Conscious Choice: The Dog Days of Love

February 2005 | Body & Mind Health

The Dog Days of Love

by Julia Mossbridge

You’ve probably heard that a sense of community, a close group of friends, and especially one-on-one intimate relationships are important for your physical well-being. But it turns out that, when it comes to intimacy, not just any relationship will do. Recent research shows that while the healthiest people tend to be those who have high-quality, long-term intimate relationships, people who do not have an intimate partner are generally healthier than people who have bad relationships with their partners. If divorce rates are an indicator of the potential of getting into a bad intimate relationship, we each have a 50 percent chance of being better off alone.

Not so heartwarming a figure for Valentine’s Day, huh?

That statistic left me with some questions: First, if you’re one of the lucky ones, how can you keep your relationship from dipping into the bad zone? If you’re alone, how can you know if a potential untested relationship is on the plus side of that 50 percent? Finally, if you’re in an unsatisfying relationship, is it possible to move it from bad to good, without passing through the dreaded “alone” state?

Seeking answers, I combed through my career in romance, wondering if anything could be gleaned from a seven-year marriage and a handful of briefer romantic couplings. Lucky for you, I won’t burden you with all that. Instead, I turned to Erich Fromm, a psychologist who wrote nicely about romantic love in his classic The Art of Loving. It’s interesting that Fromm dedicated the original 1956 volume to his much-loved dog, Fromkin, so draw your own conclusions about his knowledge of human romance.

Fromm tells us that self-love is underrated. One of his fundamental points is that two people can’t bridge the gap between them unless they each stand centrally in their own experience. And he says the only way to stand in your own experience without dying of loneliness is to love yourself.

“Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence … only in this ‘central experience’ is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love.”

This insight, which feels intuitively correct, sparked something inside of me. I wondered if all of my questions could be answered by posing a single question: “How can I best love myself?”

At first, this sounded self-serving. But upon further reflection, I realized that this question forms the core of good relationships.

Here’s how it seems to work. People who have been blessed with happy relationships are able to continually ask this question of themselves, and for them the answer is almost always: “I can best love myself by nurturing my love for this other person.” The connection itself delights them both, the gap between them is continuously bridged by their attention to the relationship. So the relationship maintains its goodness because it is good for both partners.

OK, but what about those of us who are alone? How, for instance, do we test whether a potential partner might be a good one. Another way to ask that question is: Will dating this person move me up or down the health meter?

This is especially challenging in the beginning of a romantic relationship, since many of us co-dependent types are used to leaving ourselves emotionally in order to try to please the other person. To ensure they like us, we alter ourselves a bit here and there, forgetting entirely two crucial things: 1) if they already liked us, then they probably wouldn’t need us to be different, and 2) when we move away from the center of who we are, we can’t really know whether we like them in the first place.

The part of you that knows the answer can be heard if you come back to the center of your existence and ask the original question: “How can I best love myself?” Keep asking and the answer will, eventually, bring you to a state of happy aloneness — if not fulfilled couplehood.

So much for potential lovers. What about handling bad relationships? How can you tell if you should try to transform a relationship or end it? Isn’t it selfish for one person to end a relationship because it isn’t conducive to self-love? This one stumped me until I figured something out. Instead of asking about yourself, ask: “How can I best love my partner?”

The answer is the same as your answer to, “How can I best love myself?” If you can best love your partner by working together to improve the relationship, that’s also how you can best love yourself. Or perhaps the best love senario is to distance yourself from them. There’s no way that staying in the relationship can be good for you and bad for your partner, or vice versa. The realization that what is truly in your best interest is also in the best interest of your partner is, in a sense, the definition of love, regardless of whether the relationship rises or falls. In that case, maybe the question is even simpler than the one I first proposed; it’s one that you can apply to in any moment, to yourself, your friends, your lovers, and, yes, even your dog: “How can I best love?”

Julia Mossbridge, a Chicago-based writer, is a mother, cognitive neuroscientist, and author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work (New World Library, www.unfolding.org).

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