With thousands of marriages ending in divorce every year, isn’t it time to stop and ask why? Why do good marriages go bad? Why do people become single again, I am convinced that the answer lies in the misunderstanding that most people have about the nature of love.
Western society is largely addicted to romantic love. If you doubt that listen to our songs, watch our movies, and check the sales statistics on romance novels. On the other hand, we’re very ignorant of the fact about love. We have bought into concept that love is something that happens to you. It is magical, obsessive, and extremely exhilarating. If you have it, you have it, and if you don’t, you don’t, and there is nothing you can do about it. While this description of love is fairly accurate, it describes only the first stage of a romantic relationship. It certainly does not describe the second and more important stage of romantic love. Let’s look at these two stages of a relationship.
1. The Obsessive Stage of Love
Most people are not aware of the research t6hat has been done on the “in love” obsessive stage of love. Some of the extensive research was done by Prof.Dorothy Tennov. The University of Bridgetport at Connecticut. In her classic book, love and Limerence,Tennov concluded that the average life-span of this stage of love is two years. 1 During this obsessive stage of love, we live under the illusion that the person with whom we are in love is perfect…….. at least, perfect for us. Our friends can see his or her flaws, but we cannot. Your mother may say “honey, have you considered he hasn’t had a steady job for in five years?” Your response maybe “Mom, Give him a break. He’s waiting for the right opportunity.” Your fellow employee may say” Have you considered she’s been married five times before”, to which you respond, “She married loser. The woman deserves to be happy. I’m going to make her happy.”
During this initial stage of love, we have other irrational thought such as, “I’ll never be happy, unless new are together forever.” “Nothing else in life really matters.” Such thinking often leads a student to drop out of College and marry his or her lover, or start living together even though they are not married. In this stage of love, differences are minimized or denied. we just know that we are happy, that we have never been happier, and we intend to keep this the rest of our lives.
This stage of love does not require a lot of effort. It begins with I call a “tingles”. There’s something I about the way the other person looks, the way he (or she) talks, the way emotes, the way he carries himself that gives you a little tingles inside. It is the tingles that motivate us to ask someone out for a dinner. Sometimes, we lose the tingles on the first date. Something they do or say annoys us, or we find out they have a habit that we know we cannot tolerate. Therefore the next time they call for dinner, we’re not hungry. It’s fine with us if we never see the person again, and the tingles die a natural death, a quick death
But with others, we can hardly wait to meet for the next dinner. The tingles get stronger and stronger, and the emotional obsession begins to set in. We find ourselves thinking about the person as soon as we awake. He or she is the last person we think of before we go to sleep.
All day long, we’re wondering what the person is doing. We can hardly wait to be together again, and every time we’re together, it’s wonderful!
Eventually one of us says to each other something like “I think I could love you”. We are testing the water to see if they are feeling what we are feeling. And if they give us a positive response, such as “What would be so bad about that?” We will have a tender evening.
The next time the moon is right, we actually say the “words I love you” And that we respond “I love you too”. From that moment, the emotional obsession grows until we are certain that we want to spend the rest of our lives together.
It is in this obsessed stage of love that most people get married and others starts living together. The whole relationship has been effortless. We have been swept along by the heightened emotions of the “in love” obsession. That’s why we view each other as the most important person in the universe
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