Is it Love?

If you want to know whether the love you think you feel is authentic, you could read Robert A. Johnson’s best selling 1983 book, We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. If you do, you might get your answer, but you would have had to hack through some outmoded, hetero-normative concepts and male-centric language first. You also would have had to endure a second rate myth he uses to illustrate. Neither the story of Tristan & Isolde nor Johnson’s We have aged well. Have no fear. I’ll try to translate what he said, avoiding many of the dead ends that he might lead you to. Read on and you’ll soon know if your love is true.

Before you ever met your beloved, you had a yearning for your other half, whatever would make you complete. You couldn’t describe what it would look like, but you’d know when you saw it. When you saw it, you fell in love. But who did you fall in love with? A subconscious association of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors you had in your head, or a real person you believed embodied them?

Your other half is what psychologist Carl Jung called your anima/animus. The anima is often said to be a man’s view of women; animus, a woman’s view of men. This was back in the day when Jung, and then Johnson, were alive, and men were men and women were women, as they used to say. Men were assumed to be attracted to women and exhibit masculine qualities such as strength, assertiveness, independence, and rationality. Women were assumed to be attracted to men and exhibit feminine qualities such as empathy, gentleness, nurturing, grace, and sensitivity. The qualities of the opposite sex would be your other half. You would bury and deny them when they came up in you. However, the capacity for everyone to possess the qualities of both sexes was still there. You are not complete unless they are all accepted and given a seat at the table. Everyone needs to be empathic, gentle, nurturing, graceful, and sensitive, strong, assertive, independent, and rational some of the time.

I doubt the roles of the sexes were ever as sharply defined as all that, but they’re certainly less so now. Thankfully, both men and women are more free today to develop in themselves what they used to call the qualities of the opposite sex. However, you still have another half even though the qualities assigned to it may not fall along gendered lines. Therefore, I think the concept of anima/animus needs an update. Some have suggested and, if I was king of Jungian psychology, I would decree it would no longer signify the opposite sex, it would signify whatever you lack. I would exchange anima/animus for animum to stand for all the qualities that would make you complete but don’t have.

There are people who deliberately seek certain qualities in a mate they don’t believe they are capable of. A shy one who falls in love with a social one to have more friends. A permissive parent who chooses someone strict to raise the kids. The slob who moves in with someone neat. They deliberately outsource skills they need to live a full life. It appears to be a match made in heaven until it ends in tears. The very thing that attracted them to each other becomes the thing that drives them away. If the shy one really valued having friends, she would have worked past her shyness. The parent would have been strict if they didn’t think strictness was mean. The slob would have picked up more if they thought it was important to do.

What they could have done was admit their way was not the only way and find a place for its opposite. There’s a place for sociability, even in someone shy; there are times to be strict, even when you’re permissive; and every slob has to pick up and clean sometimes. Then they can love whomever they want and see the value in their partner’s ways even when they’re different from their own.

Sometimes loving someone with complimentary, but antagonistic values is a deliberate choice, but you usually subconsciously fall in love with your animum. You’re bored and expect to be entertained. You’re uncertain and fish for affirmation. You’re unstable and steady yourself on a rock. Your life has no meaning unless you take care of someone who messes up theirs. You look for someone to make you feel in various ways, forgetting that your feelings are yours. That someone you’re looking for is your animum.

There’s no need to go on the road looking for others to fill the hole when you already have it. You’re the author of your own feelings; and always have been, even when you didn’t know what to call them. You create your own meaning; no one can give it to you. You’re the only rock you can count on; everyone will leave, one way or another. You can affirm yourself if you trust yourself and entertain yourself when you accept the responsibility of doing so. You don’t need anyone to complete you. You’re already complete.

Johnson makes a distinction between true love, which is between people who know they’re complete, and romantic love, which is this other kind that projects the animum onto another and exploits them. Johnson thinks you should develop in yourself the qualities it represents. Romantic love, often referred today as limerence, is characterized by intrusive thoughts and fantasies about the other person, a desire to be with them constantly, and a feeling of euphoria when in their presence. It can also involve anxiety, jealousy, and fear of rejection. To Johnson, romantic love is a set of attitudes that emerged in the Middle Ages, overwhelmed our collective psyche, and changed what we thought about love.

When we’re being romantic, or limerent, we turn a person into something more than human, a symbol of perfection, and worship them. We can think of nothing but our beloved. We crave intensity, the ecstasy of joyous meetings and the despair of tearful partings. We believe romance uplifts us, refines us, and gives life meaning.

However, writes Johnson:

What we seek in romantic love is not human love or human relationship alone: we also seek a religious experience, a vision of wholeness. Here is the meaning of the magic, the sorcery, the supernatural in the love potion. There is another world that is outside the vision of our ego-minds: It is the realm of psyche, of the unconscious. It is there that our souls and spirits live, for unknown to our conscious Western minds, our souls and spirits are psychological realities, and they live in our psyches without our knowledge.

Romantic love has always been associated with the spiritual. Johnson believes it’s replaced it. This is why you might feel your life is meaningless when you’re not in love. This is why you put your partner under so much pressure to be perfect. You would do better if you let your partner be human and let God be God.

Also, looking for someone else to complete you gets you sidetracked instead of becoming consciously complete, yourself. You’re trying to fill a void into which your own self is supposed to expand. Romantic love, in which you appear to be passionately devoted to the other, is really all about yourself. As long as you can make your partner play the part of your other half, you don’t have to grow.

Few people object at first to playing the part of your animum. Our culture trains us to fulfill this role. We often struggle to resemble whomever is currently held up to be the ideal man or woman, to make ourselves into the collective image of the anima/animus. You might even object to any change in this arrangement, often a collusion of you be my god while I be yours. But there’s a price to pay. You cannot be yourself that way and the minute the spell wears off, your loved one is off to find another person on which to project their animum.

When the projection of your animum fades, you’ll become disenchanted with the person you thought you loved. It happens when they fail to complete you in the way you expected. You get bored with them, they fail to affirm you, they reveal they’re not a rock. The person you are devoted to caring for learns to care for himself. She makes you feel some way you don’t want to feel. All of a sudden, you realize this person is not your animum. They’re just a human being. This has been the cause of many breakups, but it’s really the first time you’ve met. It’s a chance to discover the real other person who is there. It’s also a chance to find the hidden parts of yourself, instead of trying to live through your partner.

You might say, if I don’t need anyone, then I don’t need to love anyone. Well, let’s not go crazy. You don’t need someone to complete you, but you need someone to create and raise children, share the responsibilities of a household, take care of you when you’re sick, and point out things you’re missing. They also need you for these things. Life is easier when it’s shared, and more fun. You could bang a tennis ball against a wall if you had to, but you share the joy when you play tennis with someone. The true test of individuation is whether you can relate to another person and respect them for who they are, rather than what they can do for you.

Now that I’ve summarized Robert Johnson’s We, for today’s sensibilities, I think I’ve earned the right to tell you what I think about it. I’m with him, but I don’t see romantic love, or limerence, as a wrong turn on the journey of individuation. I see it as a stage to pass through on the way; a stage where you might get stuck or tarry. If romantic love is a part of your relationship, you might still get to what Johnson calls true love. You’ll find out soon enough that your partner is not your fantasy mate. At that point, you have a choice to either stick with your partner, resenting them for not making you complete; look for someone else and go through it one more time; or come to realize the person you’ve been waiting for is the other half of you.

Perhaps romantic love is a childish thing, a residue from helpless infancy. Your childhood caretaker was your first other half. They were the original animum, providing you with everything you couldn’t do for yourself. When you grew up and looked for a mate, why wouldn’t you have expected your partner to be like them? Eventually you put away childish notions of storybook romance and act like an adult.

One school of family therapy, the Structural, exemplified by Murray Bowen and David Schnarch, would urge you to grow up, free yourself from the emotional enmeshment of romance, and maintain healthy boundaries. Another school, the Emotionally Focused Family Therapy of Sue Johnson, would have you cater to the child inside your partner and affirm him or her, as they do for you. If you maintain a secure attachment, healthy boundaries would just follow.

On one hand, I agree with the Structuralists because it’s foolish to expect your partner to gratify all your childish desires. On the other hand, Sue Johnson’s approach is often a practical necessity to quiet those desires for the moment so the adult part of the person can take over.

So, what do you think? Is your love true love? What is true love even like, once you distill it from romantic impurities? Robert Johnson calls it stirring-the-oatmeal-for-your-partner love. I’ll close with what he says about it.

Within this phrase, if we humble ourselves enough to look, is the very essence of what human love is, and it shows us the principle differences between human love and romance.

Stirring the oatmeal is a humble act — not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth. It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks: earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night. To “stir the oatmeal” means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity in everything… it represents the discovery of the sacred in the midst of the humble and ordinary.

Keith R Wilson is a mental health counselor in private practice and the author of three self-help books, three novels, and innumerable articles.

Subscribe to his Substack, The Reflective Eclectic

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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