Are You the One for Me?. Barbara Angelis De

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      ‘We dated each other for the next ten months, and then she told me she wanted me to make more of a commitment—in other words, to propose to her. I told her I needed more time, that I didn’t want to rush things, but she kept pressuring me until one day she gave me an ultimatum: marry her or she’d leave.

      ‘I knew something was wrong, because I just wasn’t happy, but whenever I’d question whether I was making a mistake, a little voice in my head would say, ‘How could she be wrong for you if you had ‘that feeling’ when you first saw her?’ I couldn’t answer that question, and I kept remembering how crazy I’d been about Marcia in the beginning. I told myself that my concerns were born from my unwillingness to grow up. So I married her.’

      ‘Are you still married?’ I asked Skip.

      ‘No,’ he answered with a sad grimace. ‘I left Marcia after two years. The truth was, our relationship didn’t live up to that first magical evening—Marcia is beautiful, but she is also very angry. She controlled me with her rages, and she drank too much, which made the blowups all too frequent. I put off breaking up with her for much longer than I should have, because I kept doubting my own feelings and thinking about how perfect things were when we met. I didn’t want to see the truth; the romantic picture was much nicer.’

      Skip was a victim of Love Myth #2—he hid behind his intense first impressions of Marcia, and used them to fuel his fantasy of their relationship, rather than facing the reality of how unhappy he really was.

      ARE YOU A ‘LOVE-AT-FIRST-SIGHT JUNKIE’?

      2. You get addicted to flashy beginnings and miss opportunities for real, lasting love.

      Alexia was a petite, striking thirty-six-year-old woman who owned a children’s clothing store. She came to me to decide what to do about her relationship with Kent. ‘I’ll tell you right away that in the past, my relationships haven’t been great,’ Alexia began. ‘I seem to have been attracted to these flashy, exciting men who end up leaving me or cheating on me or somehow hurting me. These relationships always seem so powerful when they start, and I feel so wildly and desperately in love, and then—POW!—I get hurt.

      ‘Last year I decided to swear off men entirely, and then I met Kent. He is the cousin of a good friend of mine, and a bunch of us started spending time together on the weekends. I liked Kent from the moment I met him, but never considered dating him because he wasn’t ‘my type.’ We became really good friends, talking for hours on the phone at night, sharing things with one another we’d never told anyone else. It got to the point where we called each other several times a day and spent most of our free evenings together.

      ‘Suddenly one night while we were driving back from seeing a movie, Kent leaned over and kissed me on the lips. At first I was shocked and thought, ‘You shouldn’t be kissing him—he’s your friend!’ But then I started getting into the kiss and realized that I liked it. Kent looked at me and confessed that he’d been wanting to kiss me for months and that he thought he was falling in love with me.’

      ‘How did you feel about that?’ I asked Alexia.

      ‘Totally confused. Excited, frightened, all mixed up. Kent was supposed to be just a friend, not a lover. He’s not the kind of guy that I picture myself with.’

      ‘And what kind of guy is that?’

      Alexia looked a little embarrassed as she replied sarcastically, ‘Oh, you know, the kind that sweeps me off my feet and then knocks me down again.’

      ‘Alexia,’ I answered, ‘your relationship with Kent sounds healthy. I don’t think you’ve ever known what healthy love is supposed to feel like.’

      Alexia believed so strongly in the Love Myth of love-at-first-sight that she was invalidating her growing feelings for Kent. She couldn’t imagine that love could be real if it didn’t hit her over the head in the first five minutes of the relationship. Like many ‘love-at-first-sight junkies,’ Alexia was addicted to the instant high of infatuation and therefore couldn’t even recognize the real love that had developed in her relationship. She almost sabotaged the first healthy romance in her life.

      Being a ‘love-at-first-sight junkie’ is one of the most deadly ways in which we lower our ‘Love IQ.’

       ‘LOVE-AT-FIRST-SIGHT JUNKIES’ OFTEN LOOK FOR ALL THE WRONG QUALITIES IN A MATE AND OVERLOOK THE RIGHT QUALITIES.

      WHAT IS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT?

      Just what is it that you feel when you meet someone and have that instant feeling of falling in love? If it isn’t love at first sight, what is it?

      

Lust-At-First-Sight. You experience raw, sexual chemistry between you and another person, and assign more emotion to the bond than there actually is. You can’t stop thinking about the person, not because you are in love with them, but because you are turned on by them. Intense physical attraction, especially with someone who fits your mental picture of the ‘perfect’ partner, can easily be mistaken for love, especially if you are looking for an instant high. But the high of lust-at-first-sight is often followed by the low of the disappointment you feel when the relationship doesn’t turn out the way you hoped it would. (See Chapter Four for more about ‘Lust Blindness.’)

      

Infatuation with their image. Sometimes when you think you are falling in love with someone, you are actually ‘in love’ with their image: how they look; their profession; how much money they have; the car they drive; the things they’ve done in their life. You build a fantasy relationship in your head, telling yourself, ‘My boyfriend is a doctor,’ or ‘I’m dating a woman with the perfect body,’ and thus you ignore the real person.

      In spite of these dangers, is it possible to feel at the moment you meet someone that this is the perfect partner for you, and to be correct? What about those couples married for thirty years who say they knew they were right for one another on their first date? Wasn’t that love at first sight? I like to think that they experienced a powerful attraction and emotional connection that grew into a strong and successful relationship. They recognized something special in one another at ‘first sight,’ but the true love developed over time.

      Here’s the reality about Love Myth #2:

       IT TAKES JUST A MOMENT TO EXPERIENCE INFATUATION, BUT TRUE LOVE TAKES TIME.

      Imagine sitting in a cabin on a cold, snowy night. You decide to build a fire to keep yourself warm. You have a choice of using newspapers for the fire, or logs. If you know anything about fire, you know the answer to this puzzle—the newspaper would create a big blaze quickly but would die out just as quickly. The logs would take longer to catch, but would burn slowly and steadily for a very long time.

      I’ve seen so many people, including myself, make the mistake of looking for that instant blaze at the beginning of a relationship rather than looking for a partner with whom they can build a solid and lasting relationship. I’m not saying you can’t have both, just as you can use newspaper and logs to build a strong fire. But if you have found yourself choosing inappropriate partners over and over again, perhaps you’d be better off looking for Mr. (or Ms.) Log instead of Ms. or Mr. Flammable!

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