
• This is linked to the following key element — the clear understanding and acceptance that you are not perfect; that you have your dark sides that only you can uncover, understand and integrate.
• You and you alone are responsible for satisfying your needs and desires. Your partner can support you and give you the space to do so; but ultimately it’s your responsibility. In order to have a fulfilling relationship you need to search for those techniques and practices that lead to the fulfillment of your needs and desires. The moment that you realize that, in the end, your happiness depends on yourself and not on others is the moment that you liberate your relationship and all future relationships from the heavy shackles of unrealistic expectations.
• You are the only source of the strengths and abilities that you discover are lacking within you. We all have within us the agency for happiness and fulfillment; it’s just a question of tapping into those parts of ourselves and resourcing them.
• And finally, the more you understand yourself, the more aware you are of your drive to love and be whole and connected to the universe.

Settling into consciousness

“Our unconscious drive to repair the emotional damage of childhood is what allows us to realize our spiritual potential as human beings, to become complete and loving people capable of nurturing others.

Fidelity and commitment create the feeling of safety that allows couples to work on their unconscious issues and heal their childhood wounds — the unconscious purpose of all committed love relationships.” (Getting the Love We Want, H. Hendrix)

When we begin a relationship, the question we start out with is: ”What can this person do for me?”

But in order to have a fulfilling relationship the question we really need to ask is: “What do I need to do for myself in order for me to be happy with this person?”

Plato was not wrong.

Love is about restoring the original self. The romantic and sexual connections, intimacies and partnerships we forge throughout our life are an important part of that journey.

However, our restoration to our original essence is our task alone and can’t be done by someone else on our behalf.

The best we can aim for is to find a person or persons who willingly want to take this journey with us, and in the process, heal their own wounds and find themselves as well.

There is something missing from our lives; but isn’t it easier to have someone’s hand to hold while we embark on the journey to find it?