Love as a Basis of Healthy Relationship

Let me start by saying that there is a lot of things to be said about the subject. Different people have very different ideas. I have even heard a few different scientific interpretations of what love is. Here is one science which defines love in its own way, the science that will help me demonstrate something relevant to the subject: medicine.

Medicine sometimes explains the "state of being in love" as a very light version of neurosis or psychoneurosis. The definition of neurosis is that it is a functional disorder of various degree in which feelings of anxiety, obsessional thoughts, compulsive acts, and physical complaints without objective evidence of disease, dominate the personality. That definition is, indeed, very accurate of what we sometimes can see in real life. People with higher emotional levels(generally women and young adults) tend to express all or some of the symptoms mentioned above. Very often it happens during hormone instabilities in the bodies of young adults. It often is temporary and over time "the disease" fades. Even though medicine might seem like it gives us a perfect explanation of what love really is, I would not call it love, since I think there is a better word for it: affection.

Here is the reason why I started with describing affection: people confuse love with affection way too often. While love is more fundamental and complex, affection is nothing but a temporary state of being lightly psychologically sick. Love is a very complex feeling, comprised of several basic feelings; affection, on the contrary, in itself is a very simple feeling. And since it is temporary, that is, tends to disappear at some point, it does not represent a good foundation to build any long-term relationship on. Love, on the other hand, is, in my mind, very stable and is a great foundation for relationship-building, that is why from now on I will be using terms "love" and "healthy relationship" interchangeably.

Let me now try explaining how I see love. Love is definitely a feeling, there is no doubt about it. Human beings "feel" it. We feel that we love our children, our parents, our "significant others" etc. What is common among all these "loves"? In general, when in love, we feel the need to care about that particular person. That need to care can be easily explained in a parent-child situation but it can almost never be explained in a male-female situation. The desire to care about another adult person(usually of opposite sex) just appears in us one day. And since people have the need, they want to satisfy it.
Caring can be displayed in a variety of ways, depending on a person. In one of such examples some parents physically punish(not abusively) their children, but it doesn't necessarily mean the parents don't love their children. They do love them, and they think that this punishment will do some good in forming the kids' characters. Such parents actually care about how children will turn out to be when they reach adulthood. That is the reason the parents spank their kids sometimes. Whether or not it is the right thing to do is a totally different topic; all I tried to do is to illustrate a way in which people display how they care. So, that's just one of the ways that human beings satisfy their need to care about their loved ones. As you can imagine, there are hundreds of other ways to do that. It all depends on a particular person.

Another thing that love and generally any relationship greatly depend on is longevity. What I'm talking about here is the amount of time two human beings have spent together. Two people live together for a long time, they share various activities and things during the process, and the longer the two people stay together, the stronger their love tends to be. I know that all this sounds too optimistic. Sometimes, after many years of living together a couple breaks up and each individual thinks it was the best thing to do. Longevity in itself is worth nothing. It is important to understand that it only amplifies the other underlying components of love or any relationship. Another thing to keep in mind is that if relationship was built without proper foundation, longevity in itself will not help to keep it from breaking. In fact, longevity might even make the relationship worse. That is why it is very important to have good foundation for the relationship, and I will get to that in a minute.

I have been blabbering about foundation for healthy long-term relationship for a while now. But so far I have just talked about two components that go into love and therefore into healthy relationship. These two, while being very important, are dwarfed in importance by the two that will follow: trust and respect.

Trust is a fundamental component to love between adults. If there is no trust, or if trust is fading away, it can severely erode love. If you don't trust your loved one, your relationship is doomed, unless the trust is earned back. I say earn, because that is the only way you can get another person to trust you. Often people choose to disregard whether or not they are being trusted by their partner. That is the worst mistake you can do. Try to take trust away, and you are hurting your loved one. And if you care(see above) about the well being of your loved one, why would you hurt him/her by not supporting trust? And just like I mentioned above, longevity will just amplify the effect. The longer two people have been in healthy relationship, the more painful it will be for both if trust starts disappearing.

And here is something I kept up my sleeve till the very end: respect. This is the most critical component to love. Without it, there is really no love. If you don't respect the person you are planning to live your life with, think again. You might be hoping that you will be able to develop respect later on, and that is by all means possible, but it would be a good idea to develop it first, before committing to a relationship. What's even more important than just respect is mutual respect. If partners don't respect each other, there will even be nothing to hold them together with. In fact, if you think about any voluntary relationship, whether it is friendship or love, in the very core of it, there is mutual respect. This is what makes people want to spend time with each other. Now imagine if there is no respect, and consequently people don't really want to be together that much. Is that really love; would it be a good foundation for healthy relationship?

So, having said all that, let me try to figure out a formula for true love, which guarantees healthy relationship. Love is longevity-amplified underlying feelings of mutual respect, trust and caring about your partner. And as long as the foundation is strong, you can keep building on it forever. And all one needs to do to achieve happiness and satisfaction in life is the keep on building and building and building...