Love relationships fail because at no time in our training by society are we given a factual model of what a love relationship is, or how to make one succeed.
There are fundamentally three levels on which intimate relationships operate, and our social training only prepares us to deal with one of them – the most superficial one –
and even that one ineptly. This superficial level is called the expectations level. It is usually the only level we address consciously. The expectations level consists of all our self-images and self-importance. When we primp ourselves in front of a mirror, what we are primping is our expectations of other people. It’s the level of our daydreams and fantasies, whereon everyone is as impressed with us as we are with ourselves.
On the expectations level what interests us the most about a prospective partner is his or her physical attractiveness, manner of dress and bearing, social and educational background, future prospects, how “cool” he or she is, how he or she reflects back on us, what others will think of us for having chosen this partner.
On the expectations level a 'love relationship' is actually an approval agreement, a contract, To Wit: “The party of the first part hereby agrees to pretend to honor, love, cherish and obey the party of the second part; in return for which considerations the party of the second part agrees not to hurt, betray, nor expose to public embarrassment the party of the first part (see appended schedule of specific acts which shall be deemed to constitute ‘hurt’, ‘betrayal’, and ‘public embarrassment’). Any violation of this agreement by either party shall be considered valid grounds for spitefulness, vengeance, and all manner of carrying on like a big baby.”
On the expectations level we submit ourselves to another person not for love, but for approval.
Love and approval have nothing to do with one another. Love is a light, joyous, happy feeling; receiving approval is a tight, clinging, possessive feeling, which does, however, have an ego rush behind it.
That ego rush is not joy – it’s glory, self-importance, which our society trains us to seek instead of love. The expectations level must eventually wear out because its basic premise is getting something for nothing. On this level everything we’re putting out ('giving') is phony – it’s just to impress other people, or to get something more in return.
We’re putting out phoniness in the hope of getting something real (happiness) back. And that’s not how the universe is set up. There are no free lunches or free rides out there. What fools us is that most of the messages we receive – from our parents and peers, our teachers and preachers, our leaders and the media – are that the expectations level works; and if it doesn’t, that’s our fault and we should be ashamed of ourselves.
For whom is it working? Look around. How many truly happy marriages are you aware of (of more than ten years’ duration, since it can take that long or longer for the expectations level to wear thin). Sure, there are some, but not many; and usually the people involved in truly happy marriages are very, very special people in their own right.
Isn’t this true? But there are also lots of relationships which appear to be happy on the surface, but are actually miserable underneath: both partners have learned to repress their true feelings and resign themselves to unhappiness without showing it.
These people never get beyond the expectations level. The reason why the expectations level inevitably crashes – although it can and often does mellow into true love after the crash – is because it is wholly narcissistic: it doesn’t include the other person. It does not permit the other person to be a person, but only a reflection of our own fondest self-images. It doesn’t allow the other person space to be real – to have feelings of his or her own.
For example, is our partner permitted to have sex with whomever he / she wishes? Is our partner even permitted to be sexually turned on by anyone but us? Is our partner permitted to tell us that we are not a satisfying lover? The list could go on and on. Only sexual expectations are mentioned here because those are practically universal, but we have all sorts of other fences we try to erect around our partners to keep them pristine and unsullied for us – expectations that they will agree with us about money, child raising, career, religion, etc.; expectations that they will forego making their own decisions in order to support us. The expectations level must eventually crash under its own weight by sheer exhaustion.
When people are involved with one another in an approval agreement, or any agenda that is not love, then everyone has to work overtime in order to convince the other or to convince oneself; and this is painful to bear. The expectations level would be problematical and contradictory enough if it were the only level on which we relate with other people.
Unfortunately, there are two deeper levels which actually govern the course of our relationships, and these deeper levels contradict the expectations level. The level which underlies and controls the expectations level, which assures that the expectations level will eventually crash, or be maintained in great suffering, is the conditioning level. It’s the level of our basic conditioning by society, which is to hate ourselves. Beneath the glitter and glory of our expectations, our self-images, is the grim truth that we are actually ashamed of ourselves. We are taught to be dissatisfied with ourselves by our parents and society.
Whereas the expectations level is set up so that people will be “nice” to each other (make the agreement: “I won’t expose you as a liar and phony if you won’t expose me as a liar and phony”), the conditioning level is set up to divide people, to make them fear and distrust each other.
We are not trained to relate intimately with one another, but rather to wage war upon one another – to feel hurt, jealous, competitive, critical; to pick at each other and bend each other out of shape – rather than to be happy and accepting.
The parent / child relationship is the basic war setup; the man / woman war is grafted on top. While on an expectations level we tell ourselves that what we want is to live happily ever after, we are conditioned by our society to hate ourselves and to deny ourselves the very love which we consciously tell ourselves that we are seeking. We are trained by our parents to hate ourselves in precisely the same fashion in which our parents hated themselves. The conditioning level is the level which psychotherapy addresses (unfortunately, after the damage is already done). We are so overwhelmed by our parents when we are little – so awed by their divinity – that we are afraid to express, or allow ourselves to feel openly, anger at them, or any other feeling of which they would not approve – which contradicts their expectations.
Thus our parents’ expectations level becomes our conditioning level. Society calls infatuation with our own self-images “love”; and so on an expectations level we tell ourselves that we are going into relationships to get “love”; whereas on a conditioning level we are going into relationships to deny ourselves love – to pinpoint, through the mirroring of another person, precisely how we ourselves are incapable of giving and receiving love.
One might well wonder why people would want to reenact the situations out of their childhood which brought them the most pain and trauma. The reason is that those wounds never healed properly. They are still raw and suppurating, and extremely tender to the touch. Only by tearing those wounds back open again and cleaning out all the dreck, the self-hatred, can a true healing occur.
And only by staging a situation similar to the one which produced those wounds originally can the wounds be reopened (actually this isn’t the only way of doing it; there are far more skillful ways of doing it, such as Active Imagination.
However, this is the most popular way of doing it). Just as on the expectations level our goal is the validation of our images, on the conditioning level our goal is to recreate all the emotional turmoil our parents inflicted on us, but this time around to grab the brass ring of love which our parents denied us. Up until recently society has had the fifth Commandment and a raft of social sanctions in place against examining the conditioning level too closely. Freud was one of the first to take a good, hard look at this level of human interaction. And at the present time there are lots of good popular books available on the subject of toxic parents, how we all marry our father or mother, and seek in marriage the precise same hurt and nonfulfillment which our principle caregivers made us feel in infancy.
The problem is that we don’t bother reading these books until our relationships are already in deep trouble. These books should be required reading for all high school students. “Don’t blame your parents! Just wait until you’re a parent yourself!” they (our parents) tell us. Well, that’s wrong; we should blame our parents, because only by consciously blaming them are we in a position to consciously forgive them. Only when we can see that it was their own self-hatred which their parents laid on them that impelled them to do what they did to us; only when we can see them as people in as much or more pain as we, who really did try to do the best for us they knew how; only then can we forgive our parents. And only then can we forgive ourselves, and let go of our own self-hatred, no longer needing to reenact it or to blame ourselves over and over because we loved our parents, and all they cared about was being right. The third (and deepest) level of relationship is the karma level – the level of the lessons we are trying to learn from certain people, based upon our experiences with them in other lifetimes and realities. Anything which is wrong or out-of-kilter in a relationship originates on the karma level.
Our gut-level, first impressions of people are often good indicators of the kind of karma we have going with them; but our conscious minds often bury such information directly as it is perceived. For example, it could happen that the reason we are sexually turned on by a certain person is that in a previous life we raped and tortured that person; for some aeons, perhaps, that individual has been itching for a lifetime in which to right matters. That might be the karma we have set up with someone; but all our conscious mind knows, on its level of expectation, is that we are sexually turned on by that person and want the person to validate it by having sex with us. And so we put our head in that person’s noose, and wonder later on why things aren’t working out as we’d imagined.
To be continued …. Go to Why Love Relationships Fail - Part II
