Should You Be Afraid to Leave a Stable Relationship?

Today I want to talk about fear of love.

You probably grew up with the idea that the perfect relationship was someone who fulfilled you at your deepest level. That’s what all the love movies we watch are based on. The wrong person, the right person, the soul-mate.

This Guardian Article talks about the idea that unspeakably painful things can happen to us, and that it’s necessary for us not to run from our anxiety. Rather, we should run towards the things that cause it.

“If we are to stand a chance of being able to understand the meaning in our suffering, we need to turn towards the feelings, the memories and the losses that anxiety leads us away from. If you’re paralysed by anxiety, you aren’t living your life. But if you are in pain and you know why, perhaps because you are longing for something you cannot have – love, security, a mother, a child – and you give voice to that pain, even if only within your own mind, if you put it into words and listen to it, attend to it, then you can understand the meaning of your suffering and come alive. There is consolation in that, and it is very different from leaving yourself to cry behind a closed door.”

Easier said than done, certainly.

Imagine you’re married, maybe for decades, and the relationship has gone sour. In your heart you’re feeling like once upon a time you and your partner connected at a deep level, but you haven’t done so in a long time. You’re wondering if it would be possible to have that deeper connection with someone else.

There are two kinds of anxiety working here. One is that you’ll stay in the relationship and you’ll never know whether you could have had a chance for better one. Perhaps you’re depriving yourself of happiness.

The other worry is that you’ll leave the relationship and wind up in the exact same situation you were in before with someone else (or worse). At first the new marriage or love affair will seem like the perfect fit, but then it will sink into the same morass you’re in now because…well, relationships are hard, people are flawed, and to look for perfection is to run a fool’s errand.

That need for perfect connection which you’re seeking might come out of some gap you had in your childhood, maybe a lack of a connection with a parent. Maybe you were not cherished as a child. Maybe you were not taught to love yourself.

And so you learned to get that love from someone else. It might even have worked for a while, because the electricity of a new relationship has a bliss-aspect that covers parasitic attraction. But eventually partners get tired of fulfilling a role instead of being treated like a person.

To ask your partner to complete you is to ask something inappropriate of a healthy relationship. Some partners do it, either because it’s currently a good fit for them, or because they have their own unhealthy reason to perpetuate their role as “the fulfiller of someone else.” But realistically, only one person can love you at that level all the time: You.

Which brings us back to anxiety. “Is my relationship good? Is it worth saving?”

As the Guardian article so effectively reminds us, the anxiety is going to make us want to avoid the question under the illusion that we will be able to avoid suffering. You’ll feel the urge to ditch or sabotage your relationship now, or push the doubt way under the rug and pretend you’re fine.

Neither of those addresses the main concern: You have to learn to love yourself and you don’t know how. It’s going to take time, it’s going to be hard, and when you fail to do it, you’re going to be scared and in pain.

You’ll be in pain because you’ll be facing the reality that no one on this Earth, not your spouse, not your fantasy partner, can ever take this sadness away from you, can even love you enough to make you feel whole. Only you can do that for yourself, and learning to do it is a long, slow process filled with failures and setbacks.

I want to convince you to move into that pain.

Remember, first, that avoiding it will still result in constant misery, as your anxiety will spin you around and around. In spite of moments of euphoria, you will never have any lasting peace that way.

Second, the rewards for learning to love yourself are well-worth the costs. You have an actual opportunity to find the fulfillment you’ve always dreamed of. It’s just going to come from your own efforts…it will feel different than you thought it would.

And yes, you will continue to be in pain about the loss you incurred, the one that deprived you of the lessons and opportunities for self-love. That pain is going to revisit you for the rest of your life. It can only be managed.

But even this is good news, because it you actually face that pain, embrace it and make it a part of your consciousness, it will provide a kind of energy for you. It’s energy you can use to motivate yourself, to create, to initiate bravery. And the best part: Because the pain is inexhaustible, so are the rewards that you’ll get as a result of living with it.

This fear around relationships is one of the most potent fears we go through. It’s no small thing to decide to point your bow into the storm and face it head on. But just as with a storms, this is the only way to keep your boat afloat.