How Love Ruins a Happy Marriage.

Does romantic love have a place in a modern relationship or are we better off with a loveless marriage?

Birds do it, bees do it and companies all over the world make millions of dollars exploiting it. I’m not talking about bumping uglies; I’m talking about romantic love.

You can’t walk past a magazine stand without seeing the tabloids gushing over people falling in love, replacing an old love or being crippled by loves demise.

New romances keep us to glued trashy TV, reading tabloids and engaged in the latest gossip just to see if the boy gets the girl to return his affection. So many aspects of our culture are rooted in romantic love, but is it really that important to have in our long-term committed relationships?

Could romantic love and the pursuit of undying romantic love actually hurt our chances of living happily ever after?

George Bernard Shaw colorfully pokes at our fixation for romance in a marriage when he remarks that two people come together “under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions. They are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

Shaw has a point and his colorful way of expressing it makes us chuckle at this impractical cultural ideal that we as a whole treasure so deeply. Marrying for love or expecting love to be a major influence on the decision to marry is a relatively new phenomenon.

In her book, Marriage, A History, Stephanie Coontz highlights how throughout time many, if not most, societies regarded marring for love as an inconceivable notion that threatened the fiber of a civilized culture.

Historically, marriage has most wildly been used as a means to cultivate wealth, stabilize disputing nations and build unity between differing families or clans. For most of time basing an important decision, such as marriage, on something as frivolous, temperamental and fickle as romantic love would have been just as silly as electing a President based on his good looks (hmm… does the suit make the man?).

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in his book How to Be Compassionate, speaks of how lust can be deceptive and misleading. He believes lust can influence an individual to act and make decisions that they would otherwise find inappropriate. Lust and romantic love have away of air brushing unflattering features and accepting distasteful behavior that we would otherwise not tolerate.

It’s not until this temporary period of lust and romantic love subsides that we are able to see another’s flaws threw more objective eyes. What did I ever see in that person, is something most of us can say when looking back at past lovers after the lust is gone.

When the dust of lust and romantic love settles there is a chance that we will be left with something much more stable: attachment.

I would argue that attachment and compassion for one’s long term partner is much more important than the romantic love experienced at the beginning of many relationships. Compassion for one’s partner runs deeper than lust and romantic love and lacks the volatility.

As much as we would like to deny it- romantic love does ebb and flow in a relationship. If your marriage is based on romantic love, during times that it wanes so will your satisfaction with your relationship. Compassion, by comparison, offers more stability to a union.

When we feel compassion for our partner, rough spots they bring to the relationship become more manageable. We begin to accept them as they are without conditions or limitations, and our relationships reach a new level of intimacy.