Is love really enough in a relationship? This is the question I have asked couples and intending couples. The answer I always receive is NO and a resounding one. I will ask further. Why is love not enough in a relationship? And the answer is; other things like trust, respect, honesty, commitment and reliability, are also needed to hold a relationship together.
The next question is, what is love?
I believe one’s concept of love imparts a greater understanding of what love is.
Love has been distorted and its genuinity replaced with an idealized concept that has lured people into harbouring a false perspective of what love is.
Back in the olden days, people didn’t marry because of their feelings for one another. Feelings didn’t count, love was not a prerequisite for marriage. Marriages were purely economic and political arrangements designed to promote the survival and prosperity of families or communities.
In those days, romantic love was not acceptable, it was seen as an inconvenience to society. They were afraid of its power for the abnormal behaviours it encouraged among people. and weary of its ability to make people do ridiculous things. Also, they were of the conviction that romantic love was for pleasure or emotional fulfilment and served no social purpose.
What we regard as love and the weight we place on romance is a modern invention, promoted for commercial purposes by some group of businessmen They tout out so many fallacies about love, people now have unreasonable expectations of love.
The new ideal is that if you marry for love you will live on in bliss for “happily ever after”. .
The portrayal of love in the modern culture only highlights the periphery, the icing and not the nuance and complexities of living with a person daily.
Be it romantic love or real love both are complicated and not as exquisitely exciting in the long run as all the ‘filmwood’ industries and romance writers portray it.
The genuine test of a relationship begins after the romance ends and you come face to face with the boring, dreary, unromantic and unsavoury part of your partner. Probably, you cry foul and blamed love for your woes. In actual sense was love the bedrock of your relationship?
That every emotion is labelled love made it impossible to differentiate love from every other emotion.. Most relationships are based on passion, romance, sex, social fringes and benefits. Often, we mistake the excitement and drama of romance and the gaudy high of passion for love. When we’re caught up in the throes of romantic love, we overlook faults and dysfunctional attitudes of our partner, all we see is “happily ever after” and we can’t imagine anything going wrong. This is not love. This is a delusion. And like most delusional things it rarely lasts or ends well.
Love is love, but people think the love you display in your intimate relationship is a different kind of love. It is the same love. However, what tints love in a relationship is the romance, the passion and the sex. It makes it more deeply felt, so it should be more deeply appreciated and reciprocated.
Trust, respect, affection, commitment, patience, understanding, all are inseparable components of love but we tend to itemised them in relationships. Relationships ought not to be built on the warm fuzzies of romantic emotion but on a love that requires self-discipline and a certain amount of sustained effort over the course of time.
Romantic love has brought exciting life experiences into relationships but it should not be the foundation of your relationship but its fruit. It should not define your life but rather be a by-product of your relationship.
It is necessary for us to have a realistic, honest approach to that kind of love, the type that is enduring, sustainable and accommodates the realities of spending a life together with someone else
The best definition of love is the one i found in the Bible
According to St. Paul in 1corinthians 13:4-8
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
This is genuine love, and what love is all about. Now with this description and explanation, can you confidently say that love is not enough in a relationship?
If you think so, write to us and let us know your opinion.
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