S2 EP249 – Enduring Love: Can Love REALLY Last a Lifetime?

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. In our society, we don’t often see true love lasting a lifetime, but I’ve been privileged to grow up with a couple whose love lasted for a very long lifetime.

I grew up next door to my parents’ best friends, and they were like second parents to me. I could go to Betty with my problems, and she would listen to me and always have wise words for me. Betty was always there for me when I needed her. As an only child, I was blessed to live next door to their children so that I had children to play with.

In 2017, my dear second parents Betty and Morrie Markoff were the oldest living married couple in the US, and you can read about them in an article written at that time. There is a reference to the article at the end of the transcription of this podcast.

Betty was 100 and Morrie was 103, and they had been married for 78 years. They were still sharp, still lived on their own – and still loved each other! The secret? True caring about seeing the best in each other and supporting each other’s highest good.

I grew up watching them fight and make up and laugh together and show genuine affection – things I didn’t see with my own parents.

The last time I was in Los Angeles, I visited with them and was deeply moved by their continued love for each other, as well as by the clarity of their minds. They were amazing!

Betty lived to 103 years old, and after she died Morrie wrote her daily love letters. Morrie lived to 110 and died this year, the oldest man in the US, and never experienced cognitive decline. He donated his brain to science and scientists are excited to learn why he lived so long and why there was no cognitive decline.

Morrie had his first art show at 100 and wrote his memoir at 103. I loved reading this and learning things about my second parents that I never knew. In it he stated that he knew the moment he met Betty that she was the right one for him, and this never changed. One of the things I learned about him in reading his memoir is that he learned to listen to himself and take care of himself from the age of 6, because he was essentially on his own from that age on. 

My client Serena asked me: “With so many people in the world, I don’t believe there is just one person for everyone, so how do you know when you have ‘the right one’? A lot of articles say to have realistic expectations that romantic love does not last, so how do you know the difference between being out of this stage or whether you’ve fallen out of love? Can love last a lifetime, and what are some of the things one can do in a relationship to keep the love alive?” 

I agree that there isn’t just one person for each of us. Learning to know who is right for us is a process of becoming the right person for ourselves first. The more you learn to see, value and love yourself, the more easily you can discern who is right for you, which I think somehow Morrie and Betty were able to do before they married.

When you meet someone you are physically attracted to and with whom you feel an emotional connection, ask yourself these questions:

• Is this person open to learning about themselves and about me? Being open to learning about loving themselves and you is the most important quality to look for – once you are also open to learning.
• Are they able to stay open during conflict, or eventually open, or do they just get angry, righteous, blaming, shut down and withdrawn or resistant?
  
• Are they truly caring or are they giving themselves up to please me and control me? Are they ‘nice’ or are they truly loving?
  
• Are they interested in what interests me, or are they self-absorbed?
  
• Do we have similar values concerning religion, spirituality, money, child-raising, animals, the environment, and politics?
  
• Does their lifestyle indicate a sense of taking responsibility for loving themselves emotionally, physically, financially, relationally, organizationally and spiritually?
  
• Do they operate from honesty and integrity?
  
• Am I bored with them, or do I look forward to spending time with them?
  
• Do we feel inspired by each other?
  

Of course, it takes time to get to know someone, so I always recommend that people refrain from having sex too soon, as this can cloud your intuition about this person. One of the most important things in choosing the right person is learning to trust yourself regarding what you feel and experience with this person, and you might bypass your inner knowing if you get too involved too fast.

Once you are in a relationship, you want to do all you can to keep the love alive. As you can see from my dear friends who had been married for 78 years, love CAN last a lifetime. We keep love alive when we learn to stay open to learning about ourselves and about each other, especially in conflict, and are devoted to deeply valuing our own and each other’s soul essence, as well as accepting each other’s wounded self with all our human flaws. We all have a wounded self, and no one likes anyone’s wounded self, but for a relationship to thrive, we need to be able to accept and tolerate each other’s wounded self, helping each other through our intent to learn to heal this programmed aspect of ourselves and each other. 

We keep love alive when we choose to be kind, caring, tolerant and respectful of each other, even when we are triggered by the other’s unloving behavior. We keep love alive when we focus on the wonderful essence qualities of our partner – the qualities we fell in love with – rather than focusing on their ego wounded self and coming from our ego wounded self.

It’s a tall order to keep love alive, but what is actually more important than learning to love ourselves so that we can deeply share our love with our beloved?

It was Joan’s first Skype session with me, but it didn’t take long before the tears began to stream down her cheeks. “I’m married to the man of my dreams, but I’m miserable,” she said, reaching a hand up to wipe away her tears. “We were so in love and now things are falling apart. We are fighting and distant much of the time. I love Justin and I don’t want to lose him, but I don’t know what to do. I don’t know why this is happening. I seem to be getting angrier and angrier, and he is getting more and more distant.”

“What are you angry about?” I inquired.

“Justin keeps pulling away from me. He’s working longer and longer hours. But even on the weekends when he is home, he just seems to be distant. He’s either watching TV, playing video games, or in the garage working in his workshop. When I try to talk with him about it, he shuts down even more. We can’t talk at all anymore.

Like Joan and Justin, many couples are stuck in a dysfunctional relationship system, wondering what happened to the love and passion they had at the beginning of their relationship. 

As I’ve often said, there are two major fears that may be undermining your relationship with your partner:

• Fear of rejection: the loss of another’s love through anger, judgment, emotional withdrawal, physical withdrawal, or death.
  
• Fear of engulfment: the loss of self through being controlled, consumed, invaded, suffocated, dominated, and swallowed up by another’s controlling behavior.
  

Until these fears are healed, you will likely react defensively whenever they are triggered. Joan reacted by getting angry when her fears of rejection were activated, while Justin withdrew when his fears of engulfment were triggered. You might react in different defensive ways, but the result will be the same – your reactive behavior coming from your fears of rejection and engulfment will trigger your partner’s fears of rejection and engulfment. Now both of you are acting out of fear. Together you have created an unsafe space where love and intimacy gradually erode.

Most of us have not learned to stay open when our fears of being rejected, abandoned, engulfed, or controlled are triggered. If, when these fears are activated, you focus on who is at fault or who started it, you perpetuate the problems. Blaming your partner for your fears, as well as for your own reactive, unloving behavior, makes the relationship feel unsafe.

You both end up feeling badly, each believing that your pain is the result of your partner’s behavior. You feel victimized, helpless, stuck, and disconnected from your partner. You desperately want your partner to see what he or she is doing that you believe is causing your pain. You believe that if only your partner understands this, he or she will change – and you exhaust yourself trying to figure out how to make your partner understand.

Over time, passion dries up. Superficiality, boredom, fighting, and apathy take its place.

The dual fears of losing the other through rejection and losing yourself through being swallowed up by the other are the underlying cause of unloving, reactive behavior. These fears are deeply rooted. They cannot be healed or overcome by getting someone else’s love. On the contrary, you must heal these fears before you can share love – give and receive love – with your partner.

The key to doing this is learning how to create a sense of inner safety where you can work with and heal your fears of rejection and engulfment through developing your loving adult. Learning and practicing Inner Bonding creates and maintains the inner safety you need to open to learning rather than be reactive. It’s your reactivity that erodes the safety and connection within the relationship. And when you are doing your inner work to achieved inner safety and inner strength, then you can create a loving relationship.

Through practicing Inner Bonding, Joan gradually learned to stop attacking Justin and to take loving care of herself whenever her fears of rejection were triggered. She learned to create inner safety when she felt threatened rather than trying to get Justin to make her feel safe. When she stopped trying to control Justin with her anger, Justin gradually started to want to spend more time with her.

You can do this too. In fact, any two people who are willing to learn to create their own inner sense of safety can also learn to create a loving relationship where their intimacy and passion will flourish, and their love will endure. Even if your partner is not interested in learning Inner Bonding with you, you can do much to heal your relationship system. 

The time to leave a marriage is if there is physical abuse or severe emotional abuse, such as gaslighting from narcissistic abuse. But too often, people leave a marriage, other than due to these abusive situations, before doing their inner work. They believe that their next relationship will be better. But is that actually true? 

According to research by Jennifer Baker, of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri, while 50% of first marriages end in divorce, 67% of second marriages and 73% of third marriages end in divorce.

Is this surprising to you?

In my experience, most people who end their marriages have not learned what they need to learn, so they take their same fears and insecurities, and their resulting controlling and self-abandoning behaviors with them into their second and third marriages. Of course, eventually they create the same or similar relationship system.

Most people who leave marriages believe that the problem is mostly their partner. But as I’ve so often said, relationships are systems, with both people participating in the system. If you are not aware of the overt and subtle ways you control and abandon yourself in your relationship, then you will take all your wounded behaviors with you into your next relationship.

The thing is, we keep attracting the same kind of person, as long as we are the same kind of person. 

I’ve long maintained that leaving a marriage before you have dealt with your own controlling and self-abandoning behaviors is often a waste of time (unless of course you are in physical or emotional danger), and the research on marriage proves this to be true. If partners were devoted to healing their wounded selves, the divorce statistics would go way down.

The real issue behind these statistics is that self-abandonment leads to trying to control your partner into giving you the attention and approval you are not giving to yourself. There is little possibility of sharing love, fun, and passion with your partner when your intent is to have control over getting love and to avoid both the pain of your own self-abandonment, and the inevitable loneliness and heartache that exist in all relationships to varying degrees. Until your intent changes from controlling and avoiding pain to learning to love yourself and sharing your love with your partner, you will keep creating the same relationship dynamics over and over.

Seth consulted with me because the love of his life – the woman he thought he would spend the rest of his life with, left him after an intense six-month courtship. Both Seth and Lynne had been married before. In fact, Lynne had been married three times before. In their early 60s, their relationship seemed made in heaven. They could laugh and play together, and the chemistry between them was intense.

Lynne was a giver, who had learned to give everything in relationships – and would then feel engulfed and trapped. Seth was a taker, and was so enthralled by Lynne’s giving that it didn’t take him long to completely abandon responsibility for his feelings and wellbeing, making Lynne responsible for him.

Lynne, not knowing how to articulate her feelings of engulfment, or how to take loving care of herself in the face of Seth’s pull on her, abruptly ended the relationship. That’s when Seth called me.

The point here is that neither Seth nor Lynne had done their healing work. Both were abandoning themselves and, in different ways, trying to have control over getting love and avoiding pain. Their relationship was fantastic at the beginning, before their wounded selves got triggered. It’s sad that Lynne wasn’t willing to work on her end of the relationship system, and it’s hopeful that Seth, in working on his, will heal enough so that he won’t repeat this system again.

Do love and marriage really go together like a horse and carriage? For some they do but for many they don’t.

At the beginning of most relationships that eventually lead to marriage, the couple falls in love, and they believe that this love will last forever. These two people are so open with each other and their love flows so freely that they can’t imagine that their love may not last.

Yet, after the 3 to 6 month honeymoon period that most people have at the beginning of a new relationship, many people start to experience problems in their relationship. They may marry anyway, hoping marriage will solve these problems, only to find that their problems may get worse.

Unless you and your spouse both grew up with parents who knew how to take responsibility for their own feelings, you have never had a role model of what this looks like in a primary relationship.

The chances are you entered your marriage with expectations of how your partner was going to make you happy, take away your loneliness, fill your emptiness, and give you a sense of safety and a sense of self-worth. The beginning of your relationship might have felt good because you each tried to do this for the other.

The flaw here is that someone else can’t do this for you, no matter how much they might want to. Happiness and inner fulfillment come mainly from how you treat yourself and others, not just from how others treat you. Certainly it feels wonderful to feel loved, valued and respected, but if you are not valuing, loving and respecting yourself, you will soon feel that your spouse is not meeting your needs.

For example, if you are a person who is self-critical, and if you ignore your own feelings and do not take responsibility for them, but instead blame others for them, then no matter how loving your partner is to you, you will not feel happy or loved.

Most people are on good behavior at the beginning of a relationship, trying hard to please each other. But this can’t last when you are not taking responsibility for yourself. Invariably, no matter how hard you or your partner try to please each other, neither of you will feel loved when you are not taking responsibility for your own feelings of pain, joy, happiness, self-worth, and inner peace.

Once your marriage starts to experience problems, this is a wonderful opportunity for both of you to do the Inner Bonding work you might not have known you needed to do before getting married.

When two people learn how to take responsibility for their own feelings and stop making their spouse responsible for their pain and joy, and they learn to develop their loving adult and connect with their higher source of love, they become filled up with love. Only when you are bringing love into yourself do you have love to share with your partner. If you are trying to love your partner without loving yourself, you may end up feeling unloved and resentful, as your partner may not be loving you in the way you want and need to be loved. Only you can do this for yourself.

Loving yourself through taking responsibility for your own feelings is the cake and your partner’s love is the icing on the cake. There is no place for the icing if you are not creating the cake.

Love and marriage do go together, but only when each person is loving themselves enough through taking responsibility for their own pain and joy, so they have love to share with each other.

Sometimes my clients have problems remembering why they love their spouse, or why they even got married in the first place. Ramona consulted with me because this is exactly what was happening in her marriage.

“When Randy and I first got together, we had a wonderful time with each other. We could talk about anything. We fell passionately in love, but now I can’t even remember what I love about him, and I’m often irritated with him,” she said in our first session.

“Ramona, how long have you been married and how long has this been going on in your marriage?” I asked her.

“We have been married 7 years. We have two children. Our daughter is 5 and our son is 3. I think this has been more or less going on since our daughter was born,” she said.

“How do you see Randy as a father?” I asked.

“He is a very good father. And he is a very loving husband. I just don’t get why I’m feeling this way,” she said.

“Ramona,” I asked her, “what do you focus on regarding Randy? What do you get irritated about?”

“Oh, I get irritated when he is feeling insecure about work, or when he is tired and acting like a needy little boy with me, or when he is complaining about something, or when he seems shut down,” she said.

“Ramona, right now I’d like you to focus on what is wonderful about Randy. Put aside what you don’t like and just focus on what you do like. I’d like to hear what is wonderful about Randy.”

“Randy is a very good person,” she said. “He is so kind and caring. He would do anything for me and for the kids. He is very smart and is an extremely talented musician and composer. Even though sometimes he is insecure about it, he really loves his work and is successful at it. He has a great sense of humor. And he takes good care of himself physically, which I really appreciate.

“You know, as I talk about him, I realize that I haven’t thought about these qualities in a long time. I have been focusing on the problems instead of his good qualities.”

“Right,” I said, “and this has caused you to lose your feelings of love for him. I’m wondering if you have been focusing on the problems because there is some way you are not taking care of yourself when he is complaining or feeling needy or shut down? Is there some way you are caretaking him and giving yourself up when he is insecure or needy or disconnected?

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “I listen to him when I don’t what to and then I try to fix him. That’s when I get irritated. So what should I do when he is like that?” 

“What would you do if you were focused on taking loving care of yourself instead of caretaking him?”

“I might just go in the other room and read a book! But wouldn’t that be selfish and unloving to him?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “It is not loving to him to enable him in being needy and complaining. Your caretaking does not help him learn to take better care of his own feelings. If you lovingly disengage when he is not taking care of himself, you give him an opportunity to take responsibility for himself. It is the opposite of selfish – it is self-responsible!”

“Wow,” she said, “I never looked at it in that way! So, if every time he complains or acts needy or insecure or distant, I just walk away and do something I like to do, then I won’t feel irritated with him. I can see that if I take care of myself, it will make it much easier for me to remember what I love about him.”

Ramona emailed me a few days later that things had completely turned around in her relationship with Randy. She was delighted that she was again feeling her love for him, and she was noticing that this was even affecting her children’s behavior. They were much calmer when she was happier!

You might want to try remembering the good stuff about your partner – why you married him or her. This is actually what I saw my second parents, Betty and Morrie, do over and over, and one of the reasons their love lasted their whole marriage.

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership. 

I invite you to heal your relationships with my 30-Day online video relationship course: Wildly, Deeply, Joyously in Love.

And you can learn so much about loving yourself, creating loving relationships, and healing from my newest book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.