Outline
- In a relationship, you can know that either the other is wanting to love you, or does not.
- Fear in relationship is generally that the other doesn’t even want to love you.
- Love is: wanting someone to be happy, and not fearing their unhappiness.
- When someone doesn’t want to love you, or you don’t want to love them, there is generally no question about how to proceed with the relationship: there is no relationship.
Introduction
In this talk, Bruce Di Marsico continues his discussion of issues in love relationships. In the last study guide he outlined the problem, and in this study guide, the solution.
In a relationship, you can know that either the other is wanting to love you, or does not. When people say “I love you”, especially when in the midst of an argument (desperately: “but I love you!”), they often mean that they want to love you.
Fear in relationship is generally that the other doesn’t even want to love you.
Loving can be defined negatively as not believing someone is the cause of your unhappiness. Loving can be defined positively as wanting someone to be happy (not happy because what I give them or not, but unconditionally). Putting these together, we find the full meaning of Loving: wanting someone to be happy, and not fearing their unhappiness.
When someone doesn’t want to love you, or you don’t want to love them, there is generally no question about how to proceed with the relationship. In general, then, there is no relationship.
Wanting to love
The alternate belief to “proving that I am not loved” goes something like this: “Although I am not loved more at this moment by so and so, because they are scared, I have not proved that they do not want to love me more.” And that usually is very, very consoling and peace-giving for a person to realize.
Although I think I may have proven that they don’t love me more, all I’ve proven really is that they’re afraid. That doesn’t prove that I’m unlovable. It only proves that because they’re afraid, they can’t love me more. It doesn’t prove that they don’t want to love me more, that, in fact, they’re against loving me more. And I guess the question we could ask ourselves is “can we ever really find proof that another person wouldn’t want to love us more? Who is there that wouldn’t want to be happier? Who is there that wouldn’t want to love anybody more? Who is there that wouldn’t want to love us more? “
You will find that there are different answers that that question. Sometimes you will find that people do not want to love other people more, for example, strangers, people they don’t know. But in that relationship, who wouldn’t want to love the other one more? Who wouldn’t want to be happier? So we could see this for ourselves, they would want to love us more and they would love us more if they believed they could. It doesn’t prove that there’s anything wrong with us if the other is not able to overcome all their fears instantly. If the other people we love are not able to overcome all their fears instantly regarding us or other people, it doesn’t prove that there’s anything wrong with us.
They certainly would want to overcome those fears if they believed they could. But all the unhappiness that we have with them is based, somehow, on the belief that because I am who I am, they don’t even want to overcome their fears of me, they don’t even want to love me more, somehow because there’s something wrong with me.
And that’s where all the anger and the unhappiness and depression in relationships come to. And the confusion stems from this: in our emotions, and in our language we often believe that loving and wanting to love are identical, and we could say to somebody, “I love you.” But we could really mean two things. We could mean, “I love you.”, or frequently, we could mean is “I want to love you more.” Which means: I’m happy with you or I want to be happier with you. And both of those, we express in our language by saying to somebody, “I love you.”
We could be angry at somebody and having a terrible argument with them, and say, “but I’m only doing this because I love you.” That doesn’t mean, “I’m happy with you right now.” We can’t possibly mean that. That kind of an answer means “I’m not happy now but I want to be happier with you.”
We know that what we basically want, really, is for the person to want to love us. The fact that they do or do not love us, at any given moment, would never matter to you as long as you believe that someone wanted to love you and that what was preventing them was their own past, their own beliefs, their own fears, not you. On close inspection, it seems that what all people really want from others is for them to want to love. If we know that a person sincerely wants to love us, we cannot be unhappy because we cannot believe it is our fault.
We can only be unhappy when we believe that it is our fault, that it is something wrong with us. We cannot be unhappy when we don’t believe it is our fault. People in a relationship cannot be unhappy with each other if they really saw that the other person was being unhappy and frightened and wanting to love them, but felt they were not able to.
If you’ve ever had that fear, it was the fear that somehow the other person didn’t even want to love you. You didn’t believe that they were trying with all their might. You didn’t believe that they were doing everything they knew how to do and everything in their power to be happier. And you really believe they didn’t even want to be happier with you.
“If you really wanted to be happier with me and if you really wanted to love me, you wouldn’t do such and such a thing.” That really an impossible sentence filled with contradictions, because we can’t accuse somebody of not wanting to love us more in any real way. We can’t accuse them of not wanting to be happy, not wanting to be happier.
And if we can be in touch with that our unhappiness with another person is based on the belief that they don’t really want to be happier, we don’t have to believe that, because it’s impossible for another person not to want to be happier. So that huge belief, that cardinal belief, which is behind all the problems in relationships, which can be stated, “if you loved me more you would be such and such a way, or do or feel this or that”, This can’t be believed and felt if the person is able to see the inherent contradictions.
Okay, so that what I really want you to see is that how it’s all based on that one belief. And that difficulties between people, no matter what shape, no matter what form, no matter what style, no matter what the roles, can still be boiled down to this very, very simple principle. “If you loved me more or if you really wanted to love me more, you would. . .”
And just by sometimes pointing it out, as we do for ourselves, how many times have our own problems with other people stopped, saying to ourselves, “they don’t really mean to be that way. They didn’t really mean to say that or they don’t really want to be that way.” How many times have they stopped when we saw that they were really very sorry and felt very bad.
Why did we enjoy their feeling bad about having been unhappy with us? Because it was their way of saying, “I don’t really want to be this way either and I didn’t really want to treat you that way.” And when a person is very apologetic and falls all over you, why do you even allow that to let you feel good? Because somehow they’re saying, “but don’t you see, I really do want to be happier with you and I don’t know what came over me. And I don’t know what happened and I don’t know why I’m this way and I don’t want to be.” And as long as they reassure you that they do want to love you, all is forgiven.
I’ve seen people that lived in what you would consider the most impossible situations with alcoholics and drug addicts, and could really love those people and be with them very much, when they realized that.
Feeling that you are not loving enough
I didn’t speak too much about the second person who is unhappy about not being what they should. But basically all the dynamics are the same. That’s their way of motivating themselves to be what they would like to be in a relationship, to do what they’d like to do.
“If you aren’t what I want you to be, there must be something wrong with me that I can’t give you whatever you need, to be the way I want you to be. There must be something wrong with me that I can’t motivate you.” And that person is very much in touch with it. And they feel, “I really don’t love that person, I guess. But how come I feel so bad about it?” They are confusing loving and wanting to love. They’re not in touch. But they do want to love and that’s all that’s needed. All you need to have a good relationship is to want to love. You don’t need to love. Just want to be happy.
The person who is very frequently the withdrawn party or the abused party or the victimized party or the masochistic one, whichever you want to call it in a relationship, is very frequently feeling that they don’t love the other person and they feel bad about that. “I try my best. I can’t feel any better about her or I can’t feel any better about him. ”
We can still let it be okay. We may find out that a person who is very unhappy with us all the time, in a sense, is just not there for us. It becomes easier and more possible for them to see that when they’re being unhappy, that’s okay. But that doesn’t mean that we like it or we love it. We want to love them but we will never want to love their unhappiness.
Especially because we love them, we won’t want them to be unhappy. So we don’t have to be unhappy with another person’s unhappiness. What if we’re not really unhappy with their unhappiness? We won’t be avoiding them but I don’t suppose we’ll be searching them out, either. It would be impossible for us to look forward to being with them, too. But that’s alright. That’s not a problem. Very natural resolutions come about in that respect. And the person who’s very unhappy is just very unhappy and isn’t going really be any different regarding you anyway, and the unhappy person can really see that all they are doing is depriving you of a friend.
You won’t keep getting in the way and telling them that their real problem is that they make you unhappy. Indeed, their real problem is, they’re making themselves unhappy. All they’re doing is depriving themselves.
If someone was nothing for you because he was unhappy, then he would just be nothing for you. It’d be nothing for you to run away from, but nothing for you to be attracted to. And they would be being what they wanted and felt they needed to be.
If, for whatever reason, you wanted them to love you more, that’s another thing and that’s no problem really. If you wanted them to love you more then you could easily help them. You could try to help them. And you could see that you didn’t need them to love you more. They were an unhappy person. You would like them to be happier. You would want them to love you more. You would want them to be more happy with you but you would approach that thing a whole lot differently. And probably, in such a way, that would make a real difference to the other person, because they wouldn’t be able to use you as the thing to hang their unhappiness on.
Although they may be unhappy about everything else, they wouldn’t necessarily want to bring that into your relationship. They probably would be quite willing to suspend their unhappiness when they’re with you. And you may find that eventually, they’d only want to be with you when they were really happy. So they’d have that and they’d want to be with you and they’d be happy. And it would change things quite a bit.
Questions for Reflection
List out your love relationships (whether sexual intimacies, friendships, or familial):
For each one:
Do you want them to be happier?
Do you believe they want you to be happier?
Do you fear their unhappiness?
Do you believe that they fear your unhappiness?
Think of times when you felt unloved by a specific person. Do you believe that the other person did not even want to love you more during those times?
Meditation for the Week
Love is: wanting someone to be happy, and not fearing their unhappiness.