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*This presentation was given to a non-church audience and therefore
is more psychologically oriented than the biblical orientation I
would give to a church group.
# # #
I'm not an expert on safety issues, but I will hazard a guess that
more people are hurt in falls than in any other kind of injury. And
the type of fall that I have seen produce the most injuries is
falling in love! I offer this as a result of my observations over
twenty-five years as a marriage and family therapist.
I want to address this issue by asking the question, Is falling in
love enough? Is it enough to keep a marriage going? According to
the duet Nat King Cole and his daughter sing, "If I fall in love, it
will be forever." Don't kid yourself. It won't be. Unless there
is more to your relationship than falling in love, it won't last
long.
I can speak as an expert on this. In addition to my experience as a
marriage and family therapist, I offer the experience of having been
married almost fifty-five years.
Romantic love is the most important interpersonal relationship that
exists between human beings. But it is the least understood.
One reason for this is love songs. They mystify romantic love and
raise it to a level that is beyond reason. In our culture, the
basis of selecting a mate is based on romantic love, a very strong
elation in which you feel, This is it! Though sexual attraction is
not the only element in romantic love, it is a major one.
Let me give you a few examples of love songs. Even though they are
golden oldies, they still are very popular today. I checked this
out on my computer search engine, Google, and brought up the subject
of love songs. I wanted to be sure that people are still falling in
love. Here are some love songs, still popular today, that
illustrate my point:
"Embraceable You." The lyrics go, "Embrace me, you sweet
embraceable you."
Though it is notput as crassly as this, the message is, I want
to hold you and
feel your body against mine.
"Love Me Tonight." Why tonight? I'll let your imagination work
on that.
"Just The Way You Look Tonight." The lyrics go, "Lovely, never,
never change.
Keep that breathless charm, won't you please arrange it 'cause I
love you, just
the way you look tonight." He's breathless over what he
sees--the way she looks
tonight. I wonder if he's ever seen her in the morning! This
is when reality hits
the marriage.
"Nobody Does It Better" Here's one from the James Bond movie,
"The Spy Who
Loved Me." There's no question about what she means by love.
The lyrics go,
"Nobody does it better. Makes me feel sad for the rest. Nobody
does it half as
good as you. Baby, you're the best."
There's a strong sexual component involved with falling in
love. And obviously
the woman in that song has been in and out of love so many times
that she can
give the opinion that nobody does it half as good as you.
Psychologist Everett Shostrom, who has made an extensive study of
male/female love, created an excellent test, which I used many years
when I was in counseling. The test is called The Caring
Relationship Inventory. He examined five types of love essential to
a lasting marriage and developed a questionaire and evaluation
scales to see what kind and how much of these loves exist in any
given marriage. The types of love he examines are these: eros,
agape, friendship, empathy and self-love.
Eros
The first type of love I have already introduced--romantic love.
The word psychologists use is eros, which primarily has to do with
sex. We get our word, erotic from this. Erotic love is
fundamentally sexual love.
But it really has to do with more than physical appearance--looking
sexy. It also has to do with personality, where we see an inner
beauty. We often project on this person our ideal of a personality
that we would like to have in a mate.
This was very true of the woman I married, Fay. Actually, her name
is Faydeen. Southern girls--she's from Texas--always seemed to have
double names like Myrtle Mae, Billie Joe or Faydeen. But everyone
calls her Fay now.
When I first saw Fay, I thought, Wow! She was, and still is, a
looker. She was tall, had the body and looks of a professional
model, and carried herself like a woman. As a nineteen-year-old, I
had only dated girls. But this was a woman, though we were the same
age.
One of the things I liked about her looks was that she wasn't built
like my mother--short and busty. Not being like my mother was very
important, especially as far as her personality. My father was not
the head of the house, my mother was. She controlled him and doted
on him, and he loved it. And she would have controlled me that way,
but I would have none of it. She may have controlled my father, who
really needed her, but she wasn't going to control me by making me
need her.
Fay was, and still is, quiet, and demure. I saw at once that she
would never be the kind of woman who was going to try to run my life
like my mother ran my father's life. This to me was an inner beauty
that enhanced her outer beauty. I didn't find out until after we
were married that this could present a different kind of problem.
But I'll have more to say about this as we look at the different
types of love in marriage.
In Shostrom's test, he measures eros love with these statements:
"I want to know the details about the things he/she does."
Seeing an inner attractiveness in the person makes us want to know
more. There is more than physical closeness here. There is an
emotional closeness that develops with this person.
"I seek a great deal of privacy with him/her."
Though possessiveness can wreck a marriage, there is a proper
element of what I would call "at oneness" with this person. There
is a feeling that we have a soul to soul relationship with this
person that we have
with no one else.
There was a time, back in the 1970's, when any sign of
possessiveness in marriage was extremely unpopular. In fact, it was
so unpopular that a married couple wrote a book extolling the
virtures of having another sex partner in addition to your own
spouse. They both confessed in their book that they each had
another sexual partner and tried to convince the public that it
really enlivened their own marriage.
This also was a time where wife swapping parties became very
popular. The wife of each couple would leave her house-key in a
dish when she came to the party, and when the party broke up, the
men would pick up a key and go home, for the night, with the woman
who left the key.
This craze didn't last long. The couple who wrote the book
divorced. The swapping parties ceased. Though possessiveness in
marriage was still a problem, the words of an old popular song
regained popularity. The song, "You Belong To Me," brought back
some sanity in marriage.
Here are some more statements on the test about eros love:
"I spend a lot of time thinking about him/her."
Our minds are occupied with what is important to us and brings us
pleasure. This person is a pleasure to be with.
"I have a strong need to be near him/her."
There is an important physical connection in erotic love. I will
say more about this in my presentation next week in dealing with
sexual problems in marriage. But physical closeness, though
important to both men and women, mean different things to both. For
men, it's usually sex. For women, they distinguish between their
need for sex and their need just to be cuddled.
"I like to express my caring for him/her by caressing him/her a
great deal."
Body contact, once again, is important. Though it may not always
have a strong sexual component, it is a form of expression that
helps strengthen this part of the relationship. Every night when we
go to bed, Fay and I kiss goodnight. And even though at age
seventy-five, it doesn't have the same erotic impact on me as it did
over fifty-five years ago, those lips are as soft and sweet as ever.
Fay and I did fall in love. We had romantic love in our marriage
from the start. But something happens to that excitement as a
couple settles down to marriage. When they don't understand why
they are starting to lose that romantic attachment, and they don't
understand that there must be more than romance to make the marriage
work, they are in serious trouble.
Falling Out of Love
In our next session I'll deal with sexual problems in marriage in
more detail. But I want to briefly address the problem of losing
the romantic attachment or falling out of love. I see two
fundamental reasons for falling out of love. First, a good sexual
relationship is never developed. Second, even if there is a good
sexual relationship, other necessary types of love are not
developed. Women, usually more than men in a dying marriage, would
tell me in marriage counseling, "We have good sex. But that's all
we have." And to the man who thinks that sex is all that marriage
is about, I have to say, Buddy, you're in trouble.
1) First, have you achieved a good sexual relationship? In
many marriages, the sexual relationship never does develop into what
the man and woman fantasized what it would be. And this is even
more problematic with those who have had previous sexual relations
with which to compare the present one. I think I would be turned
off if my wife told me, Nobody does it half as good as you.
One reason why a sexual relation never develops is that there is an
ignorance about how sexual fulfillment is achieved, both for the man
and the woman. When I married I had no prior sexual experience.
And my knowledge was limited. I didn't even know that a woman had a
clitoris and the important part it plays in the sexual fulfillment
of a woman.
But sexual savy and knowing how the anatomy works is but a small
part of sexual fulfillment. The psychology of sex in both the male
and female is all important. How each feels about the sexual
relationship and how those feelings impact sexual desire is all
important.
Many times, sex in marriage becomes boring. Sometimes we begin to
see a side of our mate's personality that we had not seen before
marriage. The body may look good. But the personality doesn't.
It's a turnoff. On the part of the husband, he may come across as
demanding and not caring about how his wife feels about sex. As one
wife described her husband it was "wham, bam, thank you mamm." On
the other hand, the husband may see the wife as not really caring
about his sexual needs, and is always putting him off when he wants
sex or having an attitude about sex or about him that puts him off.
When sex is ho-hum or not frequent enough, it can lead to real
danger. I remember a case where a man was feeling very unfulfilled
sexually by his wife. In fact, she really didn't act like she found
him attractive any more.
He told me that he often would get looks from women who gave him the
message that they found him attractive. At work, he was even
propositioned. He told me that he found it very flattering, but he
couldn't be unfaithful to his wife. But his anger toward her sexual
indifference almost made him angry enough to cheat on her.
Over twenty-five years of dealing with this kind of problem I came
to the conclusion that infidelity doesn't occur simply out of lust
or the availability of other partners. It most often is prompted by
an anger that wants to get even.
2) Second, is sex the only thing you have going for your
marriage? Here's where we need to take a look at Dr. Shostrom's
Caring Relationship Inventory. For a husband and wife to feel true
caring that makes a marriage last, they must understand the other
types of love that must be expressed.
I often tell couples who have fallen out of love that romantic love,
eros, is the hook that gets us into marriage. And unless they
develop the other types of love necessary to marriage, the
excitement of falling in love wears off and there is nothing to
replace it.
Falling out of love is mainly due to the fact that being in love is
largely a fantasy about the other person. After marriage, the
fantasy is shattered. Someone once said, Love is blind, but
marriage is an eye-opener.
Agape Love
Let's look at some of these other forms of love that are important
to marriage. The first one I want to look at is agape love. Agape
is an ancient Greek word that describes what they believed to be the
ultimate expression of love. Shostrom says that agape is "a
helping, nurturing form of love. It involves unconditional giving
and acceptance of the kind that characterizes the love of a parent
for a child or of man by God." We are loved in spite of our faults.
Agape has nothing to do with the lovability or attractiveness of the
person loved. It is a choice, a decision, a committment to love.
Early in our marriage, as Fay and I got to know each other better,
we began to irritate each other because we didn't realize how
extreme our personalities really were. Every personality has an
adaptive, or balanced expression, and a maladaptive, or unbalanced
expression. We are opposites, and though opposites attract, we
didn't realize how much we differed from each other, and how
maladaptive we
both were in our own way.
I saw her the opposite of my mother. My mother was dominant,
verbal, and had a need to be right. Fay, however, was not dominant,
verbal and was a people pleaser and would quickly make peace by
declaring herself wrong. Her wants and wishes were not important to
her. Avoiding problems by pleasing people was important to her
security.
About eight months after we married, I started college. Finances
were very tight. Fay was a good homemaker, so I left it up to her
to do the shopping--for groceries and almost everything else.
Though we had the same outlook on spending, I noticed that sometimes
when she bought something that was defective or for some reason she
couldn't use, she wouldn't return it for a refund.
Living on a very tight income, this was a waste I didn't
understand. I often would chide her for not returning the
merchandise. She would make excuses, or she would jump on me for
making a big deal out of something that was not that important. We
would get into terrible arguments, and I always turned out to be the
bad guy because I didn't understand that it wasn't nice to return
merchandise and hurt the feelings of the returns clerk.
Indeed, I didn't understand her--until she began to open up about
her relationship with her mother when she was growing up. Though
her mother was very critical of Fay, it was extremely important that
Fay always please other people no matter what it cost her. What
people thought of her was all important.
Then it started to come out about returning merchandise. We had a
costly item that really needed to be returned. Because I was busy
with fulltime college and a job, I expected her to return it.
Fay began to cry. I forget exactly what she said, but it sounded
like, What will the returns clerk think of me when I bring this
back? Then it dawned on me how her mother had crippled her with
fear of what others would think.
I realized also that this was one reason why she married me. Though
she criticized me for being indifferent to the opinions of others,
she married me because she knew that I had no problem with things
like returning merchandise.
Still, fifty-five years later, she is working on the problem. She's
a recovering people pleaser. She's much better than she used to
be. But every so often she falls back into her old ways and gets
angry with herself. Not long ago I remember her weeping and saying,
"All my life I've tried to please people, and where has it gotten
me? It doesn't work, and I hate myself for doing it. But I still
do it."
Her honesty about herself has resulted in the development of my
agape love for her. Every so often she will get testy with me
because she sees me as not caring what other people think and not
wanting to please people. This attitude hurts, yet I see it coming
from this baggage she brought into the marriage. Her desperate need
to be a people pleaser makes me look like the bad guy because my
personality is so different from hers.
I say that it is agape love that overcomes the hurt that comes from
this. I choose to love her. I am committed to loving her. What
does that mean? Though I feel that I'm being treated unfairly, I
won't accuse her. Though I want to lash back at her and tell her
that the issue we're dealing with is her people pleasing problem, I
will not say it.
Please don't think she is the only one who has had a need for
change. She has had to deal with a husband who had a difficult time
coming to terms with a maladaptive narcissistic-competitive
personality. Just as she found security in submissiveness, I found
security in dominance. Our cultural differences played a part in
this too. I was raised in Northern New Jersey, in the New York City
metropolitan area. The people in North Jersey and New York City are
all the same kind of "in your face personalities." Though a friend
was just kidding, he said to me, "Are you just naturally rude or do
you come from New York."
The point I'm making is that one of the things that has made our
marriage work is the development of agape love--the choice to love.
This is what the committment of marriage is all about. Fay and I
both have learned that we both brought some heavy baggage into the
marriage, and even after all these years, we're still unpacking.
Before I move on, I want to say one more thing about agape love as
it relates to marriage. There are some people whose philosophy of
love is that if you fall in love, don't get married. Just live
together and see if it works.
Do you see the insanity of this? There's no committment to make it
work. If Fay and I had done this, we would have walked away within
six months.
Marriage is a committment to make the relationship work. This is
why my next session is going to be, "Marriage Is What You Make It."
There I will take up typical problems in
marriage where committment is essential to facing and solving the
problems. I'm talking about problems like sex, child rearing, money
and inlaws, just to name a few.
So then, agape is essential. You get started by falling in love.
Then you must choose to love--and this is the most noble of all of
the loves. Agape love is a major factor that saves couples who are
falling out of love.
Friendship
Friendship in marriage is another type of love that rescues couples
who are falling out of love. Friendship in marriage requires that
we understand at least two principles.
1) First, friendship is about something besides each other. In
the romantic phase of the marriage, all we can do is look dreamily
into each others eyes. Eros is a face to face relationship.
Friendship, however, is a shoulder to shoulder relationship where we
are looking at something else.
One of the statements Shostrom uses in his Caring Relationship
Inventory is, "I feel that we 'stand together' against the views of
outsiders." Shoulder to shoulder friends tend to see things the
same way and stand together. This is one of the reasons why they
are friends.
Another statement in Shostrom's CRI is, "My relationship with
him/her is characterized by trust." Though we may have different
personalities and different interests, we tend to look at things the
same way--whether it's raising children or how to spend money. On
political issues, we look at things the same way. We trust each
other because we are confident that we understand each other's
outlook on life.
If you've been married any length of time, you have discovered that
the dreamy face to face experience of romance fades because of
desensitization. That is to say, when we repeatedly do something
that feels good, it begins to lose it's kick. Friendship takes a
break from looking at each other to looking at those things that we
both have in common. Instead of face to face, we are shoulder to
shoulder, enjoying something together besides our attraction to each
other.
But this can be a problem, particularly when the personality and
interests of the man and woman are very different. It is a truism
that opposites attract. We often see in the other person qualities
we don't have and find desirable in marriage. But this also may
indicate a difference in interests.
Fay and I have had this problem. Her interest in reading and in
television is fiction. Mine is non-fiction. I watch the History
Channel on TV. Fay likes to watch soaps.
But there is something that we have in common. Because of my love
for music, I love to watch old movies, particularly the old musicals
where there were large orchestras and
beautifully costumed dancers. Because the stories are usually
fictional and offer the fantasy that Fay finds in fiction, she
enjoys it too.
An exception to Fay's interest in fiction is her deep interest in
the Bible. Because I have a theological education, we will spend
hours discussing what she has been reading and my answering
questions about it. Often her excellent questions will spur me on
to further research to get the answer. This common interest brings
joy to me in study and conversation with her.
Another difference is our attraction to water and water sports. We
live on the water and Fay loves to watch the boating and activity on
the water. But because she almost drowned when she was a teenager,
she has a fear of being in or on the water.
We own a boat, but she rarely goes out on it with me. But she
loves to watch when I, my sons and grandkids go out tubing and
skiing. At the ocean, she'll sit on the beach under an umbrella and
watch us body surf.
What I'm saying is that we can be very different, and have different
interests, but we respect each other's differentness and permit each
other the freedom to be different.
2) Second, freedom to be different is important. Eros doesn't
allow for freedom. There is a strong element of possessiveness in
eros.
Though we are not free to have romantic interests outside of
marriage, we are free to be different from each other. Yes, our
differentness has created problems, but in the process of becoming
friends, we have learned how to be different without creating
problems for each other.
Fay is a winter person. She loves to be in the house and see it
snowing outside. I am a summer person and love to be outside where
it is hot. Fay will watch boating but she doesn't want to go boating.
I, on the other hand, love boating. I like to spend time living on
the boat; Fay prefers the comfort of home.
I love taking my boat to the Florida Keys and spending the month of
January living on the boat. I can cruise the Keys and enjoy the
warm air, the warm water and snorkling. One year, in the interest
of developing out common interest, our shoulder to shoulder
friendship, Fay agreed to go to Florida with me. It just was not
fun for her. After a couple of weeks we came home.
The next year as winter approached, she came to me rather timidly
and asked if I was
planning another Florida trip in January. I told her I was. She
asked, with pleading in her voice, Would you mind if I don't go with
you?
I was so relieved! The previous trip hadn't been fun for me because
I knew she was just toughing it out for my sake. We were sharing
misery, not fun.
We decided I'd go, and she'd stay home. It worked beautifully. I
was able to do my thing--warm weather, water, boating and
snorkling. She was able to be warm and cozy in the house and watch
the snow fall, watch TV and read. In fact, she went out and bought
a new TV. I was happy to see her do it because it was something she
enjoyed, and she spent a lot less money on her fun at home than I
did in Florida.
When I got home, we spent days telling each other of our adventures
while apart--she in Virginia and I in Florida. And we got an
unexpected dividend from a friendship that respects
differentness--the feeling of freedom. That may sound strange for a
couple married almost fifty-five years. But even though you're
married, you don't lose your individuality, with your own unique
preferences, way of doing things and enjoyments, and a need for your
own space.
We each have our own space and separate beds. I have converted half
my garage into an office and study and have a foldout couch bed that
I sleep on at night. I can leave my place as messy as I want, and
it doesn't bother her a bit. She recognizes it as my space. When
I'm in the house, her space, I am very careful to respect how neat
and clean she keeps it. And she appreciates it, because neat and
tidy is important to her self image.
Shostrom, again, taps into this in the CRI with the statement, "I am
able to expose my weaknesses to him/her easily." Because of our
trust in each other because we tend to look at things the same way
and because we understand and respect each other's differentness, we
are able to sharpen that understanding of each other by freely
exposing to each other our weaknesses that give us problems.
Fay has often spoken about how she often gets down on herself and
explains what makes her do it. I have had trouble all of my life
with being driving and driven, and often it provokes impatience.
I'm able to tell her when I'm having a problem with this because she
knows me as a recovering driving/driven person.
I've spoken about our different interests. You may ask if we spend
time together. Yes, lots of time--just sitting and talking about
what's going on in the world, in politics, about the Bible, our
church, and most of all, our family and memories. We have four
sons, ten grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
Yes, we have a lot in common to share, in spite of our
differentness. Our time together as friends is not face to face but
shoulder to shoulder. We have easy chairs in the family room, side
by side. There, we look out over the water remembering over a half
a century together.
Empathy
The fourth type of love we must build into marriage is empathy.
Though we often use sympathy and empathy synonymously, they are not
the same. Sympathy means that we have felt that way before.
Empathy is the ability to enter into what the other person is
feeling and feel it with them. It is a vicarious experience. It is
an emotional bonding with that other person.
Shostrom captures empathy in his CRI with the statement, "I can tell
what he/she is
feeling even though nothing is said." It is the developed ability
to read the non-verbals. Can you read your mate and know when
something is wrong or something is troubling him or her just by the
tone in the voice, body language or an expression on the face?
Sometimes asking, Is everything all right, will let your husband or
wife know that you're in tune with his or her mood. This can be a
very strong element in emotional bonding.
You know the feeling of bonding in a sexual relationship. Does your
mate know the feeling of bonding with you when he or she is
hurting--the bonding of empathy?
Over the years I have had a lot of professional training and
experience in working with people who are emotionally devastated.
Sometimes the situation is so tragic and the pain is so unbearable,
words sound cheap. Don't say, "I know how you feel," and then
proceed
to tell the grieving person your war story. Sometimes, the only
thing that helps is to put your arms around that other person and
weep too. Men, do you know how to weep with those who hurt?
One of the significant differences between men and women comes into
play here. Men tend to be problem solvers. They are head
oriented. Tell me the problem, and I'll tell you
how to fix it. Women tend to be heart oriented, or feeling
oriented.
Often, when a wife expresses a problem to her husband, she isn't
telling him so he can solve it. She wants him to listen and
understand how she is feeling. Many times, for women, just talking
about a problem is the solution. Women often realize after talking
it out that it's not the problem she thought it was. And by having
someone to tell it to is far more effective than just thinking about
it. And when the problem is not solvable, the experience of talking
it out, often with many tears, brings a catharsis--a relief--that
could not be achieved otherwise.
I often had clients with unresolved problems with deceased parents
or others whom they were unable to talk to, and I used this as a way
to help them get rid of this baggage. I had them imagine that the
significant other person was in the room in a separate, empty chair,
and had them talk to that person as though he or she were there.
Sometimes, I would play the role of the significant other.
In short, our ability to love with empathy in marriage produces a
bonding experience between husband and wife that we experience with
no other kind of love. I have actually seen a couple, whose
marriage is in trouble, experience this bonding experience through
the loss of a child. It's almost as though they feel the child has
died so their marriage might live.
Your life together will give you many opportunities to develop
empathy. When problems arise, don't get out the calculator and try
to solve the problem. First, put your arms around each other and
cry together. Then, after you have no more tears to cry, talk about
the problem, and see if there's a solution. Just caring and talking
about it may be the solution.
Self-Love
The fifth and last love I want to talk about is self-love. It may
seem strange that I talk about self-love in the context of a
husband/wife relationship. Aren't we supposed to love others
instead of ourselves?
The answer to that is this. We can't begin to love others unless we
are fully functional persons ourselves. We must understand that
unless we have a healthy view of our own wants, wishes and needs,
we're not going to have a healthy view of the wants, wishes and
needs of our mate.
You may be surprised that the Bible, that book about loving others,
has a couple of important things to say about self-love. When Eve
was created from Adam's rib, Adam and Eve were called "one flesh."
For this reason man was to leave mother and father and cleave to his
wife as one flesh.
This one flesh concept is repeated in the New Testament where the
husband is to love his wife as his own body. It says, "No man ever
hated his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it." A healthy
self-love enables us to love our mate in the same way we love
ourselves.
Though I have been critical of my mother in this paper, I will say
this for her. She loved me and made me feel like a worthwhile
person. She enabled me to accept both my strengths and weaknesses,
and because I am able to do this with myself, I am able to love my
wife the same way--accept her with both her strengths and
weaknesses. I expect her to show self-love, to love herself, in
accepting her own strengths and weaknesses.
Psychologist Eric Fromm once said, "Love of self and love of others
are not alternatives, but run parallel." A self-loving person is
able to have a "nourishing" relationship with husband or wife
because there is a sense of that one-flesh relationship.
It may seem strange, but some people find their security in avoiding
self-love. It's called a masochistic personality. Its major
symptom is self-effacement--I am a worm; I am a nothing; I deserve
all the bad things that happen to me.
This person is usually the product of a home where the dominant
parent sends the message, You are a nothing, a loser. The child
eventually figures out that when this message is accepted, the
badgering is less intense. As this person grows up, the strategy
for survival is decision that goes like this: Nobody will threaten
or hurt me if I appear to be harmless, if I act like a nobody. If I
can convince others that I think very little of myself, nobody will
try to hurt me. I do a good job of that all by myself.
This is the opposite of the dominant personality that says, You
can't hurt me because I'm to strong and confident.
The masochistic or self-effacing personality finds self-love a very
threatening idea. If other people get the idea that I think I'm an
okay person, they just may be mean enough to show me that I'm not
okay and that they can abuse me at will.
The person who has grown up with constant humiliation by the
dominant parent may well develop a self-effacing personality. This
can be a serious problem in marriage because the well-adjusted
spouse may be burdened with unsuccessfully trying to assure the
emotionally crippled partner that he or she is worthwhile. It can
get discouraging and burdensome after a while.
The other side of this problem is that the partner who has a healthy
self-love may be criticized by the emotionally wounded mate for
thinking to much of self and not thinking enough of other people.
But because the wounded partner has such a warped view of life,
normal self-love in the other partner is seen as thinking too much
of self.
Conclusion
The absence of any of these five loves, eros, agape, friendship,
empathy and self-love, can create a dangerous void in the marriage
that may hasten the process of falling out of love. Competent
counseling can go a long way to developing these qualities in a
relationship.
In my practice, I used the Caring Relationship Inventory as one of
the tools to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the
marriage. I hope, that by describing these loves to you, and giving
you some practical illustrations of how they work, I may put you on
the road to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your own
marriage.
Is falling in love enough? No, it isn't!
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