Are You the One for Me?. Barbara Angelis De

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      The love Alice and Dennis felt for one another was not enough to overcome their lack of religious compatibility. Although many couples can make interfaith marriages work, Alice and Dennis were each too deeply entrenched in their own religions to compromise. No matter how much they cared about one another, they could not be happy and true to their own beliefs by staying together. But they had put off facing these problems by telling themselves, ‘If we really love one another, our differences won’t matter.’ They kept trying to love and accept each other more, never facing the obvious until the very end.

      2. You stay in unloving and unfulfilling relationships even when they are not working by telling yourself, ‘If I just love him more, he will change.’

      Kimberly, twenty-eight, and her husband David, thirty, came to me in hopes of saving their marriage. They had been together for six years but couldn’t seem to get along without constant arguing. ‘I love David so much,’ Kimberly explained with tears in her eyes, ‘but I am constantly criticizing him. It’s driving him crazy, and I hate myself for doing it.’ I asked Kimberly to list her complaints about her husband. ‘David is a quiet type of guy. He’s pretty introspective, and not much for socializing with a lot of people. I’m totally the opposite—very outgoing and talkative, and I love having fun, being with friends, and living life passionately. I hate to say this, but I feel bored a lot of the time with him. It seems like we don’t have anything to talk about, and I feel like I’m always pulling him out of his shell.’

      ‘I’ve told Kim that this is the way I am,’ David responded tensely. ‘I want to make her happy, but I feel like she is asking me to be someone I am not. I’ve always been low-key, and I really don’t want to change.’

      As we talked more, I learned that Kimberly married David because she was looking for stability after having been cheated by a college boyfriend. She was so concerned with making sure he was a nice guy that she never asked herself whether they would be compatible together. Kimberly and David had so many differences in life-style, temperament, and personality that living together harmoniously was next to impossible. They loved one another very much, but it was not enough to make their relationship work.

      But Kimberly believed Love Myth #1, that true love conquers all, and continued to stay with David, hoping that if she just loved him more, he would change. She never considered the possibility that David wasn’t changing because David didn’t want to change. She just kept trying to be the perfect wife, believing her love would transform David from the man he was into the man she wanted him to be.

      Sadly, belief in this Love Myth can cause you heartache, pain, and even physical harm because it convinces you to stay in relationships that are not healthy. People with very low self-esteem or a childhood history of neglect or abuse often set themselves up in toxic relationships they find difficult to leave, convincing themselves that if they just loved their partner more, his/her harmful behavior would disappear and be replaced with love and affection. This is a trap. Your partner’s dysfunctional behavior is determined by forces that have nothing to do with how loving you are.

      3. You beat yourself up emotionally when a relationship doesn’t work, telling yourself, ‘If I had only loved him/her more, I know I could have saved it.’

      Eileen, fifty-four, was married to Raoul, sixty, for thirty-one years. Raoul was an alcoholic whose rages and irresponsibility had tortured Eileen and her three children throughout their lives. After pleading with her husband to get some help, and facing his total denial of the problem, Eileen found the courage to leave. Two years after their divorce, she came to me for help with her feelings of depression. When I asked Eileen what she thought was bothering her, she replied, ‘I guess I feel guilty.’

      ‘Guilty about leaving your husband?’

      ‘Not just about leaving him,’ Eileen said with tears in her eyes, ‘but guilty for not trying harder to make it work I feel like I abandoned him. Maybe if I had gone to more Al-Anon meetings myself, I would have understood him better, and he would have stopped drinking. Or maybe if I had been more affectionate, or satisfied him more, he would have given up the alcohol.”

      The more we talked, the more obvious it was that Eileen was still punishing herself for what she saw as her failure to save her marriage. Eileen’s mother had always told her that ‘a good wife stands by her man through thick and thin,” and so Eileen felt that she was an inadequate wife. Eileen’s depression was brought on by her belief in Love Myth #1—that if she had just loved Raoul more, their marriage would have worked. The reality of love is very different from the myth. Of course, love is the foundation for a good relationship. But if a relationship is going to survive and grow, it needs a lot more than love.

      Here’s the reality about Love Myth #1:

       LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH TO MAKE A RELATIONSHIP WORK —IT NEEDS COMPATIBILITY AND IT NEEDS COMMITMENT.

       The sad truth is, very few relationships end because the two partners do not love each other; they end because they are not compat­ible partners.

      I know this from my own painful experience in several of my past relationships. Like many people with the wrong partner, I attempted to make up for the lack of compatibility by trying extra hard and loving with added intensity. But in the end, we were not compatible enough to live peacefully and happily together. For years I blamed myself, thinking that if I had loved more, the differences wouldn’t have mattered. Now I know I was wrong. Differences do matter, sometimes just enough to make a relationship challenging, but often enough to make it unhealthy and unfulfilling. Throughout the rest of the book we’ll look in more detail at how to tell if you are compatible with another person.

      Love Myth 2

       When It’s Really True Love, You Will Know It the Moment You Meet the Other Person

      When you watch a romantic film, you see it.

      When you listen to a romantic song, you hear about it.

      When you are single and lonely, you dream about it.

      LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

      I think we all secretly believe in ‘love at first sight,’ the idea that if it is really true love, you will know it the moment you meet the other person. Oh, there may be other kinds of love, but according to this Love Myth, true love will strike you like lightning.

      I remember first hearing this myth as a young girl, and I longed to be swept away during a powerfully romantic moment in which I’d look into a man’s eyes and know instantly, and without a doubt, that this was my lifelong soulmate! I dreamed about ‘some enchanted evening,’ as the famous ballad from the play and movie South Pacific described it, when I would ‘find [my] true love … across a crowded room.’ Anything less than this kind of intense emotional recognition seemed a pale imitation of what I was sure true love should feel like.

      You can call it ‘love at first sight’ or ‘instant chemistry,’ but the possible problems are the same if you believe in Love Myth #2:

      1 You dwell on the intense connection or chemistry and avoid examining the rest of the relationship.

      Skip, thirty-two, is a very successful entrepreneur, who met Marcia, a twenty-seven-year-old accountant, at a wedding. ‘My first. thought when I saw her,’ he told me, ‘was, ‘God, she is beautiful,’ and my second thought was, ‘I’m going to marry СКАЧАТЬ