Why am I in Love?
(A full text excerpt from the book)

You know, this question is so important - because it cuts to the heart of nearly all the issues that plague us in these relationships.

You are in love because you haven't fulfilled yourself, and your unconscious mind is trying to find someone else to make that happen. And it very often doesn't work. In fact, it often makes things worse.

Thing about what you want from a relationship that based on being in love: I'll call it an in-love relationship. By in-love I mean falling into romantic love, head-over-heels, can't live without her kind of stuff. What do you want? 1)Sex, 2) Nurturing. Let's think a minute about nurturing. What kind of things do we do in these intimate, in-love relationships that we don't do in our other relationships? We allow ourselves to be emotionally dependent on our partner. We drop our strong, silent front, stop pretending we are everything, and lean on our partner.

In a word, we act like children. We ask our partner to play a parenting role with us. We push off responsibility for our at least part of our well being, and expect our partner to make things right. We accept ourselves as incomplete and we seek wholeness through another person. 

The best explanation I have found for this is by Hendrix. Hendrix believes we have two ways we force ourselves to be incomplete. The first is denying parts of ourselves, and the second is hiding parts of ourselves. Both are aspects of our being, our spirit, that we refuse to express, the first because we cannot accept that we have those traits, and the second because we fear other's reactions to those traits. 

So again, why am I in love? To complete yourself by using another person to provide the denied and hidden aspects of yourself. Don't want to be in love? Find your whole self. Love your whole self. I can't say I've achieved this, but I believe it is the path to emotional and spiritual health, and that falling in-love is not one of the hazards down that path.

 Falling in love is an unconscious defense mechanism that tries to protect us from our own denial of ourselves. Accept yourself, know yourself, love yourself. By this you can free yourself from the trap of falling in-love yet again.

Will you stay stuck in love with somebody bad for you? 

© 2004-6 Richard, 21CP and Dalkeith Press