The Beatles thought so. Is it a mantra to live by within a marriage? Or is it just a lyrical sentiment best regarded as a romantic notion of what makes the world go round? I like to think it’s a little bit of both.
Love is a powerful basis upon which a long term relationship can be founded, but the belief that a relationship can survive ‘as long as you still love each other’ is a premise that has probably contributed to many a separation. It ignores the other all important elements that contribute to a good relationship, things like trust, mutual understanding, communication, and forgiveness. Some people look at love as the glue that binds those other elements together, and as long as that glue stays strong, it doesn’t matter if one or two of the elements weaken over time. The alternative view though, is that love is the scaffolding that allows those other elements of our relationships to be built into a cohesive whole. But much like anything we construct, if we don’t work to maintain the parts which make up the whole, no amount of scaffold can keep it from falling down.
Ok, enough with the analogies. What are we really talking about here? Basically, its the fact that many people enter relationships or marriages assuming things will more or less stay the same. Most relationships benefit from a honeymoon period where we bask in the adoration of our partners, the sun feels a little warmer, the sky a little bluer, and life in general is just fine. Most of us appreciate that in time, the nature of our relationships change, but we hope that we still continue to love our partner and they us. What we so often don’t consider is just how much we need to invest in ourselves and our loved ones to see that our initial hope isn’t a misconception.
Jason and Adrianna were married nine years and had two beautiful girls. From the outside, they looked the perfect family, but on the inside they were crumbling. Work, finances, the pressures of family life and a lack of time for one another had eroded what Adrianna describes as their initial blissful reunion.
It seemed like nothing could go wrong for us. We had two perfectly healthy children, were deeply in love, and it never crossed my mind that we weren’t going to make it.
They almost didn’t, but months of relationship counseling helped them rebuild their marriage.
It took a long time for me to realise that a huge factor in all this was my expectations. I pretty much assumed we were always going to be fine as long as we had each other. Getting some help made us both realise that simply being there wasn’t enough…what we needed was an ongoing commitment to one another. I thought we were immune to falling out of love. Now we work hard to stay in love!
Their situation isn’t an unusual one. I had a Family Lawyer explain to me that he had a particularly upset client say to him at the doorsteps of the Court on the first day of a hearing that ‘I never expected to be here‘. Her lawyer nodded his head to dozens and dozens of other people entering the Court building and responded… ‘Neither did they‘.
It might seem unsympathetic, but its a poignant reminder that no one walks down the isle or enters a long term relationship with the expectation that it will end, and sometimes badly. And yet, we all too often fall into the trap of expecting that love will conquer all. As much as we might wish the sayings were accurate, we probably do ourselves a diservice living our lives according to a romanticised assumption. None of us can anticipate what might happen in our futures which change our or our partners outlook on a relationship. What we can do however, is make ourselves better able to deal with issues which may arise along the way.
How? By giving up our expectations of how things are ‘supposed’ to be and accepting circumstances as they are. If we can make that mental leap, we create a clearing in which we can then deal with the problems in our relationships more authentically, and effectively.
Are we giving love a bad wrap here? Not at all! What we’ve done in this post is to look at one important human element that can contribute to, but at times complicate this thing called love.