The Result of Not Having Real Love

[Guest guest]

What We Do Without real Love: Imitation Love

If we don’t have enough Real Love in our lives, the resulting emptiness is unbearable. We then compulsively try to fill our emptiness with whatever feels good in the moment—money, anger, sex, alcohol, drugs, violence, and the conditional approval of others. Anything we use as a substitute for Real Love becomes a form of Imitation Love, and they all fall into one or more of four categories:

Praise Power Pleasure Safety

Praise

In the absence of sufficient Real Love, praise feels pretty good. From the time we were small children, we all experienced the exhilaration of hearing, “Good boy,†or “Good girl,†or “Nice job†when we behaved in the ways other people liked, and most of us have devoted the remainder of our lives to duplicating that feeling.

The pursuit of praise is so widespread that it’s accepted as normal, even desirable. We’ve all heard, for example, the expressions “Put your best foot forward†and “Always make a good first impression.†Without realizing it, our parents, teachers, and others taught us that earning praise was a good thing, and we accepted their counsel.

Putting your best foot forward, however, has significant drawbacks. After two people successfully establish a relationship based on their best foot, they eventually discover that their partner is a lot more than his or her best foot—that, metaphorically, there is also the other foot, bad breath, and numerous other imperfections—and the resultant disappointment can be overwhelming. Both partners feel deceived, cheated, and betrayed, and it’s understandable that they vent their frustration on their partner.

Relationships fail because we create them on a foundation lacking the one ingredient—Real Love—most essential to happiness and fulfilling relationships. Without sufficient Real Love, neither partner has the tools to create a healthy and mutually rewarding relationship. Without enough Real Love, the foundation of any relationship will be fatally flawed, and no amount of time, effort, and worry spent on the windows, doors, and carpets will ever create a healthy relationship. With Real Love, nothing else matters; without it, nothing else is enough.

Tragically, although Real Love is essential to happiness, most of us have never had consistent experiences with it, as we discussed earlier. In our emptiness and pain, we’re only too eager to reach out for anything that makes us feel better, however superficial and fleeting that relief might be. We use Imitation Love—praise being just one form—because it does feel good for a moment, even though it never really fills our emptiness.

As we vigorously engage in the pursuit of praise, however, we come to the terrible realization that the satisfaction it provides never lasts for any significant period. After you’ve worked for an hour, or a day, or a week, for example, to complete a project at work or elsewhere, it’s quite satisfying to hear the approving words, “Nice job,†but that feeling soon wears off, and then you have to work all over again to get another dose of it. The effects of praise are always short-lived, leaving us empty and desperate for more.

People who consistently use addictive drugs soon discover that the effect becomes increasingly brief, and more of the drug is required in order to achieve the same outcome. All the forms of Imitation Love are like addictive drugs. Despite all the effort required to earn Imitation Love, the beneficial effects of praise, power, money, and sex become increasingly brief. We also have to work harder to get the desired effect, and eventually we become exhausted and frustrated. Moreover, no matter how successful we are in obtaining Imitation Love, we never get the feeling of connection to other people that comes with Real Love, so we’re still painfully alone.

Power

When we don’t have enough Real Love, we feel empty, alone, helpless, weak, and afraid. We get some measure of relief from these intolerable feelings, however, when we can control the behavior of other people. That sense of power feels much better than the helplessness we often endure. As we control people—as we convince them to agree with us, or to do what we want—we also get a sensation of connection to them, which relieves our loneliness.

In the absence of sufficient Real Love, power can be quite satisfying, and we get it in so many ways: with money, authority, physical and verbal intimidation, anger, violence, and sex.

Pleasure

When we don’t feel loved unconditionally, we use physical and emotional pleasures—sex, food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, gambling, driving fast, and so on—as welcome distractions, and we often pursue them with great devotion. The enjoyable effects of pleasure, however, are fleeting, and they can never make us genuinely happy in the absence of Real Love. If pleasure could produce the kind of happiness we all want, sex addicts, for example, would be the happiest people on the planet—but they’re not. As with all the forms of Imitation Love, pleasure wears off, and eventually no amount of it will give us even a brief relief from our emptiness and pain.

Safety

Without Real Love, we’re already in the worst kind of pain, and we’ll go to great lengths to keep ourselves safe from experiencing more pain. If we can’t have genuine acceptance, we can at least do everything in our power to avoid more disapproval. Toward that end, we avoid doing anything unfamiliar. We stay in the same boring, dead-end jobs, attempt to learn nothing new, and continue in stagnant, unrewarding—but predictable—relationships. If we’ve been hurt consistently by all our past relationships, but finally we’re with someone who simply hurts us less, we can confuse that relative safety with love. Or we might avoid dating and relationships altogether.

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