What is the difference between love and being in a relationship?

Love is unconditional, being in a relationship is not!

The luck of noticing the difference, deep down, somehow (!) explains my very positive, moving experience with my ex-partners and their new lives and indeed new wives…

It’s a beautiful, freeing place to be to have gratitude but no pain or resentment with relationships that have ended.

I’ve even had a chance to support wellbeing for the new partners of my ex-partners and it was so sweet.

So much suffering in this area

I’d love people to be able to have this sweetness and freedom too as in this area especially, there is much suffering between partners and ex-partners.

Love songs confuse/collapse love and relationship routinely and in my view tragically. Young and old, we get impressed (literally: imprinted with) songs confusing an attitude or a feeling of love with relationship.

In love songs, you love somebody because of how great they make you feel, because of what they do for you, because of how they meet your need for beauty (you know, the eyes, the hair, how they walk etc).

In reality, best I can tell, you love somebody as they are or it is not love you are in.

What is love and what is relationship then?

The phrase “I’m in love” is very telling. It refers to the initial period of the relationship when it is possible to love and appreciate EVERYTHING about the other person.

If something is not perfect, we find it endearing, not annoying, when in love.

Somehow, when we are freshly impressed with a special someone, our hearts open wide to the feeling and the state of love for the other person.

But when we start a relationship, the difference I’m talking about comes to play.

Because relationship is a not a feeling or an absolute. Relationship is a structure, a set of agreements, rituals and shared experiences that need to support the most essential needs of each partner.

What relationships have in common

The same is true for all relationships/partnerships: work, projects, organisations.

Relationship is a conditional structure whose function is to deliver for the participants’ needs.

When your essential needs are not met in a relationship, the structure becomes a liability rather than a source of support and needs to be either improved or dissolved.

How the confusion backfires

When we confuse unconditional loving feelings for signs that the relationship will be effective, we get in trouble.

Especially that the confusion has us assume that the subsequent relationship difficulties mean deficiency or withdrawal of love.

The moment we act on that painful/untrue assumption, all hell breaks loose.

So, so painful and so unnecessarily so…

Isn’t the end of love why relationships end?

I wonder what percentage of people would say that relationships break up when love runs out.

Probably high.

My guess would also be that for many people it seems like dissolving relationship is easier when you assume that love is not there or not enough there.

It may not be true but it seems easier to think it’s true.

Even if to think it is torturous.

I should know, I experienced the agony of thinking that when my marriage was dissolving.

And now, many years later, I work with people who are going through that torment.

What I’ve discovered partially thanks to my marriage ending is that when you assume that love or the intention of love IS there, it’s easier to do what is needed for the relationship. Even if what is needed is ending it.

I know from another experience, when dissolving a long term relationship, that remaining open to love as you end a relationship is hugely moving and liberating.

It’s one of the many benefits of knowing the difference between love and relationship.

Seeing the difference between love and relationship helps to be in a relationship and it helps to improve or end one.

I wonder if the way I see this difference is helpful to people in some way?