In yesterday’s column, I wrote that love does not really require work — or the miserable sacrifices so many people claim.
I received some interesting responses. One reader wrote:
Good relationships require some self-sacrificial love. If the balance is off for too long then obviously something is wrong with the relationship. Keeping a good balance over the long term, i.e. commitment, requires some work. And, hopefully we become better people through the process.
Actually, “balance” won’t do the trick here. “Balance” implies that two people draw some kind of arbitrary line, sometimes sacrificing your interests, and sometimes sacrificing mine. But by what objective standard or method are we to determine when I make my sacrifices and you make yours? It’s vague and indefinite.
Instead of balance, the thing to strive for is mutuality. Mutuality means pleasing both parties, to the greatest degree possible.
The unspoken (and sometimes spoken) attitude of a person who grasps mutuality is as follows: “Until we’re both happy, I’m not happy. If one of us has a problem with the way things are in our lives, then we both have a problem.”
Whenever I talk to couples in crisis, or individuals profoundly unhappy with their marriages, this attitude is always absent in one, or possibly both, parties. In the worst cases, each keeps screaming for more sacrifice and selflessness from the other. Each conveys the entitlement mentality: “You are my wife [husband] and I am entitled to expect my wife [husband] to do/feel/think such-and-such.” Really? Says who? And what does this do to the good will and motivation of the spouse from whom you’re expecting all the sacrifices?
Another reader expressed the meaning of mutuality very well with this example:
Of course, there is back and forth in that healthy couples realize individual desires are often important to that person’s happiness, and a happy partner is a critical ingredient for a happy relationship – so there’s a balance that good couples can find and maintain. I love going to the movies, especially with my husband. He generally doesn’t care for the cinema and often prefers to stay home. He finds those movies that really interest him and will go to the cinemas to see those with me (even though he could easily just wait for video) because he knows it makes me happy to do that with him. I don’t pressure him to see movies I know he doesn’t care about – sometimes I wait until video, sometimes I go with friends instead.
One little understood principle or premise behind the idea of self-interested romantic love is the idea, “I’m not happy until both of us are happy.” The sacrificial view doesn’t allow for this. The sacrificial view sets both people up for a certain amount of unhappiness by focusing on what each allegedly has to give up. A self-interested view based on mutuality — where the interests of both parties are considered by both members of the relationship — allows for a more positive approach. It’s positive because each aims to get as much of what he or she wants as possible — while wanting the same for the spouse. It’s the constant search for the “win win” rather than “how much you give up / how much I give up.”
Compromises aren’t always possible, and there are deal breakers for relationships. They’re not just obvious things, either, as in extramarital affairs. We are all entitled to determine what our deal breakers are. At the same time, we have to take self-interested responsibility for conveying those desires to our partner. You cannot go into a relationship and just assume that you’ll get what you want, if you haven’t made it crystal clear what you consider acceptable and unacceptable, as opposed to merely optional or preferable.
A reader also asked me to write about what love actually is. Love is an emotional response to what you value. In the case of romantic love, it refers to your emotional response to personal qualities about people you hold dear — integrity, ability, as well as sense of life, sense of humor and physical attributes. (The physical does matter in love.) Emotions do not lie. When you fall in love with someone, your emotional response — one of the strongest emotions there is — contains evaluations about what you consider uplifting, important and worthwhile. “This man (or woman) represents all that I hold dear.” People don’t actually say this to themselves, but my point is that emotions, by their nature, imply value judgments of some kind.
Just as none of us can escape the fact that we have emotions, none of us can escape the fact that our emotions of romantic love toward another imply values, beliefs, ideals and all kinds of notions that can (and in my view should) be made explicit via introspection. A lot of people don’t like to take the time to do this, partly due to laziness but also because they feel, “It spoils the romance to analyze your feelings.” Actually, just the opposite is true. It spoils your romance not to understand what your feelings are based on. That’s the only way to spot errors or contradictions in your feelings about the person you love, errors or contradictions that might emerge down the road when you’ve already committed to things like buying a house, getting married or having children.
Love is a trade, or an exchange. It’s not an exchange of money or material goods; it’s not a commercial transaction, but a highly personal one. Yet the principle of trading is nevertheless the same.
A reader expressed this well when she wrote:
The base values and sense of life need to be compatible, but I enjoy what I learn from my husband (and vice versa), which is often (not always) a consequence of our differences.
That’s so true. Differences are neither inherently helpful nor inherently harmful to the course of a romantic relationship. It’s all in how you view the differences. If you view a romantic partner or spouse not as someone who exists to serve you, but who already serves you just by being who he or she is, then you’re on your way to a sustained experience of happiness with that person. It’s less about work and more about how you look at it. You ought to be able to view your spouse — your chosen love — as a gift, and a joy, not an adversary from whom you must extract whatever you can. Sadly, this is how much of the world approaches love, and it explains why love gets such a bad name with so many people. I suppose that when people claim that love is sacrifice, some of them really mean it … and it’s from you they intend to extract the sacrifices.
That’s not love.
Be sure to “friend” Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Rehoboth Beach DE). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1