Love is Not Enough

Dear Eve,
I’m eighteen and am totally in love with my boyfriend. He and I want to get married but my parents say we are too young. Even though they like my boyfriend, they think we are too different, that he doesn’t treat me well enough and that we won’t be happy together “for the long haul.” I am old enough to make my own decisions and am thinking about doing it anyhow because I love him so much and I know he loves me. What do you think?

Aloha,
Sorry, but I agree with your parents; let me tell you why.
First, love is not enough to make a relationship work, nor is love is enough of a reason to get married. Most of us believe that love is the only reason to get married, but if love were sufficient we wouldn’t have a 50-60% divorce rate.

There are a couple of challenges with the “love is all it takes” theory. Mainly, most people don’t operate from true love, they operate from love mixed with a lot of ego. Ego creates jealousy, possessiveness, judgment, blame, sarcasm, put-downs, and control and trust issues along with a whole lot of arguments.

Pure love (generated from spirit rather than ego) is unconditional, accepting, understanding, forgiving and compassionate. This doesn’t mean you don’t have problems and disagreements with true love, but you handle them very differently. Nor does true love mean you stay in a bad relationship, enabling the other to ruin your life, but it does mean that you take responsibility for making the relationship right and if you can’t, you leave from a place of acceptance rather than resistance. (Ego-resistance leaves saying, “He is such a jerk, I hope he gets what he deserves” while acceptance says, “I wish him well on his chosen journey—without me.”)

I was recently doing a panel discussion on love when someone in the audience asked, “How do you know when it is true love?” The other panelists answered, “You just know, you get that feeling,” or “It happens instantly with the look in the eyes,” but my answer was, “You know it is love when the caca hits the fan.” In my experience, you can think you are in love eternally while everything is going well and lust is at an all time high, but when something really challenging happens, that is when the truth is told.

In my experience virtually every relationship hits what I call “the wall”—a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. This is when ego wants to walk away, or blame the other person, and make the other person change. If we can get to the other side of the wall—which takes new skills, personal responsibility and awareness (a transcendence of the ego), there is usually a much deeper relationship on the other side. At the ripe old age of eighteen, I’m guessing that your parents don’t think the two of you have enough life experience individually or together to have the skills to “scale the wall” when the many challenges of a relationship or family come up.

Differences can be a good thing in a relationship if each person respects the other’s, and learns from them. My husband’s and my differences have broadened each other’s knowledge, interests and activities. Differences can also devastate a relationship if you have absolutely no interest or respect in what the other cares about or does. This dynamic can create a lot of time apart, other friends that you also have nothing in common with and underlying disrespect can brew.

It is a matter of values, lifestyle choices and goals. If the differences go against your core values, problems will emerge (you are religious, he is atheist; you like being social, he does not; one of you uses drugs/alcohol and the other does not; he wants to live at the jungle, you want city life.) This is where spending some time getting to know yourself, your desires, goals, values, interests and getting to know him better and solving problems together comes into play.

Give yourself the gift of time—time single, time dating, time to develop, discover, learn and grow. Give yourself to yourself first, then, if the relationship is still want you want, give yourself to each other.
With Aloha,
Eve

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