Moving Toward A Better Kind of Love

I have had the opportunity to spend time helping married couples who have felt a lot of unhappiness. I have listened to many who felt just in their descriptions of how they had been mistreated, ignored, criticized, and/or condemned. Their problems were quite real and often very painful. I have, as the years have passed, been a bit amazed at the number of different causes for emotional pain. One young couple stood out as an example. According to the wife, both were being very affectionate with each other and moving toward something more passionate when they heard a car honk. The husband got up, went to the door, and greeted a few of his high school buddies who wanted to go bowling. He turned to his wife, said a few excuses, found his bowling ball in the closet and left. Now, a few days later they were in my office. After she tearfully told this story I turned to him partly out of surprise hoping he would use the opportunity to explain.

He said, “well I have known these guys for a long time and we were friends before I was married.” I quietly asked him to not talk further because he was making more trouble for himself. Then he asked me, “well, what do you think?” I probably should have been more diplomatic but but I thought I had just heard a new definition of “dumb.” Since he didn’t understand what he had done that was so wrong I explained that he had possibly communicated to his wife that he was more committed to someone other than her and perhaps even communicated that he did not love her very much. This dismayed him because that was not what he thought had happened believing instead that he was only rightfully spending time with friends. We all looked at each other and began to enter a discussion about what could and should take place if a man, or woman, marries. Each had their own ideas about fidelity and love.

I have thought many times about the potential for marital problems. There are many possible and different types of problems and based on that number one could think the potential for unhappiness is quite high. If this is true, and many believe it, it seems like it would be a good thing to study the nature of these problems, as I was doing, so they could be resolved. While thinking about that on one occasion I had cause to reflect about a lesson I learned while a graduate student studying psychology. I had been taking a course designed to train counselors and had spent a lot of time studying abnormal behavior and learning about diagnostic categories for the mentally ill and for several types of emotional disorders. The more I studied the more I began to feel a heavy weight or a negative emotional burden of some kind. It was strong and persistent enough that at first I couldn’t shake it. I could see myself in some of the descriptions and wondered if I had mental or emotional problems I had not known about. I even considered admitting to myself that I had more than one type of problem just so I could stop worrying about it.

One day while thinking about this feeling I wondered if there were as many descriptions of healthy and successful behavior as there were categories of the abnormal. As a change of pace in my studies and hoping for a brief vacation from the pressure I felt, I went to the library and looked for things having to to do “healthy,” “happy,” or “successful.” I found quite a few articles and studies about “effective human behavior,” and “wellness.” They were positive and they described what people could do to make themselves into better people with better relationships. My feelings of gloom began to disappear.

I took one lesson from that experience. Here it is. “Bad things happen because good things don’t.” Over the years I have applied that lesson trying hopefully to help people resolve their marriage problems by getting them to focus on what is more effective and useful. Instead of just working to solve their problems so the sources of their unhappiness could be eliminated I learned that my task was not complete unless they also learned how to create a better kind of love. With that in mind I have noticed something about marital problems and about love. Problems appear to be like magnets because people try to defend themselves, are indignant about being treated poorly, and may seek to correct or control the person who is believed to be causing the problem. When individuals turn to control or defend themselves against one another they lose the motivation to create a relationship built on positive experience. Many then discover that an exclusive focus on problems and their resolution may actually compound the problems. Love, on the other hand, is a growing improving kind of experience. It requires that people trust, feel a lot of freedom, act with purpose with real creativity, and develop and use a set of love skills. These forms of behavior are in a very different category than problem related behavior. These skills, or practical forms of behavior, include several kinds of attention, intimacy, communication, commitment symbols, interest, and loyalty. Most couples with problems spend little time focusing on making themselves better at these forms of behavior.

As a side note, I believe that before marriage hardly anyone has had much of an opportunity to learn about these forms of love. Perhaps children of loving parents have an advantage because they have seen examples, but even those people do not have a chance to apply love skills in their effort to love another human being. If we wanted our children to succeed in marriage it just seems upside down to me.

As a result of this I have tried to learn more about a better kind of love and have attempted to teach these skills to people I have had the privilege of coming to know. When married couples can stop arguing and learn to solve their problems they can also learn to love each other better. Once committed to this course of action their lives often improve until they understand the idea of a better kind of love. This love follows real investment on the part of both people, given and received over a long period of time, and it is better, much better than what most of us begin with. There may be hundreds of ways to communicate it, and it gets better as we learn more and grow more. When it comes to creating marital happiness, I believe it would be a good thing for us to give much more emphasis to the skills we need to love one another.