Is Love a Feeling?

"We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway". We cannot love and be limited."
Alfred Adler


This is a question that confuses me a lot. I work as a a therapist and I see so many lonely people every day, men, woman, teenagers, elderly people, it doesn't matter.Loneliness is an epidemic, and the stories I hear always break my heart just a little bit.

Because I am a lonely person too. I find myself telling people that finding a partner is ultimately up to them. The first step is I believe being able to have a sense of regard for ourselves. Until we are able to do this, we embody Groucho Marx's Line, "I would never join a club that would have me as a member." The issues that we have not resolved about our own self-worth creep into our relationships again and again and again. That's why 2nd marriages have a failure rate of 65%. for third marriages it's 75.

So what do we do? I think we start with thinking about our sense of readiness.Are we in a rush to be "in" love? If so we're probably not ready. That feeling is a set of chemical messages, much like an addiction. Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful feeling to have that rush of excitement, the sexual attraction, the mystery, even the anxiety, it's all part of the process.

But that's not love. Love is sitting by the bedside of your partner day after day who has Alzheimer's Disease who no longer remembers you. Love is a continuing commitment and assessment of the choice we made to share our life with one person. That takes work..hard work. We start to see flaws, start to get disappointed when someone turns out to not possess the magical qualities we had assigned to them. Our passion comes back down to the earth with a thud. Here is where we have a choice.

We can accept that, like us, our partners are flawed creatures just exactly like we are. We can accept this. We MUST accept this. We can't assume we can change anyone. It's unrealistic and even arrogant. People have deeply habituated patterns of personality that go all the way back to their earliest childhoods. We're not changing that, not even us therapists.

What we can change is our behavior. Our choices are presented to us day-to day and it's up to us as to how we will respond to things. To chose to take responsibility for our own lives. And if we work hard enough and long enough, a new feeling emerges. That feeling is freedom. We come to realize that we are the authors of our own lives, and this is an incredible feeling.