Society has told us that one day we will grow up to meet the person who completes us, the person who is our counterpart, our other half. Is it just me, or is that conception a little, I don’t know, disturbing? Is it bothersome to think that you are not whole, and without this other half you will be harboring this ever-present inner void?
If we don’t meet this kind of soulmate, are we incomplete?
I tend to think that true love and its essence are not about finding that other half, but about finding another whole. After all, we all are whole: It just takes growth and experience to become the person we want to be, to feel secure in our own skin. When two wholes meet and fall in love, that’s when a relationship can find strength and move forward.
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“They propose that deficiency-love is substantial for as long as our needs our stable, but as we evolve and grow, our needs change. Unless our partner’s needs change at the same pace as our own, the relationship can be in jeopardy when the other person can no longer supply something we need or desire.”
This article is great, but there is a mistake in the above sentence ‘for as long as our needs our stable’.
Keep up the writing!
This article highlights how we often misunderstand love and how to find it.
There are several, and quite different, types of love – physical, mental, spiritual and true love. (True love encompasses all of these forms of love.)
We each need to determine what sort of love we want and why? Do you want love to feel better, to be like your friends or because you want the noblest thing in life?
Your relationship to love, how you think about it, is often a reflection of your relationship to yourself. Strong, true, relationships depend on strong and true self-awareness. If you don’t know and ‘love’ yourself how can you expect someone else to know you, let alone love you for who you are?!
As such, you need to be able to meet your own needs – such as those of Maslow’s heirachy – as well as those of your partner to have an enduring relationship, a true love. Otherwise, at some point you will refocus on your own needs and growth and if your partner is not helping and adding to this it will undermine your relationship – and vice versa. (Our research has found this is key to enduring love).
Also, don’t just focus on physical attraction and love! Science shows that love is a form of energy – echoing the saying the “power of love”! True love is when all your energies flow together and where someone else’s energy adds to yours to create something even stronger.
The free e-book at http://www.findtruelovebook.com is very helpful.
Lauren, the concept of needing somebody to complete you is the result of our western parental (or lack there of) philosophy. It is scientifically and psychologically “hog wash”. Psst, just between me and you, we can fall hopelessly in love with anybody. Just as easily with the bum on the street corner as we could Mat Damon. And with a little practice we can convince most of them fall in love with us. The reality is that attraction level is a result of things we find appealing minus the things we find repulsing. If you can get past nappy headed, urine socked, clothes and cheap wino breath, that bum might not be so bad. Thank Freud for repressions or I would have never gotten a date. I am closer to the Bum then I am to Matt.
Saddly what we know about picking a mate is what we have learned from our parents. In a country with a 51% divorce rate, emotional blunting via prescription and recreational drugs, and astounding numbers of single parents, many of us enter into the search for a mate with either bad references or no references at all. We have to base our assumptions on what we have idealized via TV or other ficticious sources about what “love” means.”
The books “The Male” and “The Female Brains” get into the chemistry. Basically when we meet and fall in “lust” our systems flush us with good stuff such as dopamine, testosterone, and estrogen. But nature knew that if we stayed in this state we would never get any work done let alone raise functional children. So then it has been shown we switch up to a more oxytocin driven system. A calmer more sustaining connection.
I describe love as “two people reaching inside themselves and ripping out their hearts and handing it to each other saying, ‘I offer you my connection. You can hurt me in a way no one else can. I have only belief in your words and intent and trust that you will keep your promise not to, to protect me.’” We love people who make us feel more secure.
Thanks for commenting LOL. I got a lot out of your contribution (to what was an interesting article anyway) so thanks.
The myth of the soulmate is an interesting one that builds into psychological inflexibility on the love topic in adult life. Incredibly, so many people believe there is perfection waiting for them out there … and they search in vain of course, but they hold on tight to the idea of it in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
Sarah, Thanks. I took a look around your site and found many things to be insightful and informative. I like the last post about the “self”.
I believe Freud did get his most known theory wrong. We all have “womb envy”. By that I mean we are born into this world and long to go back. Anybody who can provide the 3 basic conditions gets our affection. If you can make us 98.6 degrees (clothing) you have our attention. If you can feed us (food) to fullness, you have our attention. If you can make us feel secure (shelter) you have our attention.
I have a theory. Two of these are easy to obtain and know solidly that you have them met. Basically that Me and Matt Damon can both provide 98.6 degrees of warmth. A little more grey, but you know when you are full. Both me and Matt in this country can provide that. Where we differentiate is the extremely subjective need of “security”.
What security actually means and physically and emotionally looks like is what we learn from the moment we take our first breath from those around us. We respond, mimic, and value the lessons they teach us. What it looks like, feels like, sounds like and even smells like comes from those early moments. The younger we are the more profound and eventually subconscious those triggers are. So when we meet a “soul mate” what we are really finding is some early life triggers are being tripped. That is the theory in a nutshell anyway.
Hi Lauren
First, I have some real difficulties in relating to the ideas of other-half-ness and the notion of deficiency love.
The goal of deficiency love is that somehow, some other person will compensate for something one is unable to find in oneself. Interestingly, it’s often seen in relationships that are based around some sort of emotional rescue, where frequently the ‘victim’ or ‘sufferer’ will feel hope that the rescuer will bring about the recovery that they are unable to bring about for themselves.
It is a deeply flawed rationale since it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for someone to give you that which you cannot find in yourself.
Second, I believe that the romantic and erotic passions that the Dieners cite do characterise the initial romantic phase of almost all early-stage romantic relationships within Western society. They, however, have very little directly to do with love, although it is during this phase that couples might develop intimacy that may become part of love itself, should their relationship progress beyond the romantic phase. The romantic phase might be seen as a place where couples build up the endurance for the challenges that follow and they always do.
I feel that love itself and what sustains healthy mature love relationships is very different from deficiency / dependency that arise from childhood needs for attachment or the feelings of attraction that fuel ‘erotic and romantic passion’.
I believe that the short answer to the question of whether we have misconceptions of love is “Yes, we do”. Perhaps the more difficult thing is to say what love is and might be. For me, perhaps, it’s about trust, caring, intimacy, companionate love, respect, humour and some healthy excitement from time-to-time! Companionate love might mean something entirely different for me too. I see it as the expression of profound emotional qualities such as patience, tolerance and forbearance, acceptance, compassion, understanding and forgiveness.
The difference between romantic love and true love is the difference between receiving and giving. A lot of us don’t give generously of our hearts, nor do we give that selflessly either. Instead we address a covert desire not to be abandoned. That isn’t love at all; it’s emotional bribery.
I believe the hardest part is about giving. True love is about giving and nothing less. It’s about giving love rather than desperately seeking to be loved. Perhaps it’s the only attitude that can begin to carry us through the agony of mortality. It seems to me that only love that’s based on giving, not receiving, is true and lasting.
Unlike the Dieners, I don’t profess to be an expert in love. I’m just a humble novelist who’s written a different sort of love story. Thanks for the interesting and thought provoking post.
@Geoffrey_ Mann
I believe that we all have a misconception of the concept of love. The media portrays love as this fairy tale dream that women are promised to find thier true husband “prince chraming” and live happily ever after. since the dynamic has been established and overly compromised to the thought process of women. Women are more likely to be hurt and men are more likely to exploit women based on these expectations set by these women. I still believe that true love still exsists but with the media pushing these images and idealizations of what true love truly represents it easily lost in the vast conceptions.