Happiness is not being in love.
Codependents aren’t the only ones who suffer from this toxic belief. Public entertainment, from the classic Greek play to the Hollywood musical, has been frequently and famously built around this idea. The sirens from Homer’s Odyssey are a nod to this hypnotic human experience of love being synonymous with a fantasy land of endless pleasure.
Madame Bovary, often considered the first modern novel, portrays an obsession with romantic affairs that would rival some of the most liberal plots of the present day. The main character has a true, deep addiction to being “in love”, and everyone in her world suffers because of it. Happier versions of this story are celebrated in half the music on the radio and nearly every classic Disney movie.
Many people see fact from fiction and grow into reasonable, satisfied adults who understand that love stories are like an oil painting of a dream. It’s just a painting, and it’s just a dream. But the codependent is locked in. They believe that being “in love” is the reward for being alive. It is their motivation to stay healthy, clean, employed, and moving forward. If it wasn’t for the idea of someday being in love, they would never get out of bed.
A lot of the present-day ideas about romantic love are quite new. Not very long ago, the idea of getting married for love would either confuse people or make them laugh. In some more traditional areas of earth, it is still confounding that anybody should choose a permanent partner based on the intensity of their feelings for them.
The Stoics of Ancient Greece were in complete agreement. They believed following passions was a huge mistake, and went so far as to call romantic love pathological. But, right after World War II, when we were hungry to enjoy peace, and the nuclear family replaced a robust network of extended relatives, romantic marriages became the new norm. If you are interested in the development of modern romantic marriage, you might enjoy We by Robert Johnson.
——————-Industrialized Loneliness——————-
Once a nation industrializes, without farms to fill with working hands, families get smaller. As they get smaller, they get wealthier, and wealth is followed by the pursuit of privacy and independence. Once this trend stabilizes, the result is a falling birthrate that threatens demographic stability, as is the case in present-day Germany and Japan. When life on the land gets replaced by life on concrete, the modern social nightmare begins.
When there are fewer people in your orbit, those who remain carry greater weight in your emotional arena. When your mom gets drunk and starts hitting your dad, who is going to help if it’s just you and your sister? What would this situation look like if it took place in a village where a dozen close relatives live within earshot? The latter would be just as ugly, but everyone would know what you are going through, and that counts for more than our lonely, developed world will ever know.
Having someone who knows your struggle is what love is all about. It is relief from the isolation of a socially anemic existence. After a quiet and sparsely populated childhood, falling in love is a rush that people were not designed for. In what universe does someone become lost in another human being but one where people deeply hunger for safe attachment? And in what world would a person hang onto an abusive lover but one in which a decent lover was so hard to find?
The loss of the extended family has caused incalculable harm to a modern person’s ability to feel safe and secure. Our emotional life is like a kaleidoscope. Innumerable colors mix together in an evolving tapestry of stained-glass marvels. Stars of pink become prominent for a moment, washed away by green, which curtsies to a sea of lavender, and fades into a multicolored interstellar wonderland of endless hordes of beauty. That is what a healthy emotional life is like for a person with a strong, active, extended family.
The kaleidoscope of a wealthy nuclear family may have three or four colors that overwhelm as they temporarily block out the others. If a single color were removed, or its glass fractured, the harmonious, prismatic effect would be irreparably destabilized. This is still preferable to the single child of a single abusive parent, for whom the kaleidoscope has no color; it is a high-powered telescope pointed straight at the sun.
Small families are an emotional minefield. When one relationship fails, there are no attachment safety nets anywhere nearby. Sometimes, there are no safety nets at all. The experience of emotional grounding may exist only in the fantasy of the perfect attachment figure who will make you feel completely safe.
Their color will be the only one you can see, and the only one you will ever need. Your one-and-only will love only you. They will give you the freedom and joy of childhood that you missed out on. They will intoxicate you with the blissful ignorance of pain and heartache and fear and emptiness. Finding and loving them will be your life’s mission. The love of your life. The ultimate passion project.
——————-Passion——————-
Ironically, if we commit to following our passions, then monogamy, social order, and marriage will become things of the past. Over half of modern marriages already have. How many people marry someone who gives them the safe feeling of a parent, only to use that confidence as a springboard to have affairs?
Passion is a complaint, and leads the way to ruin. With passion, vice rules supreme, and the greatest of them all is the love of someone who you believe is perfect. Being in love with them is a transaction for which you expect to be rewarded with happiness. It is simple but malignant narcissism, and it doesn’t work.
There is nothing wrong with marrying for love, it just has a very reliable failure rate. Looking for happiness in another person is a logical impossibility. The happiness we are looking for is ours, and it is exactly what people find once they dedicate themselves to self-care, boundary enforcement, and purposeful tasks. If they happen to find love along the way, then they will find happiness in love also.
——————-Reality Check——————-
People who do well in relationships do well without them.
Happiness is an experience created by good health and is established by prioritizing healthy lifestyle choices, enforcing boundaries, and doing purposeful things with our time. You cannot pursue happiness any more than you can pursue love. If you go looking for either, you are going to fail.
If instead, you go searching for the best way to secure your physical and mental health, engage in activities that matter to you, and nurture platonic friendships, you will create an environment in which both happiness and love will find you.