LOVE AND COMMITMENT
Although we can love many things and many people, most of us put our one-to-one love relationship on a rather special pedestal and try to preserve it. This is important because it is probably the most powerful emotion in our adult lives and is the glue that holds the family unit together. We see all around us what happens when this glue gets weak – families fall apart in fragments. Although most of us would like to see our one-to-one relationship as the perfect blending of love-object and sex-object, for all but a minority this simply is not a reality. In our society we are ‘allowed’ lots of love-objects but only one sex-object within marriage. This creates problems for millions of people who do not want to threaten their love-bond for their spouse yet are not content with only one sex-object. So what can they do?
There are no simple answers but discreet adultery has always been an answer. There are, needless to say, considerable dangers to this approach and many people prefer to relate to their sex-objects in fantasy during masturbation rather than in reality. Clinical experience shows that people who have multiple fantasies of different members of the opposite sex are more likely really to enjoy the opposite sex than are the bedroom cowboys who misuse the opposite sex in reality. Everyone wants to be happy, to love and to be loved, but every deal in life has a price and marriage is no exception. Other men and women exist in the world around the loving, married couple and they have to be dealt with. Each individual will have to find his or her own way of coping with this problem and we have given several hints and tips in the book. Most women want and need clear lines of commitment and are very sensitive to any signs of withdrawal of love. Women appear to be much more love-dependent than are men – even little girls demonstrate this – and this makes them vulnerable to losing love. True, they can build up the ‘strokes’ they need from other sources, including their children, but deep down most women want a loving, secure relationship at the heart of it all.
Many marriages get to the stage in which the individuals are separately counting the cost of their loving commitment to one another. The one who receives too few strokes is vulnerable to an extra-marital affair.
Unfortunately, many people look for unattainable and unrealistic perfection within their marriage, demanding perfection of their spouse when they are not themselves perfect and forgetting the simple fact that everybody is a package deal. You cannot buy life in units of perfection – life is really only a heap of things that have fallen together in a particular way that you are trying to make the best of.
From the point of view of attachment, a mature adult is one who can both give and receive love. Life, to be successful, depends on maintaining a balance of dependence on and independence from others.
A mature person can ask for love when he of she needs it and, knowing he or she will get it, feels confident to give love to others. It is difficult and probably impossible to extend love to others in a mature way if one has not received it or is receiving none oneself. To this giving and receiving of attachment love, genitality is added in adulthood and this further deepens and strengthens the loving bonds.
There is no more an ‘ideal love’ than there is an ideal marriage. We are all complex,
ever-changing beings whose ability to give and receive love varies from day to day and from year to year. What a shame it is that more couples do not realise this as they cast around the sexual arena, or go for professional help in an effort to improve their lot when in reality what they already have is potentially pretty good.
Perhaps the final thought should be along these lines.
In matters of love – and for that matter, sex – don’t commit the grievous error of making the best the enemy of the good. Remember that the ideal doesn’t exist in this world.
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