True Love versus Real Love

 

I propose that from this moment forth, the term “true love” and all its derivatives (true, truest love) be used to describe the feelings we experience when we fall in love. During this initial romantic phase, we are bathing in ecstasy. We feel that we and our partners were destined to be together. We’re soul-mates. We’ll always be together, adoring each other, complementing each other, supporting each other’s dreams. Our hearts will always ache when we’re parted and burst when we reunite. We’ll always have passionate love-making that fuses our souls and refuses description. We just can’t do enough for each other and are willing to bend to the breaking point to bring happiness to the eyes of our partners. The world is beautiful again and we are sure we are going to live happily ever after.

Why call this true love? Is it really true? I embrace the term for two simple reasons. First, it has been around a very long time, leaping from the lips of the earliest poets, troubadours and balladeers. So to honor that tradition, I say, “Let’s go with it.” The second reason is that it feels true while it is unfolding. In fact, it feels like the ultimate truth, the truth that makes life worth living and brings everything into perspective. Its power is oceanic and not to be denied. So even if, later, we look back with a wholly different perspective, I say, “Let’s honor the moment of it. It’s pretty incredible.”

So, then, if that’s true love, what is “real love”? For me, real love is the term we should use henceforth and forever more to describe the enduring and ever-growing bond between us when falling is love has passed and we have stood up and been walking together in love for some time. We have come to know each other. We have bumped up against each other’s limitations. We have felt our way through a period of disillusionment and frustration. We have begun to accept that we are not perfect, either of us as individuals. We are not the perfect re-assembling of Aristophanes’ sundered prototypic humans, as recounted by Plato. We have discovered that we are both burdened by injuries from early in life, injuries that drive us to do sometimes hurt ourselves and each other, to sometimes make less than optimal decisions, to sometimes just fail to consider each other. With all this, we choose to be together (see my poems, The Choice, from Love Over 60 at www.loveover60.com ) and embrace our “misses”, our imperfections and inadvertent elbowing and stepping on each other’s feet—we embrace all of these as part of reality. We learn to feel what is a childhood wound and what is real in the present so that we are less likely to project, making our partner into mom or dad, big sis or big brother. We come to relinquish the quest for conventionally conceived absolute happiness or perfection in anything and begin to suspect that real perfection is just what we are experiencing—our many-faceted humanity…as the old saying goes: “warts and all.”

We gradually learn to embrace our partner not in spite of his/her wounds but simply, with them. This means that we can love the scar even though our hearts break at the scarring. This means that when our partner does project something onto us, we can stand in our own truth and help them feel what is theirs, rather than reacting, escalating and compounding the fracture. This also means that we accept the reality that no one can meet all of our needs, nor is it his/her responsibility to do so, but that the joy of a love relationship is that we do fulfill a lot of each other’s needs. Included in this is an understanding that the powerful urge to have it all actually arises from early in our infancy when, indeed, we should have pretty much had it all, given how vulnerable and dependent we were. But that time is over. We may grieve it periodically for years to come, but we know that our partner is not responsible for that deprivation and cannot heal it all for us any more than we can heal it all for him/her. Having said that, we also learn that presence, compassion, patience and curiosity about our partner’s world goes a long way toward creating the safety he/she needs to feel that old hurt, not to mention to develop in the present into the person he/she is really capable of becoming.

Perhaps above all, we come to cherish each other’s companionship in its small and large expressions, in its passion and in its tranquility. We come to savor the moment, described in the beautiful children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, when we have so loved and been loved by our partner that our fur is rubbed off; we may appear used and worn to the outside world, but to each other we are, at long last, real.

C 2011 Bob Kamm

Are Relationships Really About Happiness?

 

"And they lived happily ever after." I'm sixty-four years old. I've seen a lot of things in my life and being a gregarious guy, I have known a lot of people. I have yet to meet anyone who actually lived happily ever after. And I am not a cynic. I'm just sayin'! I'm actually an optimist and an incurable romantic--for which I offer my love poems as evidence. Still, you have to wonder where this line came from--out of what psychological state. Maybe someone, someday will write a Masters or Ph.D. thesis on that question, because it's an important one. From the earliest age, we are fed misinformation about relationships. We are given gauzy animated fairy tales that usually occupy themselves with the quest to find "the one" and end right there.

The glass slipper fit Cinderella perfectly and she and the Prince lived happily ever after.
The Prince gave Snow White (and Sleeping Beauty--that guy gets around!) the kiss of true
love. She awakened and they lived happily ever after.

When we get to adulthood, Hollywood cranks out for us an endless stream of romantic scenarios that follow the same line. Maybe we should consider the possibility that these stories are actually dumbing us down from an early age and not the best parenting on earth. I love good stories. I'm sure we can come up with some better, fuller fairy tales. Let's give little humans a bit more credit:
"When the Prince brought Cinderella to his castle, at first she was dazzled. It was really big and her house had been really small. But after a while, she felt really sad and withdrew into her room. The Prince didn't understand at first. He stood outside her door begging her to come out. He got angry with her and walked away for a while to sulk in his own room. But then, it suddenly made sense to him that Cinderella wasn't feeling at home in his castle. It was 1000 times bigger than the house she had known. And she had been a servant to her sisters for all those years. He couldn't expect her to suddenly feel comfortable being a princess in a palace. He went back to her room and talked to her through the door. He talked to her in a soft, loving voice. He told her he understood and it was ok. He heard her crying through the door and told her she had every right to those tears and he knew it would take some time before she would really feel at home with him. He told her that he had been very lonely before he met her and he really needed her. Cinderella opened the door and they held each other for a long time. They cried together because it felt so good for each of them to finally have someone who really understood what they were feeling. A few days later, Cinderella told the Prince that even though her sisters treated her badly, she liked living in a little house. So he offered to build her a small cottage not far from the palace, just for her...where she could go whenever life as a princess stopped being fun. She accepted and he built it. Over the years, Cinderella went there less and less as she grieved over her early life with her stepmother and sisters. She grew inside and became the Prince's true partner in life, sharing responsibility for running a kingdom where nobody was ever treated again like a servant by his or her own sisters or brothers." I mean, is it really so hard to tell a captivating tale that has some element of reality to it?
Maybe the word happiness has been so overused that it has become nondescript. The love I have for
Andrea is way bigger than a "happily ever after" love. It is an enormous terrain with all kinds of different eco-systems within it.. Why would humans think that love can or should be reduced to a single quality, like happiness? Happiness and its counterpart, joy, have both become words that leak fluid, like an old transmission. What do they mean?
" I'm happy that I got a new iPad."
" I'm so happy that I got that job."
"I'm joyful over my new VW."
"I'm going to be on Oprah and I am beside myself with joyful happiness"
I enjoy these moments as anyone would. But the point is that they are moments, call them semi-peak moments because they're not in the same category as the vaunted "peak experience." If you come into a love relationship expecting or thinking you're entitled to always feel like someone just gave you a new iPhone or 2 cruise tickets to Barbados, you are in for a majorly rude awakening.
What would I replace this language with? If I were limited to one phrase it would be
"a sense of rightness", a sense that you fit, even when you don't. Paradox? Yes, but truth. Even in the ways that you sometimes hurt each other and struggle with each other, totally miss each other's intent and then have to reconnect; even on days when you are both so busy that it seems all you can do is kiss each other goodnight; even on days when you go temporarily insane and really don't like each other; even on days when repugnant aspects of the world intrude on you and throw you way off balance...on these and many other kinds of days and moments, you have a sense of being with the right person in the relationship you're supposed to be in, slowly but surely growing and creating something meaningful together and helping each other stand up in the world as the whole persons you are both capable of being.
For me, this is more a "deep" than a "high"--so the words happiness and joy are too limiting. A deep is something we feel when our feet are firmly planted in the real world where relationships unfold in their own subtle, sometimes painful but beautiful way. Real love is so may things. Let's give it room to breathe. Let's not imprison it in a box with a bow that reads, "Happily ever after."

C 2011 Bob Kamm