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Healthy Relationships - Part 6 - Romantic Love

© Robert Burney

"We learned about life as children and it is necessary to change the way we intellectually view life in order to stop being the victim of the old tapes. By looking at, becoming conscious of, our attitudes, definitions, and perspectives, we can start discerning what works for us and what does not work. We can then start making choices about whether our intellectual view of life is serving us - or if it is setting us up to be victims because we are expecting life to be something which it is not." Codependence:The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney

Consciousness raising is a process of enlarging the intellectual paradigm which we base our relationship with life upon. As I have stated previously in this series, our beliefs, attitudes, and definitions determine our expectations and perspectives - which in turn dictate our emotional relationships to everything and everyone in our environment. And when I say everything, I am not just talking about objects. Everything includes ideas, concepts, opinions, etc.

In order to have healthier romantic relationships it is very important to examine our concept of romantic love. If we do not have a healthy concept - realistic definitions and beliefs about - romantic love, then we do not have much chance of having a healthy relationship. If our concept of romance is based on the fairy tales and books, songs and movies, from our childhoods, then we are set up to be disappointed in our romantic relationships.

Read the quotation above and substitute 'love' everywhere it says 'life' and you might better understand why you have felt like a victim in romantic relationships. We were set up to be victims in romance because we were taught that it is a magical paradise where we will have all of our needs met - and live Happily-ever-after. We were taught that getting the romance was the goal and that after that everything was smooth sailing.

Obviously that is not how it works in reality.

It is part of the dysfunctional nature of society that we are set up to believe that love, and life, are something other than what we are led to expect them to be. It is also part of the dysfunctional nature of society - and of civilization as we have inherited it - that we react to not having our expectations met by blaming. We blame the other person, or we blame ourselves. And even underneath the blame we are pointing toward the other person, is the feeling deep inside of us that it is all our fault. That there is something unworthy and unlovable, something defective about who we are at our core. Usually, the louder and more emphatically we blame the other is a measure of how much shame we feel about ourselves deep within.