What Marriage Counselors Want You to Know 

 

About Real Love

 

If you're doing love right, it can last through joy and 

 

heartache, chronic lateness and noisy chewing.

 

 

 

Ask anyone about love and they'll give you an opinion:

 

It's written in the stars. It's succulent, a rose. It's 

 

delightful, de-lovely... unless it's a battlefield. In any 

 

event, it's one hell of a feeling, right?

We might want to rethink that, says Harville Hendrix, 

 

PhD, a groundbreaking marital therapist. Not only isn't

 

 love a feeling—love isn't even an it. "Real love," says

 

Hendrix, looking slightly professorial in a plum-colored

 

 sweater, "is a verb. It's a behavior in which the welfare

 

of another person is the primary intention and goal."

While he speaks, his wife, Helen Hunt (not that Helen 

 

Hunt—this one helps run their seminars and has 

 

coauthored several books with him), listens intently (she

 

 and Hendrix were "the living laboratory" for their 

 

theories, she interjects) and occasionally touches his

 

 arm. "Love as a feeling is ephemeral and goes away 

 

when 

 

 circumstances change," Hendrix says. "Love as a verb 

 

isn't dependent on how you feel or even what you think.

 

 Instead you make an unconditional commitment to the 

 

 other person."

As for those who believe you have to merit love (they

 

 include no lesser minds than William Butler Yeats, as 

 

well as enrollees in the School of Tit for Tat: You know

 

 who you are), Hendrix begs to differ. "You can't earn

 

 real

 

 love," he says. "It's not subject to how good you are or 

 

whether you're pleasing to your partner all the time. So 

 

there's a kind of detachment—you simply hold your 

 

partner's experience when they're going through 

 

changing emotions. You can ask, 'Is the experience you're

 

 having right now somehow triggered by me?' Sometimes

 

 it's not. People can have stresses you don't know about.

 

 But if it is, then you can follow up with, 'What 

 

relational 

 

 transactions are stirring up your discomfort with me?' 

 

The point is, you're committed to what is real. Namely,

 

 your partner. But most of us 'love' an image rather than 

 

the real person." He pauses, then looks at his wife. 

 

"What would you add to that, Helen?"

"Well, I would say real love is about going to a different 

 

destination," she says, giving the conversation a quarter 

 

turn with a certain exuberant sweetness. "You become 

 

conscious that there is a space between the two of you, 

 

and that's where the relationship resides."

"That really needs to be amplified," he says, "The 

 

between-ness is the locale of love. It's outside us." 

 

That's why the proverbial urge to merge is, according to

 

 Hendrix, an itch best left unscratched. "In 'romantic' 

 

love, you think, My lover and I are one. Technically, we 

 

call this symbiotic fusion, which means: You live in my 

 

world; therefore, if I like chocolate, you like chocolate. 

 

In real love, your partner is clearly differentiated from 

 

you. It's an altered state of consciousness to know that 

 

you live with another person—that other people exist

 

 who do not match your inner image of them."

With this deep level of acknowledgment—this ticket to

 

 what Hunt calls the new country—comes an end to 

 

judgment. That's not to say you wake up delighted by 

 

all 

 

 of your beloved's previously irksome habits. But rather 

 

than blame, Hendrix says, you can state directly and 

 

kindly what you want ("I would like to meet you at 7"), 

 

protect yourself (by, say, deciding to hook up indoors 

 

rather than on a corner in subzero weather), and try to 

 

understand what's going on inside your partner's head.

Even when there's a breach of trust—infidelity, for 

 

instance—Hendrix and Hunt caution against a quick split.

 

 Instead, says Hunt, "you have to get curious with your 

 

partner about why they're doing whatever they're doing.

 

 Ask—then stop talking and stop judging, and become a 

 

safe person to confide in. The sense of judgment and 

 

criticism is what can make our partners feel like such a 

 

failure that they seek another avenue to express their

 

 passion."  

Hendrix believes most unions are salvageable and 

 

divorce can be "an abortion of the growth process." 

That's because we're invariably drawn to a partner who 

 

in some way resembles one of our primary childhood 

 

 caretakers, and it's only in the adult relationship that 

 

we can complete unfinished business and heal our oldest 

 

wounds. To break off a marriage without resolving the 

 

underlying conflicts and power struggles—and 

 

understanding your role in them—is, he feels, to set 

 

yourself up to repeat the same pattern in your next love

 

 affair. He concedes almost reluctantly that, in some 

 

cases, a couple can decide that they're moving in 

 

different directions, with different values. "It might no 

 

longer make sense for two people to spend their lives 

 

together," he says, "but that doesn't necessarily end the

 

 love they have for each other. It just ends the 

 

relationship."
No matter what the circumstances, the one thing you 

 

should never do, Hendrix and Hunt say, is find fault. 

 

Raise the notion of constructive criticism and they laugh

 

 ruefully. "That's very dangerous," Hunt says. "It's an 

 

invitation for self-righteousness."
"Criticism is abuse," Hendrix says. "There's no way 

 

around it. Because it means, 'You're not good, you're 

 

notright, something's wrong with you, and I'm trying to 

 

fix it.'" What your partner needs more than anything is 

 

simply to feel validated, in large part because most of 

 

us grew up feeling that love was conditional on meeting 

 

someone else's expectations.
Having weathered a crisis in their own marriage 

 

(they'vebeen together for 26 years but got to real love 

 

only inthe past five or six, they agree), Hendrix and 

 

Hunt knowhow much work—even pain—is involved. "My 

 

empathy and  patience for the people I counsel have 

 

changed," Hendrix says.
"Something I've learned is that real love is 

 

counterinstinctual. We're designed as creatures to 

 

protect ourselves and to survive, and therefore we go 

 

after what we need. But with real love, you commit to 

 

 the survival of the other person. And that has a 

 

paradoxical effect: Your survival is secured because 

 

when you surrender your focus on getting your own 

 

needs met, your relationship with your partner will 

 

change. It's not manipulative—you're genuinely caring 

 

for your partner, who knows it. Helen and I still have our

 

 differences, but they're like a ripple on the surface of an

 

 ocean. It touches me even to think about it, that I feel so

 

 safe and valued.
"In courtship," he says, "you're trying to win the partner,

 

 keep the partner, stir up passion. With real love, the 

 

behaviors look the same but they arise out of the depth 

 

of the relationship and are expressed as a sense of 

 

gratitude. They come from within to reflect a state of 

 

being rather than to generate emotions."
Hunt weighs in: "You have both learned to create the 

 

sacred space between two people."
"When you read, 'Here's what to do to get your man to 

 

stay,' or to love you, there's an outcome you want," 

 

Hendrix says. "In real love, you're already in the 

 

outcome."