Your partner says “I love you.” But what does that actually mean to you?
What about the others, in other relationships who have said it also? Relationships now broken.
What did they mean when they said it, what did you think it meant?
How did you actually feel? Did you feel loved? And what was that like?
The truth is we mostly don’t really think about this in a meaningful way. And there are a couple of aspects to consider.
The first is of course, what feeling loved means to us. If someone says those magic and highly over-rated words “I love you,” well that means we must be loved, so ergo, we must feel loved, right? But how do we know what being loved is supposed to feel like?
Our lessons in love start when we are children, and of course the first love we encounter is that of our parents. And the best case scenario for a child is to grow up well provided for, nourished and rewarded by loving parents who know how to comfort us when we are sad, encourage us when we lack direction or confidence, who help us to accept the reality that defeats are part of life, and that the world may not be a fair place, but it is not out to get us either. This is the best case scenario, and for those lucky enough to have experienced this sort of childhood, then they have a pretty good template for experiencing healthy love, and this is what they are likely to expect, and to create in their adult relationships.
And then, there is the rest of us.
Absent father? Find me a man who never comes home so I can try to be lovable enough to make him want to! Disapproving mother? Great, I’ll show you a wife who will never be satisfied with the things her husband does to please her! Or sometimes, we equate great passion and drama for love. We keep breaking up and making up, it’s so passionate it must be love!
Of course this doesn’t happen to everyone who has experienced emotional neglect, and people from perfect backgrounds are not guaranteed to make wonderful love partners, but there is definitely something to it.
We tend to re-create what we know, often, in fact mostly, without being aware of what we are doing. We construct the ‘normal’ that we know; so if that is allowing ourselves into a relationship where we experience the same sort of atmosphere that we associate with love, we can find ourselves over and over with a partner who is manipulative, or absent, or abusive, or domineering – insert the descriptor of your experience.
And it’s very hard to stop this cycle if you do not recognise that it is occurring. And even if you do recognise it, how do you work out what to do about it? What tools and resources do you have if the lessons of the past haven’t served you well?
So firstly we need to actively explore what it is that we associate with ‘feeling loved.’ And next, we need to ascertain if this is actually a healthy and desirable experience, and if not, the challenge then is to discover how we actually want and need to feel loved.
I’ll talk about this action plan in my next post. In the meantime please feel free to email me with your questions.