# Love, Marriage, and the Illusion of Certainty



## Daniel (Mar 6, 2009)

Love, Marriage, and the Illusion of Certainty
By Steven Stosny in Anger in the Age of Entitlement
_Psychology Today_ _Blogs_
March 2, 2009 

If you're like most people, you rode into married life on powerful waves of affection and intimacy that crashed occasionally into self-doubt and apprehension, only to rise again, stronger than ever. In other words, you believed that you married for love. That was the easy part.

Lots of research shows that love is more effective at bringing us together than keeping us together. You may have heard the saying, "Love is easy; relationships are hard." The truth is relationships are hard _because_ love is easy. Strong feelings and sensations of any kind carry an illusion of certainty. With the exception of resentment, no emotional experience has more illusion of certainty than love. The need to feel certain is at least part of the reason why we come to resent the most the people we love the most.

Strong feelings and sensations of any kind also tend to block out those of other people. When you have a terrible headache, it's hard to recognize that someone else has a backache. If you're resentful, you cannot appreciate the vulnerabilities of others. If you feel excited or euphoric, you are less likely to notice the homeless sleeping on the street. Love makes us less sensitive to the subtleties of our loved ones' emotional worlds in the rush to project our own onto them.
*
Half the Story: Your Partner Changed into Someone You Like Less
*When the intensity of love wanes, we stop projecting and begin to see some things in our lovers we don't like. It's not so much that we don't like who they really are, it's just that it had seemed, in love's illusion of certainty, that they were everything we really liked. This _disillusionment_ is what couples fight about in the second year of marriage, although they think they're fighting about money, sex, jealousy, in-laws, housekeeping, or something stupid. Most of the arguments that couples have in the second year of marriage take the following form:

 "Why can't you be what I want?" 
"You made me feel that I _was_ what you wanted. So you have to be what I want now!"
*
The Whole Story: You Changed into Someone You Like Less
*Falling in love made each of you a better person. You became more appreciative, caring, loving, compassionate, and tolerant. Those qualities - not your partner - made you feel lovable and gave you a false sense of confidence that you knew how to make intimate relationships work. Your _partner_ didn't make you a better person and then selfishly changed; _your_ appreciation, care, tolerance, and compassion made you a better, more loving person.

 When the intensity of love wears off, caring, appreciation, tolerance, and compassion tend to fade with it. As a result, you no longer feel lovable and adequate as an intimate partner. If you blame these core hurts - _inadequate_ and _unlovable_ - on your spouse (or your childhood), your marriage will fail, if not become abusive - all abuse is failure of compassion.

When you feel inadequate or unlovable, as we all do occasionally, blaming your spouse (or childhood) can only make it worse. The only way to make it better is to do something that will make you feel lovable.
*
What Makes a Person Lovable?*
Take a moment to think of the qualities that make a person lovable - an adult that is; children are lovable just because they're cute.

I'll bet you didn't think of things like resentment, getting your own way, or having to be right. You most likely thought of appreciation, care, tolerance, and compassion. If you want to feel lovable and adequate, you have to return to the appreciative, caring, tolerant, and compassionate person you were, only this time in small, sustainable doses.
*
If You Want to Love Big, You have to Think Small* 
Large waves of love and romance are nice, but all waves of strong feeling, with their inherent illusion of certainty, must crash into reality.

Everyday sensitivity to our partners' vulnerabilities and strengths, in a steady trickle of small attitudes of appreciation, care, tolerance, and compassion, will cut through the illusion of certainty that blinds us to the real value of human relationship.

_Steven Stosny, Ph.D. has treated some 6,000 people for various anger and relationship problems. Recent books: __How to Improve your Marriage without Talking about It and __Love Without Hurt._


----------



## Jazzey (Mar 6, 2009)

What a wonderful article Daniel.  Thank you.


----------



## white page (Mar 6, 2009)

> When you feel inadequate or unlovable, as we all do occasionally, blaming your spouse (or childhood) can only make it worse. The only way to make it better is to do something that will make you feel lovable.


wonderful advice , but hard to do at times . any ideas on how to ?


----------



## Daniel (Mar 6, 2009)

There's the holiday at home idea as a way of valuing oneself in addition to:

The Path to Unconditional Self-Acceptance - Psychlinks


----------



## Daniel (Aug 17, 2011)

"It would be wonderful if everything we were sure about, we were right about..." ~ Sol Fulero


----------



## locrian (Aug 18, 2011)

The marriage license is not a license to take the other person for granted, but that's often the tendency.


----------



## H011yHawkJ311yBean (Aug 18, 2011)

"Love, Marriage, and the Illusion of Certainty"....  I think it's closer to the truth to say "Love, Marriage, and the Certainty of Uncertainty..."  lol


----------

