All You Need is Love and Then Some

It takes more than love to make a relationship work. The older I grow, the more I realize I have been lied to. All those Mills & Boon romantic novels I read as a teenager could not have in any way prepared me for real life experiences of relationships. It dawned on me that I was deceived by Hollywood as well, happily ever after is not always so happy after couples walk off the isle.  Oh don’t get me started on all those love songs, I’m so sick of them. They in no way encompass the ups and downs and intricacies of relationships. In short, all they describe as love does not make a relationship work! Love and romance work well in the imaginary space created by writers and producers, but the real world is nothing like we read in novels.

In the real world, you need more than love to make a relationship successful. This is what romance novels and movies do not tell us. It takes more than falling in love to sustain a marriage. Love, the kind of love described in books and movies is not enough to make a relationship flourish. If all we truly need is love, then 50% of marriages will not end in divorce. Love could not be the only recipe for the other 50% that seem to be doing fine. Yes love is important, but it takes more than love or rather it takes more than the emotion of love to make a marriage work.

A successful marriage requires knowledge, knowing how to live with people, knowing the differences between a man and a woman, knowing how to deal with finances, knowing how to communicate, knowing when to shut up and knowing when to speak, knowing how to be self-controlled, knowing how to express yourself, knowing how to read people, etc. These seemingly little things breaks marriages, not lack of love. An abusive man may still claim to love his wife. It could be very well true that he feels those emotions for her. He could still “love” her, but lack the ability to control his anger. A person  who cheats on his spouse could very much still “love” the spouse, but lack the ability to control his sexual appetites. Infidelity, abuse, and lack of financial management have broken homes, this is not because the couples do not love each other, but because they lack the proper knowledge of what makes a marriage work.

People need to stop going into marriage because they fell in love. Situations will arise that are stronger than that feeling, then what happens? You could give yourself a fighting chance by acquiring knowledge. I wish there was a school for love and marriage because every single person needs to enroll and learn.

I mentioned in an earlier post that “irreconcilable differences” has become such a cliché for couples getting a divorce these days. Well if only they knew that in addition to falling in love, they also need to connect emotionally, maybe they wouldn’t have gone into the marriage in the first place.  In addition to falling in love, you need deep emotional connection, this entails that you connect romantically, intellectually, socially, behaviorally, financially, and economically.

There is what is called emotional intelligence (EI). This is the backbone of all you will ever achieve as a person. If there is low EI then there is no capacity and therefore nothing to fill, which results in suboptimal output. “Suboptimal” refers to something less than the highest standard. Your marriage will be less than the highest standard if you lack emotional intelligence. While some are born with enviable EI, most is learned (acquired). So connecting in all the above mentioned ways requires intelligence. Or put differently, knowledge! We need to acquire the knowledge of what marriage entails and how to make it succeed.

It is not wise to want to cook a meal without first counting the cost and making sure you have the right ingredients, enough ingredients or enough money to buy the ingredients required. If you go ahead and prepare it, the dish will end up coming out as something entirely different from the idea you had in mind and once it’s done, there may be nothing you can do to reverse it. You may choose to throw it away and start all over again, or you may choose to eat it like that, or you may choose to add some other ingredients to make it better. This is what a marriage is like, it’s like a dish. It’s never going to come out perfectly until you have the right ingredient and until you know how to apply the right ingredient to make it superb.

There are no perfect marriages because there are no perfect people. However, there are great and successful marriages, and the key ingredient is knowledge.