whole lives.
It is this assumption in particular that makes breaking up so hard to do. In ending a relationship, we negate the myth of forever; we violate the assumption that our relationship will last us for our whole lives. What we see is that instead of being forever, our relationship was just an episode.
Because almost all of us have subscribed to the myth of forever, when our relationships end, the only thing we can say is, “I must not be any good; there must be something the matter with me. I created this relationship with the intention it would last forever, but now it's ending. It certainly can't be ending because the idea that love is forever is wrong, so it's got to be me who is wrong.” We spend an unbelievable amount of time in self-flagellation because we can't imagine that the notion of forever could possibly be inappropriate. But it is. There isn't a person in the United States who hasn't witnessed a divorce or the heartbreaking end of a romance. The truth is that relationships end. It is high time we explode the myth that love is forever, so that when we end relationships, we can do so without such devastating crises in self-esteem.
Love Is All-Inclusive
Another one of these obsolete myths is that relationships are all-inclusive. When we make a relationship with someone, we assume he or she will be sufficient to meet all our needs. In other words, we believe that the person we love will be the one person with whom we always go to movies, with whom we always go out to dinner, with whom we go to church, with whom we have all our conversations about our bad day at the office or our ailing back, who knows all our troubles and to whom we unburden ourselves.
We don't enter into relationships saying to ourselves, “Well, in my relationship I'm going to handle my needs for sex and a Friday night date, but I'm going to have an intellectual life with my friend Sally and a cultural life with my friend Stan.” When we enter into a long-term relationship, we generally assume that the person we love will be sufficient—or almost sufficient—to meet all our needs. We expect that 95 percent of our needs will be met in our primary relationships and the other 5 percent—well, we'll just forget about them.
We presume the person we love will provide us with companionship and entertainment, with intellectual and emotional stimulation, with physical solace and sexual satisfaction, that he or she will be our . . . everything. We think of a relationship as an exclusive and all-encompassing resource, and we conduct our lives according to this expectation. We begin by turning to our partners and constricting our outreach to others. More and more, we ask our partners to meet all our needs, until they become the focus of our existence.
It is because we have such all-encompassing and exclusive expectations for our relationships that we are devastated when they end. At the simplest level, who will be our Friday night date? How will we meet all our needs—for sex, for conversation, for succor, for daily companionship, and for consistency? What or who will provide the ground of familiarity in our lives? How can we replace the handy-dandy, live-in jack- or jill-of-all-trades that the person to whom we were related had inevitably become?
The great cafeteria of needs that were being met with affection and efficiency by the single person we chose to hold close in our lives is now no longer being met. We are paralyzed not only by thoughts of loneliness—“What will I do for companionship now?”—but also by the aggravation of needing to learn, on what feels like a moment's notice, how to meet all our needs in a variety of other ways.
What's ironic about the forever and the all-inclusive myths is that they sprang up in times when the life span was half of what it is today. In those days, when a person said, “I'll love you forever,” forever could be two years or ten years, but it very seldom approached the forty, fifty, or sixty years of marriage that could conceivably be possible today. But even in the past, people often had multiple relationships. They could get married and easily say, “until death do us part,” because death often did part them, and the surviving partner would go on to marry again. Relationships ended not because of what occurred within them, but because of external circumstances. It wasn't necessary to ask, “Was I a bad person?” “Did I fail?” “Did this relationship end because I wasn't okay?” None of these questions had to be asked because the usual cause of the ending—death—was out of everyone's hands.
When we apply these myths to ourselves now, however, they can only have one psychological result: we find ourselves in a crisis of self-esteem because we are unable to build relationships that are in accordance with these myths.
The circumstances in which we find ourselves today are very different from those that spawned our cultural attitudes toward relationships, and these mythologies didn't always have such personally negative effects. In the past, the continent needed taming, and its subjugation was best accomplished in community, by teams. The teams began with a pair of people who fell in love or married for convenience and then had children, developing a society and work-force that could get the tasks done.
People were too poor and too busy to worry about anything except economic survival. The point of a relationship was, above all, to establish a stable economic unit, which, with the efforts of all its members, could create a somewhat comfortable life. Once you chose a partner, you just made it work. There was no worrying about the emotional well-being of your relationship or whether you felt good about yourself.
But now our relationship tasks are different. Since as a society we are no longer concerned with conquering the environment, but rather with keeping peace and preserving the environment we have already subdued, we are now turning our attention inward, to deal with the questions of who we are as human beings and what is the meaning in our lives.
In the past, individuals subjugated themselves to the needs of the relationship in order to accomplish work, some task that was a mutually agreed-upon goal. Now we live in a time when relationships exist to serve the deepest needs of the individuals in them.
In a sense, we are asking the relationship to subjugate itself to the evolution of the individual. Because we have solved the issues of basic survival, we have the luxury of moving on to deeper levels of development: emotional, spiritual, aesthetic. And it is in relationships, the intimate and challenging encounter with another, that we do this. This is not a state of affairs toward which we are moving; it is the place at which we have already arrived.
This is a difficult concept for us to admit to ourselves, despite the impact of the “me generation.” All evidence to the contrary, we have not yet consciously acknowledged the degree to which we value the development of the self. But it is true that we enter into relationships primarily to discover, foster, enhance, and sustain our individual selves. We haven't really openly acknowledged this because we don't like to think of ourselves as selfish or self-oriented. There is a certain part of us that wants to believe we hold human communion and, therefore, relationships as a higher value than self. We don't like to conceive of ourselves as being in relationships to get something—that's too crass. It also violates our soft romantic sensibilities. We don't want to believe that we fall in love in order to get something out of it.
We want to hold love out as the one part of life where there is still magic and mystery, where there is still romance. Although love does serve to meet our needs for magic, mystery, and romance, the deeper truth is that we all enter into relationships for very specific reasons, whether we choose to see them or not.
In spite of the progress of civilization, relationships are still task-oriented. When we fall in love, we fall in love with the person who will help us accomplish something—whether that's something we know we're trying to accomplish, like getting a college degree or having a family, or whether that's something about which we are entirely unaware, like trying to achieve emotional security.
I am certainly not saying that we should take the mystery, the magic, or the romance out of falling in love, but we certainly do need to take the mystery out of falling out of love. When a relationship ends, it is vital to look at it through reality-colored glasses and ask, “What was it really about?” “What were we doing together, anyway?” We need to see what happened so that we don't feel guilty, so that we learn for the future, so that we can love again.
My experience in helping hundreds of people go through the