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He also did something that Tennov mentioned in her studies, and that I have noticed in every person with limerence: he viewed all those who stood between him and Melinda as his enemies. Including Trish. As his wife, she was an obstacle to his having Melinda. His pastor and others at his church also became enemies because they tried to intervene and get him to save his marriage rather than destroy it. In his eyes even his own parents became enemies because they urged him to stay with Trish and stop the relationship with Melinda. Via limerence emotions masquerading as logic, he rationalized that
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We see as enemies those that use logic when we have intense feelings
if you are already married, or perhaps you have fallen in love with someone who is, understand that you will not forever think and feel as you do now. In a few months, maybe a couple years, you could be looking upon the ruins of many lives, including your own. These are important factors to consider.
Limerence makes you become someone else, but lifelong love makes you become a better version of yourself.
The LovePath leads to attachment, and in that lies the possibility of the deepest joys of true union. There is no time limit, no window of a few months or a couple of years. Love will endure throughout life, opening up into ever deeper and more fulfilling possibilities to be shared them together.
Limerence is a natural force, but love, which is selfless and sacrificial, comes from a supernatural source. It offers us a path, and we can follow that path toward those deeper levels of satisfaction. When we wander off the path, when we lose our way, we can always find our way back onto it again. We can enhance our attractiveness, broaden our acceptance, and strengthen our attachment to fall in love all over again. Fall in limerence again? No, something deeper and longer lasting.
As we have often heard, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions, well-meaning commitments. We need something more than a bare promise and a good intention to make a relationship work. It can be the road to mutual joy (the LovePath), or it can indeed become a road to what feels like hell on earth.
Sure, the thrill of heated romance fulfills—for a while. But seemingly without exception, these people end up sad that they sacrificed their best friend for a romantic feeling that felt so wonderful yet subsided with time.
Rather than buy into the love touted in movies and novels, one would do so much better—and have a much more fulfilling life across the years—if he or she understood that the goal of human coupling is not excitement, but a deep, abiding contentment that comes from fulfillment. It is not a constant thrill, but rather a lifelong acceptance. It is not a fluttering stomach and constant intrusive thinking of the beloved, but an assurance that there is one person who loves you, day in and day out, who will always accept you as you are, and who will stand beside you no matter what.
Cuddling, gentle touch, positive words, and other expressions of our love—all of these create chemistry between us. There is a particularly strong rush of oxytocin during sexual intercourse at the point of orgasm. Yes, it happens in both the male and the female; attachment chemistry is an equal-opportunity feel-good process.
Studies have shown for years that those who are committed in attachment to others, especially in marriage, tend to live longer and have fewer medical issues. A good hug, a kind word, and regularly making love to one’s spouse are good medicine. These simple pleasures fight cravings, unhealthy dependencies, and even common depression.
Several medical findings indicate that the healthiest pattern for a husband and wife is to have orgasmic lovemaking regularly. When this happens, men are at a reduced risk for fatal heart attacks, women are less likely to have a heart attack, and men have fewer occurrences of prostate cancer.
Even when you do not agree, you must treat each other with respect if you wish for your marriage to last a lifetime.
Let me offer you a few simple words that will make an amazing difference in your relationship: “I can see why you would feel that way.” Another version: “I understand why you would think that way.”
Try this exercise. Every day, each of you spend ten to fifteen minutes talking about nothing but emotions and feelings. The other listens and then, in his or her own words, explains his or her understanding of those emotions. Vary the topics from day to day but stay with explaining the way you feel.
Remember, emotions are always true for the person who has them. Denying that person the reality of those emotions demonstrates disrespect. Understanding and accepting them conveys the greatest respect anyone could ever give. It bonds you in heart as well as mind and body.
in the truest sense of the word, it is not anyone’s job to fulfill you in any way. In the purest form, fulfillment comes from within. However, when we are married, when we have a strong commitment to our lover, and when we wish for the strongest possible bond—a communion beyond the mundane—we turn to our lover for satisfaction of our physical, intellectual, emotional, and, yes, spiritual (PIES) desires.
To grow deeper and better attached as couples, we need to grow spiritually together.
The good news is that passion does not necessarily mean intense lovemaking. At its core, passion is not about titillation or orgasms. It is about oneness. Passion that lasts a lifetime, that continues to grow no matter how old we are or how much vitality we have or what is going on in the world around us, is that of two who crave being one.
Are you committed to this relationship because you want to be, you ought to be, or you have to be? (Hint: the best answer includes all three.) Ask yourself how strong your “want to” is and evaluate that. Then move to the “ought to,” meaning your sense of obligation to your marriage, your spouse, your children, your vows, and even your religious beliefs. Evaluate how strong your commitment is in these areas. Finally, move to the “have to.” This includes all that you would lose if you lost your relationship. Time, effort, history together, closeness to your children, and, yes, even your material
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One theory is that we are drawn to a person of different temperament because it tends to balance us out.
Typically when one person begins to feel a lack of fulfillment, he or she will tell the other. However, most of the time, the unfulfilling partner either does not hear it or ignores the importance of it.
If one is unfulfilled and the other does not respond to the cry for fulfillment, the unfulfilled spouse begins moving away.
When we are unfulfilled, ultimately what we feel most prominently is the sting of rejection. We only know that that wonderful feeling of being accepted for who we are, for the real person that we continue to be, has been lost, and we resent our partner for withdrawing the love that before was freely given. The more we think about it, the more we find other things to resent about that partner—things that did not bother us at all in the past. Finally, we no longer feel attracted to the person who once overwhelmingly attracted us.
Some sublimate the love and commitment they once had for a spouse into the pursuit of a career. Desires for money, power, and prestige feed into this temptation, and it becomes an ever-present refuge when we are frustrated with our personal relationships. Some men and women begin bringing attaché cases and laptop computers home not because they need to work, but because they either no longer remember how to interact with their family or simply no longer want to.
adultery is the violation of the marriage contract that occurs when the spouse is supplanted by someone or something else. Theologians might not define it that way, but those of us who work with thousands of couples each year know that it is true.
From many years of working with couples, I can assure you that no marriage is beyond risk. Politician, preacher, plumber, or pianist, it makes no difference. Marriages from every social standing, every lifestyle, every ethnicity, and every religion fail. That is why I encourage even the most happily married couples to consciously move along the LovePath from attraction to acceptance to attachment to aspiration.
How can any marriage be saved? Well, two things have to happen. First, each must stop doing the things destroying the marriage. In other words they have to quit backtracking down the LovePath. Second, each must begin to do again the things that lead in the right direction on the LovePath.
Any marriage has the potential to offer a love so powerful that it becomes a type of heaven on earth. That very same marriage also has the potential to become a darkened dungeon. If a man and a woman loved one another before—or even if they believe that they have never loved each other—they can fall in love and be more in love than ever.
sacrificing your religious or moral beliefs and values eventually leads you to do one of two things: you become a different person than you were before or you are broken by living in contradiction to your beliefs. Maybe both.
When people live in contradiction to their beliefs and values, they become a different person in so many ways. How can they continue to be who they were when they no longer live by the code that once guided their lives? In short, they cannot.
if our workshop convinces you not to leave, then you need to know that now rather than later. If your lover was smart, he or she should demand that you accompany your spouse to the workshop and find out.
Marriages are not supposed to be guided by conditions of truce. Husband and wife are not meant to be like two countries that respect each other’s borders and avoid one another. They are meant to be one, indivisible, with freedom and justice for all. Real peace is more than an uneasy truce or the absence of battle. It is active unity. It is the ability to work out things so that everyone is happy.
Some people marry with expectations of what their spouses will accomplish in life, and feel pain and anger when their spouses miss the mark dramatically. In one case I know of, the woman’s intense excitement and participation in sex before marriage gave her husband-to-be the expectation of that kind of sexual intensity throughout their married life. He became hurt and very angry when that did not happen. When we do not get what we expect, we might blame a partner, we might blame life itself, but either way, we are angry.
Pain in itself is never welcome, but it is least welcome when it comes from the person we most love. We can handle our bitterness toward the boss at work by getting another job, or simply by going home every night and enjoying the weekend. It is not as easy to run away from someone who lives in the same home and sleeps in the same bed.
What we often fail to realize, however, is that the person who causes us the most pain is that person who appears in the mirror. Think about it. Life happens to us, event by event. We choose how to frame those events in our minds.
You are the one who decides whether to let something or someone get you down.
If you decide something is worth dealing with, even if it has the potential of causing conflict, deal with it through the process of a complaint rather than through criticism. The difference is that a complaint focuses on specific behavior and avoids general character assassination or blame.
Most of the time, we do not resort to silence for well-intentioned reasons. No, we walk away when we do not want to talk about something unpleasant or we do not want to face something we know should be changed. A biblical proverb says, “A soft answer turns away wrath” (Proverbs 15:1). In other words, the best policy is to put out the fire slowly by cooperating with gentleness, respect, and no defensiveness. When we simply refuse to talk about things, we are opting out of the very arrangement of marriage, of having unity.
Though it may sound trite, the most important thing is to try, as best we can, to understand the other person—what she feels, what she really is trying to communicate, and the source of her pain. We have mentioned respect repeatedly in this book. It is essential to any relationship’s growth, satisfaction, fulfillment, and longevity.
forgiveness is not an emotion. It is a decision. Forgiveness is a decision that will, with time, affect emotions; it is not an emotion that will affect decisions.
It seems we’ve found one more truth about the LovePath. It’s not simply about a relationship with one other person. It’s also about a fuller understanding and appreciation of life itself. That means there is a stepping-stone on the LovePath that includes, but goes beyond, the relationship. I call it aspiration.
When people are too insecure to grant the freedom that love requires. Real love, of course, is a giving and even sacrificial thing. It understands the twin paradoxes that the more we give, the more we receive; the more we seize, the more we lose. But desperate love will sometimes try to take a relationship by force, to build confining walls and hold it in.
Love and shackles don’t go well together. When we cling too tightly for fear of losing something, we ensure our losing it sooner or later. You discovered this principle the first time you desperately loved someone without your love being returned. Perhaps you turned up the pressure and forced the issue. How did that work out for you?
Real love, of course, is not possessive or demanding. It gives freedom, then delights in the growth of the other person. It is the way of hope, the upward spiral toward the best of both of us. Because it represents everything we would aspire to—for ourselves and our loved ones—in this life, we call it aspiration.
How do we learn to leave control behind and embrace cooperation? The first step? Sit down to discuss your dreams together. It’s wonderful to spend a little time trying to understand each other’s motivations and dreams, and how you can support each other.
When they combined their dreams, they found they also combined their hearts. The journey is so much better that way.
never say you will be there whenever the abandoning or straying spouse decides to come back. There is nothing attractive or motivating about someone who allows the other to live as she wishes and then come back whenever she desires.
If your mate or lover has gone, don’t cling, yearn, or live in limbo, thinking that things will be okay again only if he returns. Live your life with anticipation for what can be, not in mourning for what may have been.
Loving another does not ever call for the destruction or deterioration of oneself.
The more deeply intimate you become with your beloved, the more you will find yourself involved with a wider circle of people. That seems like a contradiction, doesn’t it? We think of two people deeply in love, looking for some island paradise where they can shut out the world. That impulse may take hold for a time, but ultimately love drives us into community involvement.
