Love is Risky

Trying to make love feel safe can create more risk for our love

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Love is risky. And most often, in our desire to make it feel safe, we set ourselves up for even more risk.

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When we feel safe in someone else's love for us, when we assume their love is unconditional, we can easily take our partner for granted. Taking them for granted makes it difficult for them to feel our love and respect. Taking each other for granted is the biggest danger for any love relationship.

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A conditional understanding

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An essential way to support each other is by making this intention clear on both sides:

 

"My intention is to create and maintain a great relationship with you, which could be forever. And, if at some point I've done my best and I still don't see that it's in my best interests to stay with you, then I will say goodbye."

 

The best long-term marriages and partnerships I know share this understanding. Who would want someone to stay if their partner wasn't getting both short-term and long-term benefits? None of us, if we're honest, would want someone else to sacrifice their life for us.

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Keep the man on the edge

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In most love relationships, it's more important for the man to feel a sense of risk than for the woman. Women seek a sense of safety in romantic relationships, and this can lead them to provide too much safety for men. A sense of power, rather than safety, is often more important for men. This feeling of power comes from a sense of accomplishment, but also from an ongoing challenge and risk. This is why men are often addicted to computer games. 

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A female client, married for twenty years, complained that her husband worked long hours and had no time for her. I suggested she say this to her husband, "Honey, I'm so excited about having an intimate, romantic relationship with a great man. Right now, you're the #1 candidate. Are you interested?" He took the next day off from work to be with her.

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More power in working things out

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If both partners know they will be okay even if things don’t work out, it allows for level-headedness and empowers them to find solutions that support mutual self-interest. If we close off the option of setting boundaries, with 'goodbye' as the ultimate one, we limit our ability to build and sustain strong relationships

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My mother suspected she'd made a mistake in marrying my father within the first two days. She stayed unhappily married to a man she didn't love and didn't respect for 41 years before she finally left him. Two weeks after my mother left father, we were having lunch together. She was complaining about my father, "He did this...he did that..." After listening to her complaints for a several minutes, I interrupted her, "Mama, you let him do all those things." After a brief expression of anger towards me, she stopped and said, "You're right. I did let him do all those things."

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Setting boundaries and creating distance

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Setting appropriate boundaries and distances, while often stimulating a sense of risk, can create better relationships. The Chinese have a saying, "Distance creates beauty." Examples: keeping money separate, separate bedrooms, even TLA (together living apart). 

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In 1998 I was renting a house in Hiroshima, Japan. One day I hosted four Japanese ladies for lunch. They were all married, in their 40s, with children. As we talked about marriage, sex, and romance, it was obvious that three of the women tolerated uneasy partnerships with their husbands. But the fourth woman blushed as the other three teased her about her passion for her husband. I asked her, "Junko-san, you've been married for twenty years. How do you still have passion for your husband?!" I found out that her husband worked in another prefecture and only came home one weekend a month. 

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