Love is not enough
In 1967 my favourite band, The Beatles, released a song that is still famous to this day. ‘All you need is love.’ The lyrics of that song idealised love and sparked a generational belief that love can and will solve all of our problems. The truth however, is vastly different.
Love is often idealised and we see it as a solution to our problems, we believe that, “All we need is love. Love is all we need” (Lennon and McCartney). This however, leads us to other real life issues such as ignoring fundamental values, respect, each other’s identities, dignity, humility etc…
If love does indeed solve everything, then why do we need values, morals, ethical behaviours, trust, commitment and all that other stuff? After all we have that magical thing called LOVE. Absolutely, love can feel great, warm, cozy and give us an amazing feeling of belonging. But it also requires some pretty hard stuff to make it work, stuff that we might find difficult to do or talk about. Stuff like honesty, communication, truly listening to each other, not listening to answer but listening to understand, sacrifice and respect for each other’s identity.
If we understand and can accept the concept that, “Love is not enough’, we can then understand that there are more important things in a relationship than just love. We can understand that relationships require more than just pure emotions, gestures of affection, or passion. We can understand that simply being in love is not enough. Relationships should be based on more than just feelings.
What percentage of a successful relationship is attributed to love alone? This will undoubtedly differ from person to person based on their experiences, knowledge, self awareness, culture and so on…
Many older successful married couples will tell you that friendship is more important in the longer term than love. Love is an evolving beast, starting out with tingling, bells and whistles, dreamy gazes into each other’s eyes and eventually becoming a set of behaviours and beliefs based on mutual respect, hard work, sacrifice and the want to help your partner to become the best version of themselves. These behaviours lead to growth, trust, commitment, and respect. All of these are important elements of any successful loving relationship.
If I ask you to solve the basic equation of 1 + 1, you would quite rightly tell me the answer is two. But here is where we start to enter the realms of possibility. What if each 1 in the equation is a person in a love relationship? Therefore, if 1+1=2 there isn’t any real growth occurring. Surely if we love each other, then my goal is to facilitate your growth and yours, mine. Therefore 1+1 should equal infinity. But what is the formula that brings this infinite growth?
I cannot pretend to know the exact formula, if I did, I would publicise it and we would all be hugging trees, there would be no more wars and we would have to invent a whole new set of issues in which to find pain and misery to write songs and make movies about. For some bizarre reason, some of us thrive on the drama of heartache and the need for sympathetic attention.
I personally believe that aligned values matter more than the emotion of love itself. For a relationship to be successful we must learn to use both our heart (emotion) and our brain (intellect). The trouble with this is that’s not what the movies and love songs want us to believe. Imagine if the Beatles sang ‘all you need is love, intellect and aligned values’, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have been the hit their original song was.
We are programmed to believe, ‘Love conquers all’ but I have news for you, it doesn’t!
Just because you fall in love with someone, it doesn’t mean they will be a good partner for you. It’s possible to fall in love with someone who doesn’t have our interests at heart, who doesn’t treat us well, who makes us feel worse about ourselves, who doesn’t have the same respect as we do for them. We might fall in love with someone who has different ambitions and life goals as us, who has different priorities, who has different philosophical and psychological viewpoints as us, who has world views that clash with our reality. It is possible to fall in love with someone that makes us feel unhappy. This doesn’t mean they’re bad people, in fact they maybe great people who are kind, but in reality, they unknowingly hurt us.
If people do not have similar or complementary values, the chances of their all consuming early days of romantic based love lasting, will be short.
Are your life goals, vision of the future and core values similar? Why don’t we ask these questions on our early dates? Probably because they’re too heavy and might dampen the mood, but that might be exactly what we should do.
Love can often make us feel like we are overcoming issues, we argue and then make up and making up feels great. When on a practical level, nothing is getting solved. Whilst love may make you feel better about your problems, it doesn’t actually solve your relationship problems.
Another question to ask yourself is; what are you sacrificing and is it worth it? In loving relationships both will occasionally sacrifice their own needs, wants and desires for the betterment of their partner. This is normal and to be expected. But what happens when one person feels they are sacrificing more than the other? What happens when that partner feels they are sacrificing their;
- Self Respect
- Dignity
- Physical Body
- Mental Health
- Ambitions
- Identity
When this happens, that same love can become toxic and destructive.
A loving relationship is supposed to supplement your identity, not damage or worse, erode or replace it. This will inevitably change us into someone we are not supposed to be and resentment will fester.
Relationships based on power or a power imbalance are seldom built on a foundation of love and are ultimately toxic. Abuse of power can take many forms;
- Telling people how to behave in order to fit in
- Making people do things they don’t want to do
- Making it difficult for a person to exercise freedom of choice
- Restricting a persons activities
- Controlling the finances
- Emasculation
Love is not rare, special or unique but a persons self respect and identity is. Erosion of these will affect the trust in any relationship. Love is a wonderful experience but we cannot let it consume us, nor should we sacrifice our identity for it.
Three harsh truths of love;
- Love does not equal compatibility
- Love does not solve relationship problems
- Love is usually not worth sacrificing yourself for
(Manson 2021)
For love to work, we have to work. We have to align our values, our life ambitions, understand and accept each other’s identities, help our partner grow into the best version of themselves, not the version we want them to be.
Think about the person you want to become. Take time to work out your values and share these with your partner. Genuinely listen to theirs.
I believe my values to be;
- Self Awareness (Caring about the impact my behaviour and words have on others)
- Risk Tolerance (Pushing my comfort zone further, having adventures, living a less ordinary life)
- Scepticism (Not believing the first thing I’m told, taking time to research and seek out knowledge)
- Compassion (Caring for the well being of others regardless of their position in life)
- Patience (remaining calm in the face of adversity and using my brain rather than emotion to problem solve)
At least that’s who I want to be.
Chris Enness