Love is Not Enough - by Mark Manson
Published 7/3/14 on markmanson.net
In 1967, John Lennon wrote a song called, âAll You Need is Love.â He also beat both of his wives, abandoned one of his children, verbally abused his gay Jewish manager with homophobic and anti-semitic slurs, and once had a camera crew film him lying naked in his bed for an entire day.
Thirty-five years later, Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails wrote a song called âLove is Not Enough.â Reznor, despite being famous for his shocking stage performances and his grotesque and disturbing videos, abstained from all drugs and alcohol, married one woman, had two children with her, and then cancelled entire albums and tours so that he could stay home and be a good husband and father.
One of these two men had a clear and realistic understanding of love. One of them did not. One of these men idealized love as the solution to all of his problems. One of them did not. One of these men was probably a narcissistic asshole. One of them was not.
In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of lifeâs problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as lifeâs ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.
When we believe that âall we need is love,â then like Lennon, weâre more likely to ignore fundamental values such as respect, humility and commitment towards the people we care about. After all, if love solves everything, then why bother with all the other stuff â all of the hard stuff?
But if, like Reznor, we believe that âlove is not enough,â then we understand thathealthy relationships require more than pure emotion or lofty passions. We understand that there are things more important in our lives and our relationships than simply being in love. And the success of our relationships hinges on these deeper and more important values.
THREE HARSH TRUTHS ABOUT LOVE
The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us. These unrealistic expectations then sabotage the very relationships we hold dear in the first place. Allow me to illustrate:
1. Love does not equal compatibility. Just because you fall in love with someone doesnât necessarily mean theyâre a good partner for you to be with over the long term. Love is an emotional process; compatibility is a logical process. And the two donât bleed into one another very well.
Itâs possible to fall in love with somebody who doesnât treat us well, who makes us feel worse about ourselves, who doesnât hold the same respect for us as we do for them, or who has such a dysfunctional life themselves that they threaten to bring us down with them.
Itâs possible to fall in love with somebody who has different ambitions or life goals that are contradictory to our own, who holds different philosophical beliefs or worldviews that clash with our own sense of reality.
Itâs possible to fall in love with somebody who sucks for us and our happiness.
That may sound paradoxical, but itâs true.
When I think of all of the disastrous relationships Iâve seen or people have emailed me about, many (or most) of them were entered into on the basis of emotion â they felt that âsparkâ and so they just dove in head first. Forget that he was a born-again Christian alcoholic and she was an acid-dropping bisexual necrophiliac. It just felt right.
And then six months later, when sheâs throwing his shit out onto the lawn and heâs praying to Jesus twelve times a day for her salvation, they look around and wonder, âGee, where did it go wrong?â
The truth is, it went wrong before it even began.
When dating and looking for a partner, you must use not only your heart, but your mind. Yes, you want to find someone who makes your heart flutter and your farts smell like cherry popsicles. But you also need to evaluate a personâs values, how they treat themselves, how they treat those close to them, their ambitions and their worldviews in general. Because if you fall in love with someone who is incompatible with youâŚwell, as the ski instructor from South Park once said, youâre going to have a bad time.
2. Love does not solve your relationship problems. My first girlfriend and I were madly in love with each other. We also lived in different cities, had no money to see each other, had families who hated each other, and went through weekly bouts of meaningless drama and fighting.
And every time we fought, weâd come back to each other the next day and make up and remind each other how crazy we were about one another and that none of those little things matter because weâre omg sooooooo in love and weâll find a way to work it out and everything will be great, just you wait and see. Our love made us feel like we were overcoming our issues, when on a practical level, absolutely nothing had changed.
As you can imagine, none of our problems got resolved. The fights repeated themselves. The arguments got worse. Our inability to ever see each other hung around our necks like an albatross. We were both self-absorbed to the point where we couldnât even communicate that effectively. Hours and hours talking on the phone with nothing actually said. Looking back, there was no hope that it was going to last. Yet we kept it up for three fucking years!
After all, love conquers all, right?
Unsurprisingly, that relationship burst into flames and crashed like the Hindenburg being doused in jet fuel. The break up was ugly. And the big lesson I took away from it was this: while love may make you feel better about your relationship problems, it doesnât actually solve any of your relationship problems.
The roller coaster of emotions can be intoxicating, each high feeling even more important and more valid than the one before, but unless thereâs a stable and practical foundation beneath your feet, that rising tide of emotion will eventually come and wash it all away.
3. Love is not always worth sacrificing yourself. One of the defining characteristics of loving someone is that you are able to think outside of yourself and your own needs to help care for another person and their needs as well.
But the question that doesnât get asked often enough is exactly what are you sacrificing, and is it worth it?
In loving relationships, itâs normal for both people to occasionally sacrifice their own desires, their own needs, and their own time for one another. I would argue that this is normal and healthy and a big part of what makes a relationship so great.
But when it comes to sacrificing oneâs self-respect, oneâs dignity, oneâs physical body, oneâs ambitions and life purpose, just to be with someone, then that same love becomes problematic. A loving relationship is supposed to supplement our individual identity, not damage it or replace it. If we find ourselves in situations where weâre tolerating disrespectful or abusive behavior, then thatâs essentially what weâre doing: weâre allowing our love to consume us and negate us, and if weâre not careful, it will leave us as a shell of the person we once were.
One of the oldest pieces of relationship advice in the book is, âYou and your partner should be best friends.â Most people look at that piece of advice in the positive: I should spend time with my partner like I do my best friend; I should communicate openly with my partner like I do with my best friend; I should have fun with my partner like I do with my best friend.
But people should also look at it in the negative:Â Would you tolerate your partnerâs negative behaviors in your best friend?
Amazingly, when we ask ourselves this question honestly, in most unhealthy andcodependent relationships, the answer is âno.â
I know a young woman who just got married. She was madly in love with her husband. And despite the fact that he had been âbetween jobsâ for more than a year, showed no interest in planning the wedding, often ditched her to take surfing trips with his friends, and her friends and family raised not-so-subtle concerns about him, she happily married him anyway.
But once the emotional high of the wedding wore off, reality set in. A year into their marriage, heâs still âbetween jobs,â he trashes the house while sheâs at work, gets angry if she doesnât cook dinner for him, and any time she complains he tells her that sheâs âspoiledâ and âarrogant.â Oh, and he still ditches her to take surfing trips with his friends.
And she got into this situation because she ignored all three of the harsh truths above. She idealized love. Despite being slapped in the face by all of the red flags he raised while dating him, she believed that their love signaled relationship compatibility. It didnât. When her friends and family raised concerns leading up to the wedding, she believed that their love would solve their problems eventually. It didnât. And now that everything had fallen into a steaming shit heap, she approached her friends for advice on how she could sacrifice herself even more to make it work.
And the truth is, it wonât.
Why do we tolerate behavior in our romantic relationships that we would never ever, ever tolerate in our friendships?
Imagine if your best friend moved in with you, trashed your place, refused to get a job or pay rent, demanded you cook dinner for them, and got angry and yelled at you any time you complained. That friendship would be over faster than Paris Hiltonâs acting career.
Or another situation: a manâs girlfriend who was so jealous that she demanded passwords to all of his accounts and insisted on accompanying him on his business trips to make sure he wasnât tempted by other women. His life was practically under 24/7 surveillance and you could see it wearing on his self-esteem. His self-worth dropped to nothing. She didnât trust him to do anything. So he quit trusting himself to do anything.
Yet he stays with her! Why? Because heâs in love!
Remember this: The only way you can fully enjoy the love in your life is to choose to make something else more important in your life than love.
You can fall in love with a wide variety of people throughout the course of your life. You can fall in love with people who are good for you and people who are bad for you. You can fall in love in healthy ways and unhealthy ways. You can fall in love when youâre young and when youâre old. Love is not unique. Love is not special. Love is not scarce.
But your self-respect is. So is your dignity. So is your ability to trust. There can potentially be many loves throughout your life, but once you lose your self-respect, your dignity or your ability to trust, they are very hard to get back.
Love is a wonderful experience. Itâs one of the greatest experiences life has to offer. And it is something everyone should aspire to feel and enjoy.
But like any other experience, it can be healthy or unhealthy. Like any other experience, it cannot be allowed to define us, our identities or our life purpose. We cannot let it consume us. We cannot sacrifice our identities and self-worth to it. Because the moment we do that, we lose love and we lose ourselves.
Because you need more in life than love. Love is great. Love is necessary. Love is beautiful. But love is not enough.
