Wonder Woman: The Good We All Search For

"Love is the good we all search for," wrote psychologist Robert Karen. And
yet a lot of the time, we’re searching for something we don’t really understand:
is love that heady mixture of anticipation and anxiety we get when we "fall" in
love? Is love about dependency and believing that "I can’t live without him or her?"
Is love about sex? About getting our needs met financially or emotionally? Is
it about not being alone anymore?

With so many different understandings of what love is and isn’t, it’s
hardly surprising that the highest highs we experience in love are followed,
after a short time or a long time, by the very darkest of lows.

Love Is a Mirror

Many wise spiritual teachers hold the view that love is a mirror we look
into in order to see ourselves more clearly; that any relationship we embark on
is always going to teach us more about ourselves than about the other person. And
in many ways, I believe that this almost can’t happen while we’re "in love".

Being in love has a quality of biological blindness to it: this person
is perfect. Perfect! We love everything about them: their voice, the way they
dress, their sense of humour, their quirky
habits, their physical presence.

Nature, in all her wisdom, compels us to unquestioningly adore this
person for a long enough time to overlook the things that might otherwise have
driven us mad and sent us packing: "He never puts the lid back on the
toothpaste!" "She never contributes toward the restaurant bill!"

With the passing of months, the biological urge to be with this person
eases off a little and we begin to "get real" about our partner, to
idealise them less and to see them as a real human being; warts, weaknesses and
all. Perversely, it often happens that the same things that attracted us to the
person to begin with are the things we struggle with now.

Choosing to Change

At this time, we face a choice: have we come to care about this person
enough to forgive their "imperfections" and understand that they cannot
complete us in whatever way we may have been hoping? Or is our disappointment
serious enough to make us move on, hoping that our next partner will be closer
to ideal?

For many people, this is where risk enters relationship because choosing
to stay will mean choosing to change. When we’re alone, we’re unchallenged in
our beliefs, our comfort zones, our set ways of doing things. It is often only
when we care about another person as much as we care about ourselves that we
become willing to compromise and experience the tremendous growth that this can
bring.

If we choose to stay, we create the possibility of Love in its truest
forms of action and commitment. We begin to make choices for the well-being of
our partner, and to focus on nurturing rather than needing them. We do this not
as a mechanism to keep the relationship or as a way of making ourselves less
worthy, but as a way of saying "you are as perfectly human as I am, and I am
willing to extend myself for you because I love you." That counts for a whole
lot more than wine and roses.