On Valentine’s Day I read a love letter in the newspaper. The woman publicly proclaimed her intense and eternal love for her husband. “You’re everything to me, honey,” she wrote. “When I first saw you, I knew right away that my life had changed…I’ll love you this way forever…You’re my all…Without you I’d be nothing…”
It sounds nice enough, but creates an impossible standard. She has set her husband up as a god figure. But spouses are not gods. They cannot – and should not – be one’s all. Her husband is mortal; he has problems of his own. When the god fails, the disappointment can be crushing. When people say, “without you I’d be nothing, or, “I love you more than life itself,” they are setting themselves up for disappointment because they are putting all of their emotional/existential eggs into one flimsy basket. They are focusing their lives on a single white knight savior. But if he is unfaithful, a wife beater, impotent, a screamer, callous, self-centered, lazy, neglectful, alcoholic, emotionally unresponsive, or merely fallible, then “life itself” turns dark.
Unfortunately, telling an 18-year-old girl that her eternal bliss is transitory, if not illusory, is often water over a duck’s back. She knows with axiomatic certainty that the world has never known a love like this: intense, meaningful, eternal. Loves made in heaven are often one-way tickets to hell because the higher the expectation, the more shattering will be the fall. The greater the need to be saved, the greater will be the pain and disappointment.
A number of years ago, my wife and I gave refuge to an eighteen-year-old girl whose nineteen-year-old husband had burned their infant son with a hot iron. The young man was court-martialed and put in the brig. Two years before, when they were in high school, she purposely became pregnant so they would have to get married. They were hopelessly in love, but when they went overseas in the army, he became jealous of the baby. The realities of marriage were different from their high school dreams. Within two years, bliss turned to madness.
James H.S. Bossard and Eleanor S. Boll wrote the following in, Why Marriages Go Wrong. “If one selects a mate and marries solely for personal happiness and personality fulfillment, then, when the mate no longer serves that function, the marriage is gone…” Psychologist, Nathaniel Branden, suggests that people tend to marry individuals at their own level of self-esteem. When people with strong self-esteem marry, their expectations tend to be realistic, making for more a stable marriage. They have less need to draw psychological sustenance from the other. But in low self-esteem marriages, each has a need to take from the other, but little or nothing to give.
“I am struck, over and over,” wrote Branden, “by the frequency with which the agony of invisibility in their home lives as children (neglect by parents) is clearly central to their development problems and to their insecurities and inadequacies in their love relationships.” Those who emerge from childhood feeling unloved, unlovable and therefore inadequate, will have the greatest need for love as adults, and consequently, will be the most likely to have unrealistic, savior-like expectations for their spouse.
When people idolize their mates, psychologist Erich Fromm wrote, and they make their lovers, “the bearer of all love, all light, all bliss,” then that person “loses himself in the loved one instead of finding himself.” A partner expected to be “the bearer of all light,” will invariably fail. Ironically, those who have the greatest need to be loved are the least likely to find that love in marriage. “…without self-esteem,” wrote Branden, “love cannot survive.”
I’m not completely convinced the psychologists have it right. “Love cannot survive without self-esteem” is a bit too absolutist. Since Freud, “toxic parents” have been the go-to scapegoats for all of our insecurities and neuroses. It’s not that simple. Laying a guilt-trip on parents who raise their kids within a normal behavioral range, but who still have maladjusted children, is a terribly unfair, if not arrogant.
“Love made in heaven” is not a cure-all for our ills, but a hoped-for solution that is often temporary.
Love as God doesn’t work.