5th
The Unhooked Generation
many of my unhooked singles wanted to “do their own thing” and expected love and relationships to be on their schedule, on their terms, and to come without too much personal sacrifice. this is fine if you are happy to remain single, but if you want intimacy, this won’t work.
the dopamine level one’s brain receives depends less on the experience itself than on one’s expectations regarding the experience… you only get a pleasurable “dopamine cocktail” if something happens that is better than what you expected.
peter, like many of the people she interviewed, became exasperated by his own indecisiveness: he didn’t trust himself — or love. falilng in love became an angst-ridden journey of second-guessing, constant indecision, and perpetual confusion.
by the 19th century, romantic love had become embedded in the western ideal of marriage — and while all the other bases for marriage — social status, economic partnership, the need to raise children — have weakened for Gen-Xers, the legacy of romantic love has strengthened. Unfotunately, Gen-Xers inherited an impossible notion. Why We Love author Helen Fisher writes that falling in love is a basic biologic human drive and cites multiple studies that early courtship releases chemicals in the brain that cause feelings of elation, a “bio chemical high.” But a team of neuroscientists recently concluded that such a feeling on average lasts between eighteen months to three years before it subsides.
60: “YOu shouldn’t fall into love. I think love should be a conscious choice. It is about making it work. It is not a gamble, it is a choice - to stop looking and stop choosing other people.”
63: “it was the work, the struggles, and the resultant joys over forty-two years that had made them - over time - each into a mate to each other’s souls.”
63: “On marriage: there are difficult days and bliss takes work. there have been both a spark and the willingness to renew it when it inevitably dies down.”
158: “beating yourself up because you can’t use your body without involving your soul is quite the twenty-first-century dilemma.”
159. “free love is the supreme oxymoron. someone who is genuinely in love cannot be free; to be in love is to be connected, tied, bound to another… totally free people can have sex, but never love, because to have love is to give up freedom.”
191: “i thought marriage was going to everlasting excitement, and it wasn’t. so i went out looking elsewhere for happiness. i had an affair and realized that wasn’t going to be happiness. i fucked up my marriage. i desperately loved my wife, but it was over and i had to move on.”
195: “although he and his girlfriend seemed to connect on many levels, he soon learned they didn’t connect in many other ways that he did with his now-estranged wife. ‘My relationship wasn’t solving every problem in my life. i was in love with my wife, and i realized i was looking for happiness outside myself. it is hard to see the difference between being bored with your life ad bored with your partner. but i realized this all a little late.’”
206: “what this generation needs to find is a comfort level with making the choices that we do make. this means we have to accept that, with every positive choice, we will have to give many things up.”
209:
- look at yourself first
- burn your checklist
- stop speeding
- go all the way
- commit and fuel the fire
210: “when something is wrong in there people’s relationships, they consider fist what they themselves might be doing to cause the problem. this is totally at odds with the culture of emotional consumerism around us. the passionately-in-long-term-love people i heard from would have looked at how they” themselves were handling their part of the argument to see if there was more they culd do to ccreate an “us” set of values.”
210: “people with enviable relationships that i encountered all took responsiblity for becoming the kind of person who was communicating and caring, rather than ditching the partner when a conflict arose. those people looks at how their own actions got in the way.”
212: “it wasn’t the kind of male courtship she imagined.. .she explained she was still stuck on an internal script: ‘his appraoch to romance just wasn’t what i had in my head.’”
213: “ppl kept saying, if you have any doubts, maybe he’s not the right one. so whenever any natural hesitations came it, it would shake her to the core. “no one ever said to me, ‘sophia, nobody is perfect, doubts are natural or maybe you should go talk to someone aout what is going on with you; maybe *you* are afraid of commitment.’”“
215: “when you feel gratitude — that is the best practice. when you are thankful for what you have, more great things come to you. when she decided to stop asking herself whether she was “in love” with Clark and started to look at him with an open heart and loving eyes, she fell blisfully in love with him.”
217: “decided to make a concerted effort to open himself up to this unexpected relationship. ‘i made a choice to give in to the fact that it was different from my other relationships. i stopped evaluating it and i just let the feeling take over.’”
225: “when two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
226: “when these people talked about their belover, they did not refer to the sum of that person’s parts or mention what the other person offers them, but rather they spoke of his or her uniqueness, that which is indescribable and irreplaceable about that person. the romantic notion that a person is so unique that he or she is irreplaceable often seems completely lost by my generation. the checklist appraoch undermines potential for that kind of connection.”
226: “by looking for perfection, we lose the chance to love uniquely.”
226: “when they stopped thinking about replacing their mates, their mates became irreplaceable.”
234: “the gen-x appraoch of keeping your options open, or holding back from a complete commitment, is one of the biggest obstacles to finding true love today.”
234: “marriage is a leap of faith, even in the best circumstances.”
237: “she explained some of the reasons her relationships was so strong. the words she used were ‘acceptance’ and ‘dedication’. what she was describing was the opposite of the picture-perfect package, the soulmate delivery that to Gen-Xers is supposed to confer true bliss. what she had — that gave her such joy — was devotion and struggle, acceptance and loss, and gaining things she did not know she would gain. ‘it was a journey with this man,’ she smiled.
241: “when we drop the cultural script, which tells us that the initial euphoria of the relationship is the best part, we can experience an even deeper fulfillment with our partners.
242: “ask yourself: am i willing to think of a relationship in terms of what i can give instead of what i can get?…. if you are constantly waiting for the other person to give to you, it will never be enough. rabbi boteach writes: ‘love is not measured by the beating of a heart, but by the actions of the hands. the best way, therefore, to gauge the authenticity of the affections of lovers is to see what they do about their love.’ to say you are ‘in love’ means nothing, but to act out of love means everything.”
“am i willing to stop asking whether i am in love with the other person and start asking if i have been loving with this person? love is a conscious choice. over time you can’t expect to be ‘in love’ with someone without doing the work to make love grow. when you are loving, you look at your partner with loving eyes. when you are angry, you look at your partner with angry eyes. if you are not being loving, you cannot love.”
243: “true love is a daily practice— the daily practice to being open to it. love, it seems, demands a daily openness to transforming yourself and being transformed by love.”
244: “‘a lifelong marriage requires the persistence of children at the seashore. each partner must resolve to revive the dreams, to resurrect the hopes, to rebuild the love, every day. every day, as the tides of the world wash away your love, you must rebuild it with the fierce determination of children.’ i hope this book helps you build and rebuild your own sand castles.”
