This article was originally published on Skit Hub
You might have heard of John Lenon and his prominent track “All you need is love”. What you might not know is the fact that he beat both of his wives, abandoned one of his children and verbally abused his gay Jewish manager with homophobic and anti-semitic slurs.
35 years down the lane, Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails wrote a song called “Love is not enough”. Another interesting thing about this man was that he married one woman, had two children with her, and then cancelled entire albums and tours so that he could stay home and be a good husband and father.
John Lenon
What could be deduced from these two stories? One thing for sure is that one of this person had no idea of what love is, and one of them had a clear idea of what love stands for. The funny thing is the way they idealized it.
And it’s not only limited to them. It applies to each one of us too. We see love as some straight forward way to cure all our problems, a way to infinite happiness, and for most of us, it’s a goal we try to achieve at any cost. In lieu of all these expectations and desires, we forget about everything else, get lost deeply in love, get our hearts broken and blame love for all the problems. We forget every other fundamental value like respect, commitment, humility in search for a final ground called love. And this is exactly not how a relationship is driven.
Your passionate love is not enough to sustain a relationship!
We all know how it starts. A person falls in love, participates in some wild and passionate love making, forgets the world while being completely lost in love and then reality starts to kick in. Your ever increasing expectations can not be matched now. You now feel love is worthless which sucks away all of your happiness. And this is where we get it all wrong. For a relationship to sustain, you need passionate love, but there are countless other things to care about too.
Love doesn’t necessarily mean you are compatible:
Just because you fall in love with someone, doesn’t mean they are compatible with you. We all know how easy it is to fall in love, all it requires are a bunch of hormones kicking on and well, you are on the right path. Compatibility, on the other hand, assures two people are actually made for one another when they can make decisions and share everything. It’s possible to fall in love with somebody who doesn’t treat us well, who makes us feel worse about ourselves, who doesn’t hold the same respect for us as we do for them, or who has such a dysfunctional life themselves that they threaten to bring us down with them. This is one thing we should be looking for in a relationship other than love. Because, in the end, good relationship matters, not your passionate love making.
We should understand that relationship is about compromises:
This is another thing we always take for granted. We always dream of love being like a fairy tale where there would always be rainbows and unicorns. And that’s far from reality. The relationship is about connecting two people. Two different people. No matter, how compatible or similar those two are, there would always be differences and there would be sacrifices. If your definition of relationship talks about maintaining only your personal identity, you could not be more wrong. Whenever there are two people involved, there will always be compromises and once you embrace those, your relationship would flourish. Consider, for example, a society. You live in a society of say, 100 people who have set some rules and marks which are meant to be followed. If you don’t, you might be expelled from it. What makes you think, the same case doesn’t exist for a relationship? Agreed, there should always be a line to your compromises but expecting it to be completely free from it would be your mistake and roadmap to a failed relationship.
We all know love is a wonderful experience. And we all know how love changes lives. Love is necessary and love is great. But love is not enough to sustain a relationship.
