Falling In Love Isn’t Being In Love - Oscar Bamwebaze

Falling In Love Isn’t Being In Love

Peter’s fiancée, Jane, has dumped him because she found a half naked white woman, wrapped in a towel, sitting on his bed. I am trying to reconcile the two. Peter says he wasn’t unfaithful and I believe him. According to him, the woman was his visitor. In other words, he seems to say, things are not what they seem. He has always had the tendency of bringing visitors into his bedroom, but they were males in the past. Bringing a woman into his room has caused him a lot of trouble. His open door policy has cost him a lot. Peter is heart broken because there is no one he loved more than Jane. He wanted to marry her.

I contacted Jane and she was still outraged. “Why should I live in hell,” she said, “when I still have a chance to live on earth?”

Mary almost dumped her fiancée because he used to take one of his female friends into their bedroom. “Our bedroom is sacred,” said Mary “It is not a place where every Tom, Dick, Harry, Obama, or whatever can come and hang out.” Fortunately for Mary, they were able to sit down and solve their problems. They are still in love today.

When I was in Bangladesh, I broke up with my girl friend six times, and made up with her seven times. We are now separated by distance, and we are friends. There is no relationship without problems, and there can be no love if the people in a relationship are not willing to endure the pain involved in solving their relationship problems. Many relationships fail, not because the people in the relationship don’t have feelings for each other, but because they do not want to experience the pain involved in solving their problems. They want the romance, passion and pleasure, but not the hard work involved in repairing the relationship. They seek out pleasure and avoid pain. This is sad because it is only when we are willing to suffer that we can find happiness.

Every human being is an animal and that is why we are territorial. Many of us come from dysfunctional families, and when we enter into a relationship, we get into it with our issues. In a dysfunctional family there are no boundaries, and when they exist, they are enmeshed. In such situations, everyone’s business is everyone’s business and there is no sense of privacy. When these people from dysfunctional families get into relationships, they fail to respect each other’s boundaries and this becomes a cause of separation. In a relationship there are always boundaries and these boundaries have to be respected if the relationship is to survive.

As mentioned earlier, two people, each with issues from their dysfunctional childhood, enter into a relationship. So, very often, two people, each with their emotional/ mental issues, fall in love, and then you have double the number of original issues. The problem with this situation is that people born in dysfunctional families do not know how to live with another person in a normal relationship because they never saw one. They grew up seeing their parents fight, quarrel, abuse or neglect each other. May be they did not even grow up with both parents. They do not know what it means to live with another person in a normal relationship. They do not know what it means to make a commitment and stick to it. They saw their parents break up over simple problems and now that is what they do. They never saw their parents sit down to solve problems amicably, and so when they encounter problems in their relationships, they just walk away or make a mess of the situation. This isn’t surprising because, in life we can only practice what we were taught and these people re enact what their parents demonstrated.

Many people fall in love on a daily basis, and they fall out of love just as impulsively as they fell into it. Very few people choose to sit down and solve their problems when they fall out of love, but it is these people who actually love each other. Falling in love isn’t the same as being in love. Falling in love is a feeling, but being in love is rational. When we fall in love, it is inevitable that this illusion of ‘oneness’ fades or dies and we fall out of love. We can only be in love after we have fallen out of love, and that is if we successfully solve the problems that made us fall out of love.

Most relationships and marriages have a one year life expectancy, because the people in these relationships lack the discipline necessary to be in love.

http://www.writersownwords.com/oscarbamwebaze

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