REALISM

In the movies love vetoes every other decision. Brides and grooms are regularly left at the altar because their future mates have decided to run off with someone else with whom they are “really in love”. Once you fall in love, in the Hollywood version, every other promise you have made is null and void. You can’t be held to any previous commitment. The person with whom you “fall in love” will become the object of your life, your future, your dreams, and your satisfaction. You have suddenly realized that they and they alone will make you complete. They will make you whole. Life will have meaning like it never has before (except for all the other times you’ve been in love). In fact, you will find yourself living and thinking the lines from your favorite songs. “I don’t know what I’d do without you” and “I can’t go on without you baby” You begin to believe you can’t make it without him/her. You constantly daydream about this person, writing perfect, romantic scripts about your future life together. You fully expect that this person will be able to meet your deepest longings and needs and come through for you 100 percent of the time. Though we all intellectually know it’s impossible, we have been subtly taught to base our future happiness on the unconscious expectation that finding the right person will solve all our problems.

Hollywood equates infatuation with love. This period of intense infatuation and supercharged emotions can last anywhere from six weeks to eighteen months. And when feelings start to subside, (as they always do), we’ve been brainwashed to conclude that our love is dying. The perfect partner turns out to have a flaw or two. They can’t quite live up to our imagination. Relational conflict begins to raise its ugly head. Dissatisfaction gradually erodes those once euphoric feelings. Disillusioned and discouraged, we begin to change our focus. As emotions wane and irritations arise, we start to blame our problems on the other person’s inability to measure up. Hollywood provides a convenient “Plan B” when “true love” falters. Clichés abound to describe how we’ve “drifted apart” or are “falling out of love” or how good it once was, but it’s “just not the same anymore”. We’re led to believe that “falling out of love” is an expected and natural risk in relationships. We either chose the wrong person or we were right for each other for a season but that season has now passed. Our lack of love has nothing to do with us, it is simply the result of discovering that we no longer have the right person in our life.

Real emotional maturity is how thoroughly you let yourself feel anything. Everything. Whatever comes. It is simply the knowing that the worst thing that could ever happen is just a feeling at the end of the day. That’s it! A feeling. Imagine the very worst, the only thing bad about it is…how you would feel about it. What you would make it out to be, what you assume the repercussions mean, and how those would ultimately affect…how you feel. A sense of fear, a pinch or throb or sting. A hunger pang or ego kick. The sense of worthlessness, the idea of not belonging. (Interesting how physical feelings are always quick and transient, but the ideas we hold of pain always seem to stick around..) But we avoid feeling anything because we have more or less been taught that our feelings have lives of their own. That they’ll carry on forever if we give them even a moment of our awareness.