Have you ever been in love, have you ever felt passion and desire in love? Have you ever experienced how these feelings fade away? Perhaps you asked yourself – where do they go, when and where did it happen? Perhaps you concluded that we cannot fall in love with the same partner all over again during the years spent together. Or are you more prone to thinking that people in long relationships should look for the feeling of being in love somewhere outside those relationships? You could have also wondered why long years and love do not guarantee a good sex life. Can we at all want something that we feel we already possess?
These questions seem too important for the answers one can find in women’s magazines and self-help books. Analyzing one’s broken relationships deserves better references than romantic movies and lyrics which portray our pain. However, in the absence of better understanding of oneself and relationships we develop, we are often soothed with the effect of these sedatives.
Esther Perel, a psychologist, points out that it is comforting that we live in the age when for the first time in human history we want to feel “in love”, sexual desire and passion with the same partner in a long-term relationship. One of the authors who have to provide some advice on the topic is Stephen Mitchell, an American psychoanalyst.
“This is the book of the feeling of being in love and its disappearance”, he already warns in the first pages of his book Can Love Last?. Despite gloomy predictions which one can discern from the quote, the author actually takes us through to a new, exciting and optimistic perspective of comprehending love and the feeling of being in love. The feeling of being in love does not disappear on its own, he says, we do contribute to that. In examining the question of why the feelings of being in love, desire and passion are prone to disappearing, Mitchell leads us to question some of the most widespread beliefs about love. Some will be described in the text and the rest of them can be found in the aforementioned book that we recommend.
We often hear that the feeling of being in love implies the sensations of novelty and secrecy and it disappears when they are overpowered by familiarity. On the one hand, human beings want security, predictability and trustworthiness, while on the other hand they need adventure, the unknown, risk and mystery. These two aspirations take us to opposite directions and relationships are the most common battlefield where they come into contact. Namely, the feeling of being in love is rooted in desire. Motor fuel for desire is a constant feeling that the person for whom we lust “we do not completely own”, i.e. that there is something we haven’t met in them, something that we haven’t conquered. No matter how attractive this feeling is, at the same time romantic love invites us to rush to the feeling of security that it seemingly promises us.
Therefore we can say that maintaining desire in a romantic relationship represents a battle between trying to perceive our partner as mysterious and thereby constantly slipping away from our control and a wish to make our partner familiar, trustworthy and predictable. If for a longer period of time we feel that our love is finally safe, certain and that it will not change with time, our attraction to our partner often fades away or disappears.
Certainty, security and familiarity in a relationship which we often perceive as a state of affairs or as a partner’s responsibility were actually created by ourselves. We are the ones who, consciously or unconsciously, create an illusion of certainty of our partner and the relationship, says Mitchell. We are the ones who decide that we do not want a partner for whom we are sure is not trustworthy and familiar and we tend to perceive them as predictable. By trying to strengthen the feeling of control in a relationship, we are lowering anxiety thus losing all emotions that make desire.
By trying to regain passion, we often expect our partner to bring in some excitement, to surprise us, to be unpredictable. Sometimes, sexual aids or sexy lingerie bought for inspiring passion may help us, however, these stimuli cannot make up for the effort that we personally invest in destroying the erotic perception of our partner. One of the secrets of preserving the feeling of being in love, suggests Mitchell, is our ability to perceive our partner all over again as a mysterious, unattainable and a person one cannot catch in a romantic way. Instead of jeopardising the sense of security and control in our relationship, this pre-condition of being in love actually renews it. It is our responsibility to maintain this feeling.
The second widespread belief on the tragic nature of the feeling of being in love is that it is necessarily driven by sexuality which we usually perceive as animalistic. The author emphasizes that desire for sex rarely corresponds with the respect and admiration we feel for a certain person. While the feeling of love sparks our need to secure our own and the stability of our partner, erotic passion brings in the broom.
Mitchell emphasizes that to feel desire for a partner is risky as it implies that we depend on them, that we constantly yearn for what he/she can give us. In that way, satisfying the desire remains partially out of our control making us vulnerable. Sexuality implies giving up control and self-control, subjugating to someone else’s power. We accept to be excited by other people, to be deprived and rewarded, to let other people lead our body sensations and processes.
With such destabilizing power of the sexual desire, we will want to have it under control for a long run. According to Mitchell, the second secret to preserving the feeling of being in love lies in practising to nurture fantasies of surrendering to lust, instead of those fantasies where we have control over it. By making yourself immune to vulnerability which comprises desire, we are running out of motor fuel of passion.
The famous wisdom has it that idealization in love is childish, so it is better not to get any false hopes as we can be brutally disappointed. Does time inevitably bring “the test of reality and inevitable sobriety”. Is the destiny of the feeling of being in love to become “sober respect devoid of passion or bitter disappointment”?
Mitchell argues that the notion that by “giving up idealization we can perceive someone realistically” and objectively is a dangerous illusion. It is useful for us as we are persuading ourselves that the person we are most dependent on will in that way become predictable and we will know what to expect from them. Among other things, we give up the belief that our partner is special or unique, so we are starting to emphasize their ordinariness and imperfection. We are certain that the picture created in that way is more realistic from the idealized one, but it is hard to claim whether that is really the case.
Mitchell invites us to think whether this “firm ground” where we are certain that we are wiser and more real is more realistic than our idealizations of a partner which contribute to the birth of passion. Or have we just substituted one conception of a partner with another one, when the other one started to benefit us more?
But what are the benefits of discrediting a person that we love? During a relationship our partner necessarily lets us down in different ways. Mitchell thinks that we choose to give up on idealization as a defence strategy so that we would not get disappointed. It is easier for us to believe that our partner was not that special and great as it seemed, than to find some other way to heal the injuries caused by unfulfilled expectations. This other way would perhaps lead us to questioning our responsibility for unrealistic expectations which we had put before our partner. At the same time, it is more likely that the qualities we adored in others were not the product of our imagination, but the emphasis on certain qualities of a person which we liked at the moment of falling in love. In addition, it is more probable that what we imagined actually is our partner’s guarantee against disappointment and solitude.
In order to fathom the third secret of preserving the feeling of being in love we have to try to believe that all these different conceptions of our partner are created by ourselves. Can we notice that they are interchangeable as they represent how we perceive our partner at a certain moment? Each of our visions of our partners serves a particular purpose, so idealization can be seen as a way of reviving those characteristics which are not present in our everyday activities. Long-term abstention from idealization protects our vulnerability, but also ruins our desire. Mitchell warns us that preserving desire for the important one, and consequently what we want to get from them, is the main risk in our emotional life. Are you ready to take the risk?
Original (in Serbian language) published on psychology blog Psihobrlog