A love no one can live without
I recently had a session with a young woman who said that a day before their one-year wedding anniversary, she found several intimate messages between her husband and another woman on his cell phone. Crying, the young woman said, “He wrote that he missed her and that he wanted to be with her again.” When she asked her husband for an explanation, he became very angry and refused to talk to her about it. She said, “He is the one getting mad about everything. And I can’t get what I read out of my head. I need some advice on what to do.”
Whenever I talk to people who are dealing with relationship problems with a spouse or partner, I always ask one very important question. So I asked her, “Do you love him?”
“Yes, I love him!” she replied.
“Is it a love you cannot live without?” I asked. “Because if you choose to stay with a man who, after less than a year of marriage, gets angry at you for sexual messages he wrote to another woman, then the way that you feel right now, with all your confusion and sadness and loneliness, is exactly what your love for him will feel like every day you continue to be with him.”
I understand that there are times when loving someone can bring suffering. Illness, accidents, and, of course, death, can make our love for someone feel painful. However, the feeling that you cannot live without a certain person is not love. On the contrary, an “I can’t live without him” may mean “I don’t know if I can live without the financial support” or “I am too afraid to be alone” or “What would people think if they knew the truth?” It could also mean “The kids need their parents together” or even “If I can’t have her, no one can.”
There are other types of “love.” There is obligation love: “I’m with her because she is the mother of my children.” Scared love: “He said he would kill himself if I leave him.” It-has-always-been-done-this-way love: “People in my family don’t divorce.”
If you’re not happy with your job, you don’t quite love it. If you’re not happy with your partner, you don’t quite love them. If you’re not happy with your life, you don’t quite love it. You’re just tolerating your job. Tolerating your partner. Tolerating your life.
If you believe that giving scared love or lonely love or obligation love is in some way noble in your situation, then I challenge you to tell your partner the real reasons you choose to stay. If you believe that a conversation like this would be in any way overly confrontational or even dangerous, then you have your answer on what type of love you have. On the other hand, if after this conversation, for whatever reasons, you both choose to stay with each other, or not, and can have reasonable harmony with each other, then know that you are not choosing suffering love. You choose unselfish love, the one love no one can live without.
Mother Owl.
