Belives of Love

[SamIam]

Love exists. I don't know about "true" love, though. A really good book on this is "Keeping the Love You Find: A Guide for Singles" by Harville Hendrix.

In the book Hendrix postulates that we pick romantic partners because they present us with the same situations that our care-givers did when we were children. So a woman who had a father who was always gone on business will be strongly attracted to emotionally unavailable men. A man whose mother was an alcoholic will be attracted to women with addiction problems. We try to resolve our childhood issues through our adult choices of romantic partners. The more dysfunctional our childhoods, the more dysfunctional our adult choses will be. We do not consciously do this, but we do it all the same.

When I look back on the men I have fallen the most heavily for this rings true for me. My father was an alcoholic, and he was often away from home due to his career in the military. As an adult I fell madly in love with men who had serious emotional problems that ensured they were unable to maintain a marriage or love relationship for the long term.

The one exception to this was the man I stayed married to for 20 years. I did not feel that mad, head-over heels love for him. Instead, I picked him consciously because I was so battered emotionally by the bad boys I had been involved with before. He was a stable, good man. I eventually divorced him in favor of another "bad boy."

I would just as soon not fall in love again because I always fall for an impossible man. If I ever do form another partnership, it will be on the basis of friendship and respect. Some other woman can have the Hell's Angel who makes her heart go pitty pat.