Cheated In Love

This is part 3 in a series… click here for part 1 – Afraid To Fall In Love

But… love also means the risk of being cheated… the person you love may take advantage of the power they have over you. They may exploit you or “play you”. Here again, lack of self-confidence makes us vulnerable to the danger of this happening to us.

The truth is, however, than in love, no less than in business, the risks are worth it. It is commonly agreed that business rests on credit… that is, on the general assumption that the person who contracts an obligation will want, and manage, to meet it will it comes due.

The average business man who is unwilling to give credit will soon find he has no business. And… if those who run a business exercises caution, his chances of being “stuck” are so small that the extra profits he makes by extending credit will outweigh the small percentage of deadbeats.

I can see no reason why we cannot keep our “losses” in the field of friendship and love down to a figure just as negligible if we can learn to treat people in a sane and realistic manner. And it is as true of love and friendship as of business that the person who trusts nobody cuts himself off from many dividends of good will.

Such a person might as well live on a desert island so far as the fun he can get out of life is concerned. And what’s worse: the more afraid of being cheated we are, the more we unconsciously provoke the very sort of treatment that we fear.

The psychologist is frequently accused of being pessimistic about human nature, and he does sometimes break down cherished illusions. But psychology has not shown human beings to be hostile to each other by nature. On the contrary, a man’s or woman’s deepest instinct is to love, and make friends, and hostility does not come into being except when some sort of fear is aroused.

Therefore if you disarm other people’s fears by showing good will toward them, all except those whose minds are seriously warped will respond with good will towards you. And besides that, since they want your good opinion, (if they think that they can get it without too much effort) most people who feel that you regard them as trustworthy will try pretty hard to make you retain that opinion of them.

This applies particularly between sweethearts, or husbands and wives. The man who knows his wife trusts him is a lot less likely to be untrue to her than the one who feels that she is keeping an eye on him every minute of the day.

Bu that isn’t the whole story. A distrustful attitude on our part kills other people’s desire to be trustworthy because of the way it makes us act towards them before thy have had a chance to give us real grounds for suspicion. For although we do not realize it, the way we treat other people is based much more on how we expect them to act than how they do act.

If say… Mary expects her husband John, to “double-cross” her the first chance he gets, that expectation creates in her mind a picture of John as a double-crosser which will make her bitter and resentful before he has done a thing to justify such feelings.

Let’s say they are going to a party and Mary has made up her mind in advance that John will probably humiliate her by paying too much attention to the first good looking woman he meets. Even before they get to the party, Mary’s voice has begun to take on an acid tone… she would have to be a fantastic actress to prevent this because already she is neglected and humiliated in her own mind.

Then if John does meet a women whom he finds attractive, at least part of the attraction will be that her manner is so different from Mary’s. Since she has no grudge against him, she can be as charming as she pleases, and John scarcely can help noticing how much more pleasant she is than Mary.

If, as a result, he shows much more pleasure in her company than he does in his wife’s, Mary will be sure she was justified in her suspicions, and will tell all her friends that now she knows that no man can be trusted.

You will have realized by now that married folks, no less than single ones, can be love-cowards!

Click here to read more of this story- Do you need a Love Contract?