Khalid Sohail June 8, 2006

Tags: relationships

href="/tag/love">love
…walk hand in hand for hours along sandy beeches
…enjoy candle light dinners in cozy restaurants
…dance together till the early hours of the morning
…and make plans for their future together

after a few months or years of living together feel so frustrated, angry and resentful that they not only leave each other, but also feel so bitter and disappointed that they have difficulties falling and growing in love with somebody else.

While some struggling individuals and couples resolve their conflicts on their own or find help from friends and family members, there are others who need professional help. When I reflect upon the couples I helped in my clinical practice, who were struggling with unhappy and unhealthy intimate relationships, I feel that they had difficulties either initiating and maintaining a healthy relationship or ending an unhealthy relationship and starting a new loving relationship. In those people their romantic love never matured and blossomed.

When I think of all the factors that played a significant role I can divide them into the following groups to highlight the barriers people have to cross in falling and growing in mature love.


1. DIFFICULTIES IN DEVELOPING A HEALTHY SENSE OF SELF

Before entering an intimate relationship, it is important for both partners to have developed a healthy sense of self. People who do not feel secure within themselves, have not achieved a sense of independence and autonomy and cannot enjoy a stable identity in all relationships, have great difficulties in initiating and maintaining a healthy loving relationship. Rather than enjoying their own company when alone, they feel isolated and lonely; and when they enter an intimate relationship, they are afraid of being emotionally engulfed by the other person.

This situation is quite common in shy, introverted and schizoid personalities. R.D. Laing, a well-known British psychiatrist, describes the existential dilemma of such an individual in these words. “The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place there is a dent in his relations with the world and in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself together with others or feel ‘at home in’ the world, but, on the contrary he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation, moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but as ‘split’ in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.” (Ref 1)

Such people not only have difficulties with intimate loving relationships, they struggle even with superficial and casual relationships. In my experience some of the people who had difficulties in developing a healthy sense of self had a history of physical, emotional and sexual abuse as children.


2. DIFFICULTIES IN EXPERIENCING INTIMATE FEELINGS FOR ANOTHER PERSON

Some people who live in unhealthy and unhappy relationships experience only superficial relationships as they have difficulties experiencing feelings of genuine tenderness, care and empathy for other people. Their relationships are usually guided by physical attraction with infrequent moments of excitement. They do not experience much depth in their intimate relationships and feel hollow and unfulfilled even after interpersonal, even sexual encounters. They say to themselves “like a shopper in a department store, we try one relationship after another, skimming over intimacy and finding that nothing touches us deeply.” (Ref 2)

They may express their “love” to other people but it is soon obvious that their actions do not go hand in hand with their words, which leads to very transient, shallow relationships. Such occurrences are quite common in people with narcissistic and psychopathic personalities who are very self-centered, selfish and egocentric. For them their own narrowly defined happiness and excitement are more important. They simply do not care for the feelings of the other person. They lack the capacity to genuinely feel guilty and remorseful. Psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley comments on the individual with such traits: “The psychopath is always distinguished by egocentricity…This can be best expressed by stating that it is an incapacity for object love…True psychopaths are sometimes skilful in pretending love.” (Ref 3)


3. DIFFICULTIES IN SUSTAINING INTIMATE FEELINGS FOR ANOTHER PERSON

Some people, who live in immature loving relationships, even if they experience feelings of tenderness, genuine affection and caring, are unable to sustain them. Once they become intimate with another person, in a short period of time the relationship stirs up a number of painful feelings like resentment, anger, hostility and guilt which lead to dissatisfaction or breakup of the relationship.

As there is no permanence to these intimate feelings, people engaged in such love relationships live in the present and find difficulty in looking into and planning their future. They are incapable of making genuine and honest commitments because nothing in their lives has much depth to it. Commitments are often important in sustaining intimate relationships, as the O’Neills said, “…we desperately need commitment in our lives. Commitment is the very core of constructive change, of growth, and it is vital both to a sense of self and a sustaining relationship.” (Ref 2)

Nietzsche wrote, “Man can be defined by his capacity to promise.” (Ref 4)
People who have difficulties in sustaining intimate feelings cannot make or keep promises and are often unfaithful to their lover and spouse.


4. DIFFICULTIES IN EXPERIENCING FULL SEXUAL SATISFACTION WITH ANOTHER PERSON

Some people who are involved in unhealthy and dysfunctional relationships can experience emotional intimacy but cannot experience sexual intimacy. Some are so uncomfortable that they remain celibate throughout their lives. Others who are involved in sexually intimate relationships are so full of anxiety, insecurity or guilt that they cannot fully enjoy spontaneous, playful and meaningful sexual encounters. They may remain fully or partially impotent or never free themselves from being sexually frigid. I met a number of men and women in my practice who had difficulties enjoying sex even after years of marriage as they had grown up in very conservative and repressive families and communities.


5. DIFFICULTIES IN INTEGRATING INTIMATE FEELINGS WITH SEXUAL SATISFACTION

Some people face an interesting dilemma in their loving and sexual relationships. On one hand they can experience feelings of caring and tenderness and empathy for another person, and can also enjoy sexual satisfaction with someone else, but these two waves of feelings do not come together in the same relationship. They have friends and they have lovers but they do not have lovers who are also their friends. Some call this The Madonna/Whore Complex. They have difficulties accepting that sex can be an innocent and respectable expression of love. They cannot respect the opposite sex whole-heartedly. Cultures that segregate the sexes make it difficult for men and women to have genuine friendships before they get involved in sexual intimacy. Jacob Arlow highlights the cultural factors by stating, “Cultural ambience influences not only love is expressed but also how it is experienced.” (Ref 5)


6. DIFFICULTIES IN ACCEPTING THE OTHER PERSON’S PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTONOMY

People who feel insecure and lack a sense of personal autonomy also have difficulties accepting the psychological autonomy of other people, especially in an intimate relationship. They “love” people because they need them desperately. Eric Fromm calls such immature relationships symbiotic relationships. He writes, “Symbiotic union has its biological pattern in the relationship between the pregnant mother and the fetus. They are two, and yet one. They love togetherness (symbiosis) because they need each other.” (Ref 4) Such dependent relationships can become very controlling and restrictive. Merle Shain states, “Being in a dependent relationship is like being in a canoe…if one stretches his legs, the other is beset by vertigo.”

People involved in such immature relationships have great difficulty ending them. In spite of the suffering they experience, for them a bad relationship is better than no relationship. Such people have a tendency to cling to stable but unsatisfactory and immature intimate relationships.

It is obvious from this discussion that people have to cross certain hurdles in their personal lives and achieve a certain level of emotional maturity before they can initiate, maintain and cherish healthy, happy and meaningful intimate relationships.

I am of the opinion that if people involved in immature loving relationships cannot help themselves, then they need to consult a therapist to develop a better understanding of the dynamics of their personalities and relationships. In that way they can decrease their emotional suffering and learn the art of growing alone and growing together. It is an art to initiate and maintain mature loving relationships and people who lacked good role models in their family of origin can learn it as adults.



REFERENCES
1. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self. Penguin Books England 1981
2. O’Neill, Nena and George. Shifting Gears. M. Evans and Company Inc. New York 1983
3. Cleckley, Hervey. The Mask of Sanity. St Louis MO Mosby Compay 1971
4. Fromm, Eric. The Art of Loving. Harper and Row Publishers USA 1985
5. Arlow, Jacob. Object Concept and Object Choice: Psychoanalytic Quarterly 49, 1980