Reflection 142 (replacing the in)

In love versus love

Being in love, how beautiful, how amazing, how all encompassing!
The subject of our "in love" means everything and we are truly convinced that it will be for ever.
For ever and ever. At least that is how our fairy tales end: and they lived happily for ever after.

Life however is no fairy tale. Being IN love does not last forever.
It was nature that provided us with the ecstatic feelings of being in love
It was nature that connected to it the invariable feeling of being forever and ever.
It was nature that wants to ensure our species does not end in this generation
that is why we get the extraordinary feelings, and that is also why it connected it to forever-ness


The want for forever-ness is there for a good reason.
Our children may greatly benefit from parents with a stable relationship.
Somehow a stable relationship is not only benefiting the children but equally the partners inside it.
Humans need affection, support, love and where else is a better place to get these things than within the harmony of a family and the coziness of a real 'home'.
But what do we humans make of it?

Love is not the same as 'in love'.
While the one with the 'in' comes spontaneously as an infatuation that is invariably only temporary, the one without the 'in' does not come spontaneously. It requires effort. People in successful marriages sometimes make this effort at a subconscious level and manage to replace the in love with love. But far more often we try to cling to the infatuation. We lose the infatuation but try to bring it back. Sometimes we can temporary bring it back but it is still infatuation and tends to fly away as fast as it comes. If we fail to make the effort to replace the infatuation with love (without the ín) we either end up in broken marriage or unhappy relationships. We can make this effort consciously!

To love with effort seems to go against nature.
But that is what humans are endowed with and are capable of doing.
We can achieve much bigger things than through just following our natural instincts.
Our nature urges us to indulge in sweet and excessive food, we can choose a healthy diet.
Our nature urges us to relax and rest so we have enough energy for the next fight or flight response, but we can choose a healthy life style with regular excercise
Our nature urges us to be lazy, but we can choose to live a life with purpose bringing us great peace of mind and elevate us to higher level of thinking, a higher level of awareness.
Our nature urges us to fall in love and then fall out of it, but we can replace the in love with true love bringing us a life with lots of harmony, support and a real home for us and our children.

Which efforts are we talking about? Just doing simple loving things, saying simple loving words, creating a unique lovely name (darling and honey are not very unique), probing each other's interests, being 100% trustworthy, assisting in each other's growth, mental, emotional and spiritual growth that is. Once love, true love is growing, romance will come back with another delightful dimension. Being 100% trustworthy (not a single lie) is perhaps the single most important one

I have reached an age where many of my friends of similar age are struggling with the so called midlife crisis. Midlife crisis is an ego problem. Our children are bigger, our jobs often quite established, our wives growing older. Our ego starts to doubt our outer worthiness and gaining the heart of a much younger girl seems a ready solution to please the ego enough and convince it we still have "ït".

Giving in to this means we have not managed to create true love within our marriage in the first place. Embarking on another infatuation followed invariably by falling out of the infatuation is not a solution. Can you just imagine how your middle aged wife must feel about you having a young girl? First let me tell you it is not a big achievement to lure a young girl, even if she is beautiful into a relationship if you are middle aged. The most ugly men of middle age can usually lurk through sweet talk young ladies quite easily. So nothing to be proud off. But every thing to worry about. First put yourself in the place of your wife! Even if your religion allows a second wife, think for a while how the one who has delivered your children must feel. A little bit of empathy. Surely if you think about a second wife you have failed to establish love, to make the efforts. You have missed out on this wonderful human achievement, but then did you also lose all forms of empathy?

It is truly never too late to make the efforts to create a loving relationship with the mother of your children. Some marriages really do not work out, but if we all put perfect honesty and so many other good values to work within ours, the number of marriages enjoying true harmony may increase sharply.

How about the religion? 'It is allowed, Mohamed had multiple wives'. That was in a time when women outnumbered men by huge multiples since men were dying in wars and huntings. Now we are living in a different era. While it could be considered a noble and good thing to take care of a widow and multiple women in the year 400, this does not justify in any way a lust-driven instinctive poor and selfish solution to an ego driven selfish midlife crisis. The much better solution to midlife is to make some of efforts, simple efforts to find true love with your wife, respect her more than anybody else in the world and not let her suffer in silence because of a misplaced male ego problem.