Myths About Love | The Road Less Traveled

The perception that we are loving when we fall in love is a false perception. ... The extension of extending one's limits (which characterizes love) requires effort; falling in love is effortless.

Real love is a permanently enlarging experience. Falling in love is not.

As a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the [romance] myth.

[Co-dependent] couples sit together, speak for each other, defend each other's faults and eek to present to the rest of the group a united front, believing this unity to be a sign of the relative health of their marriage and a prerequisite for its improvement. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, we must tell most couples that they are too much married, too closely coupled, and that they need to establish some psychological distance from each other before they can even begin to work constructively on their problems.

All couples learn that a true acceptance of their own and each other's individuality and separateness is the only foundation upon which a mature marriage can be based and real love can grow.

My work with couples has led me to the stark conclusion that open marriage is the only kind of mature marriage that is healthy and not seriously destructive to the spiritual health and growth of the individual partners.

It is obvious and generally understood that sexual activity and love, while they may occur simultaneously, often are disassociated, because they are basically separate phenomenon.

Ego boundaries must be hardened before they can be softened. An identity must be established before it can be transcended. One must find one's self before one can lose it.

True spiritual growth can be achieved only through the persistent exercise of real love.

Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.

[Role switching in a marriage] is a process that diminishes mutual dependency. In a sense, each spouse is training himself or herself for survival in the event of the loss of the other. But for passive dependent [or co-dependent] people the loss of the other is such a frightening prospect that they cannot face preparing for it or tolerating a process that would diminish the dependency or increase the freedom of the other. Consequently, it is one of the behavioral hallmarks of passive dependent people in marriage that their role differentiation is rigid.

Through such behavior, passive dependent marriages may be made lasting and secure, but they cannot be considered either healthy or genuinely loving, because security is purchased at the price of freedom and the relationship serves to retard or destroy the growth of the individual partners. Again and again we tell our couples that "a good marriage can exist only between two strong and independent people."

Love and discipline go hand in hand, so that [when] unloving, uncaring parents ... fail to provide their children with a sense of being loved, they also fail to provide them with the capacity for self-discipline.

Passive dependent people lack self-discipline. They are unwilling or unable to delay gratification of their hunger for attention. ... Most important, they lack a sense of responsibility for themselves. They passively look to others, frequently even their own children, as the source of their happiness and fulfillment, and therefore when they are not happy or fulfilled they basically feel that others are responsible.

Dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another. But in actuality it is not love; it is a form of antilove. ... It nourishes infantilism rather than growth.

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Dr. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

From sections:

Falling in "Love"

The Myth of Romantic Love

More About Ego Boundaries

Dependency