How’s Your Love Life?

Love is that condition in which you see not what is there, but what you expect to be there. When two people suspend their “seeing through” the other, there is a possibility for liking, or even loving. It is only when you suspend judgment of the other in some literal way that you can possibly “fall,” as we say, in love. What you are falling for is your personal and private image of the other.

The closer those images come to what each person idealizes himself or herself as a loved one, the more likely the whole affair will take off. It becomes a mutual delusion. Let the games begin.

What typically changes over time is the way you “see” the other. You cease to suspend judgment. You become judgmental. And love depends upon being non-judgmental. So you fall out of love. And you begin to wonder what you ever “saw” in the other person in the first place. It was irrational at the outset. To reduce it to rationality destroys the feelings you had at the outset.

In the heat of “falling in love,” you are not critical of the other. You idealize the other. When you are “falling out of love” (which seems more like ascending than descending), it’s because you have become critical – judgmental. You dissolve what you felt by no longer playing the game that thrilled you at the outset.

Living happily ever after would depend upon continuing to “see” the other person as you did at the beginning. If you become critical or judgemental, the delusion slowly (or suddenly) implodes.

-Lee Thayer, Thought-Leader, Excerpt from And They Lived Happily Ever…Before: What Love Has To Do with It…Or Not