Does love make you stupid? Part 1
by Mira and Charles on May 17th, 2010Journalist asks about the falling-in-love stage
We sometimes wonder if the questions journalists ask come out of their own personal lives. Hmmm… Well, we just don’t know. But it’s fun to speculate. Anyway, here is the first part of an interview by a journalist who seemed very interested in the falling-in-love stage of relationships and why it makes us so stupid and so vulnerable. And this is timely, because it is Spring, the time of year when people fall in love, go crazy, and screw up their lives…except when everything works out just fine.
The basic question is: Can you use your head to save your heart? Should you? These are crucial questions. After all, we want wonderful unreasoning, head-over-heels feeling. But we also recognize how often it has led us to make horrible mistakes. So how do we sort this all out?
Here are the journalist’s questions, part one.
Q: Why do we dive head over heels into a relationship?
Mira: When we meet someone, we want to be swept away, because for most of us that’s the mark of real love. Proceeding carefully seems more like a business merger.
Q: So is being swept away a good or a bad thing?
Mira: It is definitely a good thing for two people to feel caught up in passionate love for each other. It strengthens relationships enormously to be able to point to a time when you were head over heels for each other. And in fact when people move too cautiously, analyzing every little twitch in the relationship, it often sucks the joy, then the hope, then the love right out of things. The things is, though, that, yes, it’s great to be caught up in a grand passion, but before you move to making a commitment you need to see what things are really like between you when you’re in the cooling-down, return-to-everyday-life stage.
Q: What are possible consequences of rushing things?
Mira: If you move to commitment just because you’ve fallen head over heels for each other, the risk (and it’s a significant one) is that you won’t discover until it’s too late that your chemistry didn’t survive the cooling-down phase. It’s only when chemistry survives the cooling down phase that you can say you have good chemistry.
Q: Why is it so important to date, and get to know each other in the beginning?
Mira: You need to get to know each other in all your many dimensions to see if your relationship chemistry is based on who you really are, not just on who you want to be for each other. Your love is born on the tide of who you are at your best. It survives based on how the two of you work together when you’re at your worst.
I know that millions of you are in new or sort-of-new relationships and are bedeviled by all kinds of confusion and dilemmas. And they all boil down to: Should I go forward with this relationship or not? The best help available on this issue is in Is He Mr. Right?, which will show you exactly how to decide whether to go forward or not.
If you’re in a more established relationship, then Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay will give the info you need to decide whether you’ll be better off staying or going.
