Counselling Central

I was having Thai Green Curry with a friend earlier when she began to ponder the nature of love, and why it was she couldn’t find a partner who ticked all of her boxes. As a counselling psychologist I often find myself making the mistake of describing love and commitment in clinical terms, such as “it’s all about neuro-transmitters”. But I decided tonight to dispense with the psycho-babble and describe my thoughts on love in a slightly different way.

Romantic love is an antiquated and outmoded fiction. It was invented by Victorian poets and writers in order to console the masses, and themselves, on lonely nights, but it is still an ideal deeply embedded in our culture. Perhaps this is one reason why so many relationships fail. So what other types of love are there? Let’s think about ego-love and ego-less love.

Ego love is as my friend described this evening. We have an image of our perfect partner; their body shape, the colour of their eyes, their personality, their emotional and financial stability to name but a few. We imagine what this archetypal person (okay, so I couldn’t resist throwing in some Carl Jung) will bring to our lives, how they will impact on our happiness and how they will enrich our lives. Ego Love is a reflection of the needs, wants, and desires of the lover, not the loved. It rests upon the mistaken premise that our fulfillment can be found in another. It’s about us and not them, and it leads to disillusionment, disappointment and, ultimately, resentment; the sentiments that, in the end, unravel a relationship.

Ego-less love is about true passion, true love. It’s not about temporary infatuation, sex or turning somebody into a person who we imagine will meet our needs. It’s about the subtle intimacies that two people share – the words unspoken, the needs understood, the delicate understandings, the comfortable silences. It’s about the experience of another human being as a perfect reflection and complement to ourselves; when something seemingly lost to us returns – or maybe finds us for the first time – in a single moment of understanding. Ego-less love is about putting the needs, wants and desires of another person before our own, whatever the risk to our own emotional well being.

When described in these terms there is a risk that ego-less love begins to sound like romantic love, doesn’t it? But think about it, ego-love leads to histrionics, pain and disappointment because nobody can live up to our high expectations. Ego-less love on the other hand, agreeing to put somebody else first, is about unselfishness, unadulterated by history, neurosis, baggage or regret. How cool is that?