The Health Blog

YOUR MARITAL HEALTH/LOVE LIE:’ ‘LOVE IS AN ALL-OR-NONE PROPOSITION”

Look. You love me or you don’t. There is no halfway in this thing.

HUSBAND

One of the most common confrontation moments in the therapy program for couples came in the form illustrated by one wife:’ ‘This is it. Just say it. Yes or no. You either love me or you hate me. I want to know which it is.”

For this wife and many of the persons in my sample, there was the assumption that love, anger, resentment, joy, and other emotions were somehow exclusive, that it was possible to feel only one emotion at a time. This is not true. We are capable of the simultaneous experience of a range of emotions. The language of love does not contain prepositions, on/off, in/out, beside/away from. The system of love is one of simultaneity, of the balance and flow, the Tao of loving I described in Chapter Two.

There is an important exception here. Research indicates that while we may be able to attach to many people at one time, we can bond with only one person at a time. It is not that we cannot bond with several people, just that the actual bonding I referred to earlier—the mature, intentional bonding—can only take place on one-to-one basis, one interaction at a time. This concept is called “monotropy,” the technical word for bonding relationship by re lationship. It became an important concept in treatment, and I required couples to suspend any other bonding processes for the few weeks they worked on their marital bond. Therapy would not begin until this could be done. Extramarital sex, “Type I, sex outside marriage,” is debilitating to marriages because energy spent on bonding is an invested energy. If you are spending it in one bond, it is not available for forming another.

Love, however, is not monotropic. You can love many people and feel many other feelings while you are loving. When you are bonding, establishing or re-establishing love, it is a one-at-a-time event. But isn’t there a “one and only” for everyone? This assumption underlies the next love lie.

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