I Love Him But I’m Not
“In Love” With Him!

“As a nation we are in love with the notion of being in love,” says Dr. Joy Browne in her book, ‘The Nine Fantasies That Will Ruin Your Life’ (Crown 1998). “If I had a nickel for every caller who echoed the plaintive wail, ‘I love him, but I’m not in love with him,’ I would be a wealthy woman. What does any of this mean, for heaven’s sake? What is love and what is being in love? We all know the symptoms for falling in love, but that’s just the sizzle; relationships that endure and nourish are based on the steak.”

Browne talks about how people want to experience romance. “Somewhere out there there’s someone who can make me feel tingly and brand new. I want to feel the way I did when I first met my husband, when we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”

This is an “escape” fantasy.

Browne says “... romance is a lie. Even the dictionary defines it as a ‘picturesque fiction.’” Romance is about loving someone because of who you’d LIKE them to be rather than for who they really are.  She advises anyone who is restless in their relationship to take a long look at what works and what doesn’t. What do you want and what don’t you want? Ask yourself all the important questions and “don’t allow a perfectly good relationship go stale because you’re not working at it or looking at it realistically.”

Dr. A C Grayling is an English philosopher and author of “The Meaning of Things -- Applying Philosophy to Life” (Weidenfield & Nicolson, London 2002). He speaks of romantic love as being a “scorchingly vivid turbulence” and ...” it is such a time-consuming, exhausting, ecstatic, painful, transforming business that it require a long recovery -- in some cases, indeed, whole lifetimes.”

Grayling claims that modern love has been infiltrated by expectations drawn from all kinds of love. “The Greeks had different words for love’s different manifestations. They spoke of AGAPE, altruistic love (in Latin Caritas, which gives us -- but with what a cold ring--our word ‘charity’). They spoke of LUDUS, the playful affection of children and of casual lovers, and PRAGMA, the understanding that exists between a long-established married couple. They spoke of STORGE, the love that grows between siblings or comrades-in-arms who have been through much together, and of MANIA, which is obsession. And they allied the latter with EROS or sexual passion.”

After exploring the subject in depth, he says, “One measure of the generally unsuccessful nature of modern romantic-companionate love is the high rate at which the relationships based upon it fail.”

In summary, Grayling says, “It is the dead hand of oppressive institutions -- principally religions -- which explains why love can be a problem: which it only is when rationed and starved, as it is in the ‘family values’ dispensation of monogamy and restrictive attitudes to sexual expression and variety. When rationed and starved, eros becomes destructive, prompting the moralisers, in their wisdom, to ration and starve it more. And thereby hangs many a long tale, as novels and films in their thousands show. If the modern experiment of romantic-companionate love is to succeed, it has to be freed from the institutional arrangements made centuries ago for a quite different kind of relationship -- the practical-economic model of Christian monogamy -- in which neither romance nor companionship was the more important thing.”

Maybe Gary Zukav’s ideas about “spiritual partnerships” offer a more workable model -- enlightened relationships based on freedom and a self-actualized viewpoint. (Discussed in a previous column.)

Suggested Zen self-talk: “I allow my relationship to be the way it is and not the way I think it should be. The only thing making me unhappy is my idea about how it should be. I draw a circle of acceptance around everything in my awareness.”

Easier said than accepted? Of course. But we incarnated to grow, right? While in spirit, plotting our life to come, I think most of us were braver than we are here on earth.

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