By itself, love is never enough to sustain a relationship. It is something that can be both healthy or unhealthy, helpful or harmful, depending on why and how you love someone else and are loved by someone else. We’ll get more into codependence later in this article, but for now, it’s useful to point out that love, itself, is neutral. This desire to use the love of someone else to soothe your own emotional problems inevitably leads to codependence, an unhealthy and damaging dynamic between two people where they tacitly agree to use each other’s love as a distraction from their own self-loathing. The other “wrong” reason to enter into a relationship is, like Greg said, to “fix” yourself. Without that mutual admiration, everything else will unravel. Being young and naive and hopelessly in love and thinking that love would solve everythingĪs we’ll see throughout the rest of this article, everything that makes a relationship “work” (and by work, I mean that it is happy and sustainable for both people involved) requires a genuine, deep-level admiration for each other.Being together for image-because the relationship looked good on paper (or in photos), not because the two people actually admired each other.Feeling like a “loser” because they were single and settling for the first person that came along.Where did they mess up?īy far, the most common answer was “being with the person for the wrong reasons.” I asked people who were on their second or third (or fourth) marriages what they did wrong. When I sent out my request to readers for advice, I added a caveat that turned out to be illuminating.
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