Sex, Attraction, Romance and Love
By; Eric Erickson, PhD
Many of us get confused when we consider such important aspects of our lives. Does the powerful attraction of a new relationship point to the presence of true compatibility with your new partner? Does the intense sexual energy present in this new relationship signal the beginnings of true love? Does the lessening of this sexual intensity over time indicate an equal lessening of emotional involvement with your partner? And, why do we find some people more attractive than others?
If you find such questions perplexing it is not your fault and you are not alone. No one ever gave you, or most of us, the answers to questions like these. In our society such answers either remain unknown to all but a few or the topics themselves are beyond many people’s comfort level. This situation causes many of us to believe that it is natural to allow these areas of our lives proceed as they will.
Unfortunately, when we hold this belief we often follow the wrong path when choosing a marriage partner or when beginning a long term relationship. When we so choose and the initial physical energy fades, once again clearing our minds, we often see that we’ve made a grave error. These mistakes can lead to great emotional pain when anyone leaves the most important decision they will ever make, which is the choice of their mate, essentially up to fate.
Before going on to discuss Sex, Attraction, Romance and Love I would like to remain on the topic of the importance of your loving relationship briefly. Your relationship is the most important “possession”, for want of a better word, which you will ever have. It can be a source of endless joy and happiness or it can bring you endless suffering and despair. The results of several recent studies indicate that there is a stronger connection between one’s level of happiness and their health than has been previously thought so the quality of your marriage might very well bring you better physical health or, if it is an unhappy one, eventually ruin your health. Your choice of a mate and the relationship you build together has the power to add joy to all of your other carefully made choices just as it has equal power to cast a pale of misery over your entire life and everything in it, including the lives of your beloved children. These are a few of the reasons why your choice of a mate and the loving relationship you build involve the most important decisions that you will make in your life, decisions that are too important to leave up to the caprices of Sex, Attraction, Romance and Love without some deeper understanding of them.
Sex, Attraction, Romance and Love, four little words that usually remain unexplored and misunderstood yet exert a profound influence over the quality of our lives, isn’t it time you become better acquainted with them?
Let’s begin our exploration by separating these words as they all do not actually belong together! When we do this our words are now grouped like this:
Sex, (Romance, Attraction) Love
You can immediately see from this grouping that romance and attraction are closely related and that the physical act of sex is also somehow linked to them. It is also clear that love is separate, for the purposes of our discussion, from the others1. For the present let’s deal with the first three and then return to Love later.
It is helpful when considering the mysteries of male / female attraction to break down this complex subject into smaller units that can then be more easily understood. These smaller units can then be placed into a series of levels so that how they affect us emotionally can become clear. To begin, let’s take two of our title words; Romance and Attraction, and combine them into a new, more descriptive term; Romantic Attraction.
Romantic Attraction is responsible for the intense physical attraction new couples feel toward one another. It is the result of purely biological processes that are “hard wired” into each of us by nature and are not indications of compatibility and likewise have nothing what so ever to do with any emotional attachment. When you fully understand and accept this you can easily see that you should never base your selection of a mate on Romantic Attraction alone. Many people unknowingly do just this and many of those make a terrible mistake, as you can now begin to understand.
Romantic Attraction often leads to sex, which is intense, frequent and often fulfilling for the new couple. While the passion of this lovemaking remains high it is difficult for either member of the new pair to think about anything else but their new “love”2 let alone consider the fact that their shared sexual bliss will soon fade away. But this initial bliss is destined, by natural design, to fade away quickly3 often leaving two people puzzled and in despair.
Romantic Attraction is perfectly natural and healthy. It is only when it is misunderstood and improperly interpreted that it causes a problem in one’s life. But this problem can, and often does, have major consequences that can last a life time.
You can plainly see from this portion of our discussion that there is great benefit to be gained from a thorough understanding of Romantic Attraction and its true place in our process of selecting our life mate. When Romantic Attraction is understood and appreciated for what it is and no more, it can then be enjoyed without becoming prematurely emotionally involved with the wrong person. Your new understanding of Romantic Attraction also adds another tool that you have to use when dating, beginning a new relationship or even when trying to improve or repair an existing one4.
Now that we’ve briefly covered Sex and Romantic Attraction let’s move on to see how “love” fits in to your relationship. To begin to understand love we will first break it into separate units or levels as we did above. In the case of “love” there are two varieties; Apparent Love and real, true Love which I will simply refer to from here forward to as Love.
With that accomplished we will begin by exploring Apparent Love which is the most common form of emotional attachment experienced by couples in this culture. Apparent Love is the emotional attachment which exists between couples who have an Average / Working Relationship (as opposed to those who have a perfect one). It is the result of the interaction of the needs, desires and insecurities of each of the couple’s Ego Structures5 and is constantly moderated and limited by each individual’s Persona6.This is why Apparent Love is often empty of the meaningful emotional fulfillment that you sought from a relationship for the majority of your adult life. This emptiness is a leading cause of the large number of failed relationships we all hear of and too many people experience first hand.
Love differs greatly from Apparent Love, for it brings with it all the passion, excitement, tenderness and security that we all seek in a relationship. It is the stuff of novels, movies and dreams that seems to elude all but a lucky few. Love is pure, it has no opposites. Hate is the opposite of Apparent Love only. Love can, in some circumstances, where a couple share a lot of positive commonality from the beginning, grow out of Apparent Love. This is how an Average / Working Relationship moves toward becoming a perfect one.
Love brings only joy, it never causes pain because it can never be lost. To understand how this can be so one has to acquire an awareness of the nature of Love. Love itself belongs to the group thought of today as being universal fundamentals. It belongs to that rare group, consisting of those pure essences from which the Universe and all that is within it sprang. These fundamentals are today thought to be; Gravity, Uncertainty and Love. Each is perfect, ever present and incorruptible. Unfortunately for the casual student this makes any thorough awareness of Love difficult to acquire. However, great reward will come to those who diligently pursue such awareness.
Now you can see why our discussion of Love will be a brief one here (for a thorough discussion of all of these and many other topics pertaining to relationships visit my web site www.perfectcoupleproductions.com where you will find everything you need to find or to build the happiness you deserve). However, you can take away from our discussion the notion that Love is always with you regardless of your current circumstances. If you wish to see this Love all you have to do is to look into a mirror. If you do not see love there then one or more issues within your Ego Structure are blocking your perception, for Love is there if you look deeply for it. You can also take away from our discussion today the realization that it is both possible to use your new understanding to choose your next mate wisely or if you are already in a less than satisfactory relationship you now know that there are things that you and your mate can do together to improve or repair your relationship. Lastly, you now have an indication that Love is always with you and can and will sometimes develop between even the most unlikely of couples, for this is the true nature of the universe.
- Love can also be linked with sexuality. This is especially apparent in happy relationships where the positive emotional bond between the couple adds fuel to their physical fire causing it to burn brightly for many years while that of lesser couples fades quickly to nothingness.
- I am using the word love in quotation marks to separate the common meaning of the word from its true meaning which we will cover later. Even before I do so however you can now see that a couple experiencing Romantic Attraction is merely experiencing biology and not Love, which is something else entirely.
- There are exceptions to this, such as when two people who are totally right for each other meet and form a relationship. But this is a topic for another of these discussions.
- The use of this understanding to improve or repair an existing relationship is also a topic for another discussion.
- The Ego Structure is most commonly described by Western Psychology as consisting of two parts that we have little, if any, awareness of; the Superego and the id along with a third part that we are aware of; the Ego. In concert, these three components form the Ego Structure and affect our lives.
- One’s Persona is best thought of as a two way barrier or shield that presents others with an idealized picture of us as we internally see ourselves, while at the same time changes our perception of other’s words and reactions so that they will more closely match our self perceptions. We all have a Persona to one degree or another and it usually limits the degree of true emotional closeness that we can achieve with our partner.