Do You Need A Love Conract?

This is page 4 in a series… Click here to start from the beginning – Are You Afraid To Fall In Love?

You will have realized by now that married folks, not less than single ones, can be love – cowards. Many of them had just courage enough to get married, but have never since dared love each other as much as they would have if their fears hat let them.

They’re afraid that if they love each other too much, they’ll be putting themselves at risk of being taken advantage of. I know married people who seem able to give their love to each other only “C.O.D.” and who refuse to give it freely… or a least, refuse to show how much they love the other person… at the slightest sign that they may not be “paid back in full” and hopefully with interest.

Let’s look a little closer at the basis of the perceived
dangers that love is supposed to involve.

To begin with, when we talk of trusting other people, we often set up conditions which no one… not even ourselves… could meet. Once more there’s a lesson to be learned from business. If you’d made a contract with a man which turned out to be greatly to his disadvantage, you might trust him to fulfill it, even though it had some loopholes, in order to protect himself.

But you certainly could not expect him to do more than it required of him – and still less to continue it in force any longer than he had to. Except… if he is honorable,  he would only keep on doing business with you as long as he made a profit.

Why would you expect a person to act differently in the case of a love contract? Why, in other words, should anybody go on loving you unless your love brings him a profit in the form of happiness and satisfaction?

Suppose you’re a woman. If you let yourself get run down in the looks department so that you’re no longer attractive; if you won’t take the time to speak pleasantly, or show interest in things that interest your husband; if you give him the impression that all he is good for is paying the bills – he can’t go on loving you as much as ever, no matter how honorable he is or how firmly he intended to keep his vows.

He may never leave you or cheat on you, but his love will eventually grow less and less with time.

And… the rules work both ways.

If you are a man, your wife can’t go on thinking you are so wonderful because she has your name and has been taught to be a good wife. The way she will feel about you must depend on the way you treat her.

You can’t mistreat her or neglect her without taking the chance that her love will dwindle.  She might even learn to hate you.  Happy memories may keep love alive for a while, but it can’t survive in the long run with every day poor behavior.

That’s the plain truth about love, in marriage or not.

So if what we mean when we talk about finding some one we can trust forever is a person who will go on loving us without out having to do anything that is beyond human nature. We are trying, though we may not know it, to get something for nothing… to find some one who will love us in the unconditional, unselfish way our parents did when we were young.

It’s true… that nobody expects a baby to do anything to earn love, because he is helpless; but we grow up and we are not helpless, so why should any one give us love with no return on the investment? No one will… once they have realized the nature of the bargain.

You must realize that the hope of getting love for nothing does not prove that we are mean and selfish… just that we are still childish.  Many of us hate to admit it… but deep down in our hearts, we may feel that we are unworthy to be loved for ourselves, and that no one could love us. The feelings of this unworthiness may be so deep that the truest love we could find… still would not make us feel worthy. This unworthiness may have started in childhood, when our character is being shaped.

Let’s get back to Jennifer and try to help her out of her dilemma.

Click here to read the next chapter: Unworthy For Love