The difference between being "in love" and practicing a love that binds

​There are a lot of relationships in which people say and hear I love you and yet never FEEL loved, valued or prioritized.

Maybe it's one of the most structural challenges we have to relationships, that long before we ever understand what love is we begin saying the words I love you. And along the way, many of us begin to believe it's the words and not the definition that hold a relationship together.

Listen, I confess, any time I start talking about love or relationships I'm overwhelmed with imposter syndrome. What on earth right do I have talking about healthy and loving relationships? I'm divorced and long before I was divorced I had a pretty dismal track record in relationships. All relationships, not just romantic relationships.

But my friend Marrin quotes a saying often; "we teach most what we most need to learn."

Well, the last several years of my life, I've come to grips with the reality that there is nothing more important to our healthy survival than healthy relationships. So I've been faced with the challenge to learn how to healthy relationship or continue on with a life of unhealthy surviving.

Learning how to relationship starts with understanding that our brains are pleasure addicts. And little makes a brain feel more pleasurable than the sensation of being "in love." But like any pleasure, say like the fleeting high that comes from alcohol or other drugs, the pleasure of being "in love" fades.

Sometimes fast.

And if you don't fully know the feeling of being in love has nothing to do with holding the relationship together, but at best is simply a beautiful but fleeting symptom of being together, the relationship will fall apart.

Maybe you'll stay in it, but little hell compares to living in a fallen apart relationship for any other reason than feeling loved, valued, and prioritized.

There comes the challenge. Because to love and to value and to prioritize are often, if not almost always, actions quite separate from the feeling of "in love." In fact, many times those actions come in spite of NOT having that feeling.

They are actions that allow us to express that even though my ego is demanding that I feel overwhelmed with a sensation of love, and I don't, I'm going to offer evidence of love absent that sensation.

It's a model that ideally comes from the earliest days of our lives. When a mother or father is utterly sleepless, and the baby cries out, in spite of feeling far more exhausted than overwhelmed by the beautiful sensations of love, they rise and they model love.

They rise and love and value and prioritize.

Maybe our loving infrastructure never develops healthily from baby into adult, we don't fully grasp the difference between feeling "in love" and the healthy definition of practicing love because we were too young to cognitively understand that difference?

Maybe it's because we didn't receive that early definition of love?

Maybe it's because the definition seemed to grow more and more confusing and disorganized as we grew older and relationships changed?

Maybe it's as simple as relationships are complicated?

I don't know, but I know my road to contemplating the true nature of healthy relationships started in fatherhood. That's where I began to understand that the love that binds is far more complicated than binds that always feel like love.

It's where I began to understand the key to an intimate relationship is understanding what love is when love doesn't feel like being in love. We are much better at knowing how to desire to feel in love than we are at having a desire to show love.

Feeling in love requires nothing of us. Practicing a love that binds requires skills. It requires setting aside ego. It requires a complete willingness to prioritize someone else feeling loved over me feeling in love.

It makes me wonder if feeling in love and practicing a love that binds are on some opposite ends of the life cycle of a loving relationship. Feeling in love the beginning and practicing a love that binds the end?

It makes me wonder if the ending isn't supposed to be far more beautiful than the beginning, but our desire for pleasure hides that truth from us.

It makes me wonder how many people will come to the end of life, or at least to the end of a relationship, and be forced to wrestle with the possibility they have experienced being in love but have never experienced love, and will count that among their greatest losses.

Maybe I wrestle with that. I suppose that is why I'm writing. Maybe it's my way of protecting myself against the potential of that great loss.

Maybe it's simply my desire to learn? And like my good friend says, we often teach what we most need to learn.

Whatever the case, I think we could all do at least a little better at practicing a love that binds, and I'm old enough to assure you we're never too old to learn how to do that.