More about Love
When I speak about a love attitude, I mean the way you look at love, the way you feel it, experience it and what you appreciate about it.
You may already realize that love is different for different people. If you have a friend who is into love relationships that don’t appeal to you at all, you can listen to each others’ thoughts and feelings and try to understand. It might feel a bit like you’re translating from one language to another. If you have a lover who has a view on love that you find intriguing but hard to understand and navigate, you may end up with a pressing need to figure it out. Or, you might decide you and your lover can’t give each other the kind of love you need.
Doing individual and couples therapy, I’ve had the ideal opportunity to find out what love is to different people. Some time ago, I started recording the various descriptions of love I was hearing about. This fact still amazes me: There are only four. Here is an excerpt from Why Love Succeeds or Fails:
Love is a Gripping Drama
Seeing love as a Gripping Drama means you’re prepared for uneasiness, suspense and turmoil. In other words you’re expecting your love-life to provide you with some serious and intense ups and downs. Both good and bad times can fill your need for tense and spellbinding excitement.
Love is a Passionate Adventure
It’s very different if you see love as a Passionate Adventure. Then you figure you’ll have the excitement of strengthening your romantic and sexual feelings as you embark on new and wonderful experiences. Your daydream includes feeling inspired and enthusiastic about the quest and challenge of love.
Love is a Sensible Compromise
Picturing your love relationship as a Sensible Compromise indicates that you’re seeking a calm and steady love-life. For you love and passion are desirable as long as they work well in your daily life and plans for the future. You generally prefer a solid and reliable love relationship; one that provides you with a sense of serenity and confidence.
Love is a Joyful Diversion
Viewing romance and desire as a Joyful Diversion indicates that you have a youthful, fun-loving sense of wonder about love. You respond to difficulties by needing to be refreshed and restored before facing them. But, even then, dealing with troubles isn’t your favorite activity.
Compatibility of the Love Attitudes
In Why Love Succeeds or Fails you can look at your own love attitude in detail. You’ll realize that you have some lovable features. These may explain why a lover falls in love with you. You also have some potentially dislikeable features which are actually your areas of need. Of course, your lover has lovable and potentially dislikeable features too.