“Have You Ever Been in Love?”

You won’t find real love until you stop chasing it away

Say what you will about the baby boomers but those guys knew how to make relationships last. The art of being in love, if it ever really existed, is dying. This complicated and nuanced practice of being in love with someone else is falling onto a generation that can’t stop taking pictures of themselves.

I was asked this question just last night. “Have you ever been in love?” I went to a restaurant with a couple of coworkers, one of them about a decade younger than me. She’s recently divorced and in many ways, it’s clear to see that as a 31-year-old, she’s trying to figure out how to open her wings and really fly for the first time. I remember feeling that way.

“Yes,” I said, “I most definitely have.”

“I never have been,” she confessed between her sips on a margarita, “How do you know when you’re in love?” And our tumble down the rabbit hole began. First I wanted to clarify, did she mean how do you know you love someone or how do you know when two people are in love with each other. She wanted to know how two people love each other.

Don’t Just Wing It

Before this starts to turn into some kind of cheesy love story, let’s bring some rational and logical thinking into this. Most people just feel it out. They just wing it. Those people usually fail to find love. I told her that she needed to understand something really important about real romantic love and that you just know it implicitly. We have things that we understand explicitly and things that we understand implicitly. There’s a big and important difference here. If you wreck your bicycle, you know explicitly that it’s painful and anyone who sees it also knows explicitly that it was painful.

Now, imagine trying to describe the taste of something to someone who had never tasted it. Like salt. You can’t tell someone the taste of salt, it’s extremely difficult. You just know it implicitly and so I told her that when you’re young, you want to know how you know you’re in love and it’s just not something I can articulate. I just understand it implicitly like I understand that taste of salt.

Millennials are failing at love. As a Gen Xer, I’ve got my popcorn popped and I’m sitting on my grassy hill, watching the train wreck. All the cars are buckling and piling onto each other while the sparks fly and flames erupt while being drowned in their selfish whining. It’s hard not to get a sense of satisfaction, I can’t help it, I’m still human. As a mental health profession, I rarely see anyone that has really found love. The millennials are especially failing hard at it. They’re just doing it wrong but God knows you can’t tell them that.

The fact is, you will never find love until you stop chasing it away and here is a short list of how I see people chasing it away.

1. They don’t think about their partner, they think about themselves — Love happens when you think about someone other than yourself. There are a lot of narratives out there about what you deserve as an individual and that your partner exists to serve you. It’s not oppression to make your partner a sandwich, it’s an act of love. If you’re coming at your relationship like you’re owed something then you’re going to be in failed relationships.
2. They want to be loved before they give it — This is just more of thinking about the self first. But if you want love, you have to give it. And that usually means too that you have to also give acts of love to yourself but here’s the key. The acts of love to yourself can’t diminish or take away from other people. No, self-love doesn’t mean that you get to play the field and expect your partner to stick around. This is a BS and twisted interpretation of empowerment that seems to have developed in recent years. You should give love first and if it doesn’t come back then you’re with the wrong partner.
3. They are a stage five dingleberry — People cling to each other too much. They have control issues. “What are you doing? Who are you with? Who are you talking to? Let me look at your phone. I saw you looking at that other person,” etc etc. This is guaranteed love repellent and screams of insecurity and insecurity is repulsive. Love cannot exist without trust and if you’re struggling to trust your partner then you’re not relationship ready.
4. They expect their partner to change even though they aren’t willing to change themselves — This is a resentment factory. Resentment is the great relationship destroyer. Resentment preys on love, chews it up and spits it out. If you approach relationships with the, “you need to change and I’m just fine where I am,” then have fun with not being able to find real love.

There are many others but as long you remember that anything having to do with only thinking about yourself first is the path to failure. If you actively practice these attitudes don’t be surprised when your love life is a total dumpster fire.

Instead of Focusing on Insecurity and Worry

In life, I know that if I want good friends, I have to be a good friend first. The same is true for being a romantic partner. If you want a good romantic partner then you have to be a good one first. Some people won’t return it and so you just let them go and move on. Too many people focus their relationship energy on controlling things. They become jealous and clingy. Instead, focus your attention on being a good partner. This is the best recipe for success.

Most of the time when I tell this to people, “be an amazing partner,” they look at me like a dear in the headlights

Most of the time when I tell this to people, “be an amazing partner,” they look at me like a dear in the headlights because most of their relationship efforts are focused on jealousy and blame. It’s time to do something different. If you’re not able to move away from this style you’re just not relationship ready and love will avoid you like the plague like you are some kind of love plague.

This is an unbreakable law of nature and the more you resist it, the more pain you’re going to experience. So you can choose more pain or you can choose something different and cultivate real love. Here’s my shortlist on how to be a good partner.

1. Do things that are thoughtful — Think about them when you’re not with them and do something nice for them. If you’re going over to see them, pick up their favorite coffee. Plan a special date just for them. Go to their favorite place to eat and buy them a small gift just to say I love you. Surprise them with a special day out. If you’re thinking about going about this so that you can get something out of it later then you’ve got it wrong. Do it just because you love them and if you’re not willing to do so then you don’t really love them. I knew I was really in love and I knew that she really loved me when she went all out on my birthday and was beaming with happiness and the opportunity to do it.
2. Focus on what you love about them, not what you wish was different — If you can’t name things about your partner that you love and appreciate then you’re not in love. Say thank you, be grateful, tell them what you love about them. These are acts of love and how love is cultivated. Stop trying to change them. If you don’t love them how they are then you might need to move on.
3. Take personal responsibility — This is, by far, the most underrated relationship skill. This is the great relationship healer, the great bridge-builder and the great resentment buster. Admit you screwed up, own up to your mistakes and apologize for them. Everybody screws up and if you can’t admit it and apologize for it then you’re not going to find love. If you can’t do this, love will continue to evade you.
4. Exercise empathy — Stop talking to your partner and take time to listen to them. Take the time to understand their perspective. Try to walk in their shoes for awhile. But empathy is so much more than that. It’s an emotional bridge between people love each other. When they’re in pain, you’re in pain, when they’re happy, you’re happy. That’s empathy. If you and your partner don’t have that empathic bridge and you can’t build it, then you can’t love each other.
5. Let them be their own person — At and the same time, you also need to be your own person. Too many people expect their partner to support them in being their own person but don’t give that support back. That hypocrisy will kill love with lethality. Encourage them to do what they love. Encourage them to explore their talents and chase their dreams. If you’re threatened by your partner having a life outside of you then you’re not relationship ready. You won’t have love, you will have pain.

We shouldn’t be telling young people how they know they are in love, we should be teaching them how to cultivate it

So how do you know when you’re in love? If you’re not cultivating it than you’re not going to feel it. Guaranteed. We shouldn’t be telling young people how they know they are in love, we should be teaching them how to cultivate it. You can’t force love so don’t try so hard. You can’t make love happen any more than you make a plant grow. All the jealousy and screaming in the world isn’t going to make a plant grow. You just have to make the conditions right and let nature take its course.