Love is not a Monolith

As I navigate this brave new world as a newly-single-mother-of-three-under-the-age-of-40, aware of the fact that I have failed at one of the biggest relationships that any of us humans can commit to, I am thinking deeply about what love means. I feel that this provides me with an incredibly important opportunity to re-think what it means to love someone and how to make it work.

I have been consuming books and articles and blogs and vlogs in the last four months.  Some of the ideas are grounded in research (e.g. John Gottman), years of experience in particular fields (e.g. Thanks for the Feedback) others come from personal experience or are viewpoints.  I have been trying to distill all these pieces to create my own, new model, which I will not set in stone, but will hopefully create a guiding framework for me to be successful in the future.

Some of these sources focus on what you need to do to communicate more efficiently, such as figuring out both your and your partner’s primary love language; or to listen for the feedback that is being presented to you, in terms of words, body language and so on. Others focus on what you need to avoid if you want to have a successful relationship, such as contempt, criticism and defensiveness.  A few focus on creating shared goals and life aims to work together as a couple.  Some give you a simple directive – be kind, or enact the Golden Rule (treat others as you want to be treated). Others focus more on the importance of how you need to work on yourself – your own spiritual, emotional, physical well-being, so that you are coming to the relationship as a full, complete being, and not looking for the other person to complete you.

As I have been reading and thinking about this, I have also been talking to those around me, to help me think through my ideas and to get other points of view.  One conversation I had recently focused on the question: “What is love?” Is it a feeling, is it chemistry, is it something that happens over an extended period of time or does it just hit you?  The conclusion that we came to was the love is an action. Sure – you need the chemistry, the attraction, but what makes it love is the commitment to act towards each other in a certain way. This made a huge amount of sense to me and related to a book that one of my cousins sent me, called The Five Love Languages, by Gary Chapman. In this book, the author, a therapist, lays out the importance of the five different ways that couples can communicate love to each other.  Physical Touch, Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Gifts and Quality Time are the five languages.  As I read about these different languages, I found myself identifying with all five languages, unsure which was my primary language.

So, I did the self-test and was not surprised to find that I had a score which indicated that I was “bilingual” in two of the languages (Physical Touch & Words of Affirmation) with a third (Acts of Service), close behind. This means that what I need to feel loved is for my partner to acknowledge my presence, my coming and going etc with hugs, kisses, a pat on the shoulder (Physical Touch).  I also need to hear words about how I am appreciated, what I do is noticed and valued, that my ideas and goals in life are heard and considered (Words of Affirmation).  Finally, I also need to see my partner doing things for our shared life, that I find hard or boring, such as loading the dishwasher, folding laundry or paying the bills (Acts of Service).

Considering these different viewpoints, research and approaches, I have created a work-in-progress model.  This model, a work in progress, has two strands, which I might try and conceptualize into a visual at some point:

1. Myself – to be able to be in a healthy relationship, of any kind, I need to be complete in myself.  There is a Sanskrit word: Svastha, which means to seated in one’s self – sound, healthy (in mind and body), which is what I am describing.  This involves working on all the layers of myself – the koshas or sheaths – my physical body, my breath body, my mental body, my wisdom body, my bliss body.  If I am going to be able to know what to do and what to say and how to be, I need to be able to listen to myself and operate from a place of deep truth and complete mind-body health.
2. Communication – primarily, I need to understand my love languages and those I am in a loving relationship with, which includes my children and family as well as life partners. When I am communicating with those I love, they need to have my full attention, not diluted by a text message, or my own desire to react.  I also need to have the skills to pause, listen deeply and not react mindlessly.  Apparently people often only listen for 17 seconds before interrupting!  That won’t benefit a healthy communicative relationship.  One of my yoga teachers recently said that if your mouth/jaw muscles are tight when you’re listening to someone, you are not truly, deeply listening to them because you are waiting to respond!

I recently re-read the Celestine Prophecy, which is all about energy and relationships, and less about romance and the excitement of Machu Picchu, which is what I took away from it as a 17 year-old.  There is a chapter about how people become addicted to each other and this arises from two incomplete energy sources: like a C and a back-to-front C, locking together, which inevitably creates a power struggle.  They suggest that if two people who are energetically complete (like an “O”) connect together, the result is synergy – more than the sum of the parts. The word yoga means union.  I hope for a synergistic union for all my relationships and for all of yours.