A person doesn’t need a reason to fall in love. The experience itself is reason enough. BARBARA DE ANGELIS, AGE 17 JOURNAL ENTRY
When I was seventeen and hopelessly romantic, I lived in a philosophical world of idealism and fantasy. The year was 1968. My favorite book was The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, my favorite song ‘The Impossible Dream’ from the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha. I used to listen to that song ten times a day because it helped me believe anything was possible; I believed in people; I believed in the hope of world peace. And most of all, I believed in love, To me, falling in love had to be the highest human experience there was. As you can see from the above quote, I didn’t really care about whether a relationship was good or bad, whether the person was right for me or not. I was fascinated with the mere idea of being in love.
Many years and many lessons later, I have learned that what should be the joy of falling in love can quickly turn into sorrow if you are falling in love for the wrong reasons. Can there be wrong reasons for falling in love? In spite of what I thought at seventeen, the answer is yes.
GETTING INVOLVED WITH SOMEONE FOR THE WRONG REASONS IS ONE OF THE WAYS IN WHICH WE CREATE UNHEALTHY AND UNFULFILLING RELATIONSHIPS.
There are many reasons why people decide to have relationships other than being in love. This chapter talks about seven wrong reasons to have a relationship. As you read each one, ask yourself if you’ve made one or more of these mistakes in your past, or if you’re making them in your life even now. The more of these patterns you recognize, the more you’ll understand why some of your past relationships caused you so much pain and disappointment, and the more you’ll be able to avoid recreating these patterns in your future relationships.
SEVEN WRONG REASONS TO BE IN A RELATIONSHIP:
1. Pressure (age, family, friends, etc.)
2. Loneliness and desperation
3. Sexual hunger
4. Distraction from your own life
5. To avoid growing up
6. Guilt
7. To fill up your emotional or spiritual emptiness
Wrong Reason 1
Pressure
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably already know about pressure. Pressure is the influence that your friends, family, society, and your own programming place upon you that gives the message, ‘You should be in a relationship, and if you’re not, something is wrong with you.’ When we feel pressured by those outside influences or our own internal ones, we may choose to get involved in relationships we normally would not choose.
Here are some of the different kinds of pressure people commonly experience.
AGE PRESSURE
This is age pressure—the attitude that if you are over a certain age and not seriously involved with someone, you aren’t ‘normal.’ Of course, just what that age is varies from person to person. Whether you’re conscious of it or not, you probably have an age by which you think you should be married, or in a permanent relationship. That number might have come from things your family talked about when you were growing up, or what ages your older brothers and sisters were when they got married, or just an image of at what age a person is really grown up.
To understand the origins of age pressure, we need to go back thousands of years in history. The economic and physical survival of a family was based on how many children there were. Sons could help with hunting, farming, and protecting the family against enemies. Daughters could help with chores and be valuable assets if desired by other males for mates. The sooner a young man or woman married and started his or her own family, the better. It strengthened the family group, or clan, by adding to their number and, in families who owned property, guaranteed that there would be inheritors to keep what the ancestors accumulated. And remember, life expectancy was less than half of what ours is now in the twentieth century. So a girl of fourteen might have had only another twenty or, at most, thirty years left to live. By the time she was in her twenties, she was middle-aged! Therefore it was natural for her family to want her married in her early teens, so she could start having children right away.
Although we’ve come a long way from those ancient times, we are still influenced by some of the thinking our forebears lived by. So when your Aunt Mabel pulls you aside at Thanksgiving dinner and says, ‘Sweetheart, I know it’s not my business, but why don’t you find a nice guy and settle down?’ she is voicing a sentiment that has its roots in historical realities.
Whether the pressure comes from your family, your friends, or from your own sense of urgency, the result is the same. You may compromise your standards for an acceptable partner just to have a relationship with someone.
ROSEANN’S HIGH-SCHOOL REUNION TRAUMA
RoseAnn had just turned twenty-eight when she received an invitation to her ten-year high-school reunion. ‘That’s when the impact of being single really hit me,’ she explained. ‘I’d been wanting to find someone special for a long time, but I was so busy starting my own business that I guess I didn’t stop to think about how I was feeling. When I opened up that invitation and thought of seeing all of my old friends, I got so depressed. I had these fantasies of showing up at the hotel, greeted by all of my girlfriends and their husbands carrying piles of baby pictures, and me the only unmarried one there.’
‘That’s when I met Sandy. A friend introduced us, and I didn’t really think he was my type, but decided to give him a chance. Before I knew what happened, we were in a relationship. Looking back, I can see that from the beginning, there were big problems. I kept finding things wrong with Sandy, and wanting to improve him. I didn’t like his taste in lots of things—clothes, food, movies. Even the way he kissed bugged me. But I found myself tolerating all of this stuff and telling everyone how happy I was.
‘Five months after the reunion, I woke up and admitted to myself that I didn’t want to