RATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS: "I love him, but I'm not in love with him..."

I've heard the refrain countless times. The emotional emancipation proclamation that claims...

..."I love him, but I'm just not in love with him."

Often the attachment has been eroding for years, with building frustration and mounting resentments on both parties. She informs me that, "he caters to my every need, sends me romantic texts everyday, makes me coffee every morning, last week he sent flowers to my job...

...but I don't want him to touch me and I feel bad because I don't know why."

He doesn't get it either, "I do everything for her, why won't she love me?" So he does more and the more he does results in more disdain, dissociation, detachment, estrangement and alienation. She's pulling away and in his desperation he accelerates the demise of the relationship by doing ever more to maintain it.

But she feels jipped. "He's not the man I fell in love with." "He changed after we got married." "I don't know who he is anymore."

I once had a man tell me that when he met his current wife, "I was raising my daughter as a single dad, working two jobs and attending school." I responded, "that's the strong, independent, resourceful man she picked, but who are you now?"

In the subconscious balance of the masculine/feminine (yin/yang), energy is precarious and fluctuates over time, because neither wishes to control or be controlled. Both masculine and feminine traits are within all individuals and manifest in different ways, times and circumstances.

With any intimate relationship the one who needs the other the most has the least control and power. This results in an imbalance to the dynamic in which the specific cause cannot be identified, but the imbalance is felt more deeply over time resulting in an alienated state.

Love grows within equality. Resentment festers under control. In a healthy relationship, neither party is in a state of need, because need denotes dependency, addiction, victimization and control. 

If the foundation of your love is need, you place a burden upon the other that will eventually evoke resistance and a natural pulling away to lighten the weight of that burden. Intimate relationships are a precarious balance between dependence and independence. Too much of either leads to unstable interactions and perpetual conflict. Interdependence, or the mutual dependence upon another that does not suffocate the other's independence, is often difficult to achieve if one partner has drained the other through prolonged dependency.

You say you adore her, but in your adoration have you impeded her ability to adore you? She doesn't want an adoration that negates YOU over her, because her commitment was to your strength joined with her own. 

Respect is the foundation of every relationship, but is particularly crucial within intimate pair bonds and becomes the chief measure of the status of your relationship. When there are NO boundaries to what you will tolerate, the other will naturally assume control, but will lose respect and evoke a sense of guilt for the boundary violations you fail to confront and coupled with that guilt will be resentment.

You cannot make her "happy," since happiness is an internal state under the direct control of the individual and not contingent on any external person or event, but directly related to the individual's conscious interpretation of that person or event.

Change over time is an aspect of the fluid personality and the neuroplasticity of the brain, but change solely to accommodate another's happiness, regardless of the consequence to your own state of mind, becomes a form of emotional bondage and it will materialize subconsciously, under the radar, until the day it cannot be denied (which may be too late).

Recall the man you were when she committed to you and ask yourself...

...who am I now?


RATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS THREAD