Is love enough to build a happy relationship?

I met Martha at a party in Kaufleuten club in Zurich on a rainy Saturday evening. We had a ‘girls talk’ over a White Russian. She was in a tough relationship which brought lots of troubles and worries. She said: “The most important is that we love each other”. 

Hell yeah, I thought. As if love could fix it all…

LOVE IS NOT A CURE 

You can call me the most unromantic person in the world, but love cannot fix troubles in your relationship. You cannot sit around, unhappy, thinking that love to your partner will heal all problems. 

Love will neither fix you nor bring you permanent happiness. It won’t heal your traumas. Sometimes you need a visit at the shrink’s office to heal yourself and not a person who sleeps next to you and calls you ‘darling’. Love is not a plaster you put on your skin when you hurt yourself. 

Why love is not enough for a relationship to succeed?

If love to your man is the first thing that matters to you in your relationship, then ask yourself a question.

• What is there apart from love? 
• What other qualities does your relationship have? 
• What are the common values of you and your partner?
• Do you share a similar view on things and life in general? 
• Do you both want to have a family and kids? 
• What are the common goals and life plans of you and your partner?

LOVE IS MATHEMATICS

Sometimes I meet women who crave and beg for love. When they meet a guy, they fall in love straight away and think about the love that they will get from their partner. Love blinds them. They cannot see who the guy really is and figure out if he only says that he ‘loves’ or he actually does it. 

“I just wanna be loved” attitude is very dangerous for women. Love is an important part of a relationship, but you cannot sacrifice everything for it. Any relationship consists of many parts. There’s one part called ‘liking each other’, another one called ‘respect’, the next one ‘common values’ and so on. 

So, what is love? Love is an addition.

First of all, you need to take care of yourself. Your state of mind. Your shit. You need to love yourself before you love another person. You cannot get water out of a stone. If you don’t love yourself, there’s a low probability that you will be successful in loving another person. It’s pure mathematics. 0 love times 1 equals 0. You cannot give what you don’t have in yourself. 

In romantic comedies, people who meet each other, first, need to overcome some obstacles (job challenges, personal challenges, etc) before they are finally together. They don’t go into a relationship only because no one else came their way. 

They don’t bring into their relationship shitty patterns from their family of origin or exuberant expectations. First, they deal with their own shit, before they turn their relationship into a ‘relationshit’. 

Better to be in a ship with the other person than in a shit… It makes a whole lot of difference.