Extracts from the book, “The Road Less Traveled” written by M. Scott Peck:

LOVE DEFINED:

Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words. In an effort to explain it, therefore, love has been divided into various categories: eros, philia, agape; perfect love and imperfect love, and so on.

I am presuming to give a single definition of love, again with the awareness that is likely to be in some way or ways inadequate. I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.

When we love someone our love becomes demonstrable or real only through our exertion – through the fact that for that someone (or for oneself) we take an extra step or walk an extra mile. Love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful.

My use of the word ‘will’ I have attempted to transcend the distinction between desire and action. Desire is not necessarily translated into action. Will is desire of sufficient intensity that it is translated into action. I therefore conclude that the desire to love is not itself love.

Love is as love does. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. No matter how much we may think we are loving, if we are in fact not loving, it is because we have chosen not to love and therefore do not love despite our good intentions. On the other hand, whenever we do actually exert ourselves in the cause of spiritual growth, it is because we have chosen to do so. The choice to love has been made.

FALLING IN ‘LOVE’:

Of all the misconceptions about love the most powerful and pervasive is the belief that ‘falling in love’ is love or at least one of the manifestations of love. It is a potent misconception, because falling in love is subjectively experienced in a very powerful fashion as an experience of love. When a person falls in love what he or she certainly feels is ‘I love him/her’. But two problems are immediately apparent.

The first is that the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience. We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them very deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex – unless we are homosexually oriented – even though we may care for them greatly. We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated.

The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough. This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love. But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes. The honeymoon always ends. The bloom of the romance always fades.

By my use of the word ‘real’ I am implying that the perception that we are loving when we fall in love is a false perception – that our subjective sense of lovingness is an illusion. By stating that it is when a couple falls out of love they may begin to really love I am also implying that real love does not have its roots in a feeling of love.

To the contrary, real love often occurs in a context in which the feeling of love is lacking, when we act lovingly despite the fact that we don’t feel loving. Assuming the reality of the definition of love with which we started, the experience of ‘falling’ in love is not real love for the several reasons that follow:

Falling in love is not an act of will. It is not a conscious choice. Not matter how open to or eager for it we may be, the experience may still elude us. Contrarily, the experience may capture us at times when we are definitely not seeking it, when it is inconvenient and undesirable. We are as likely to fall in love with someone with whom we are obviously ill matched as with someone more suitable. Indeed, we may not even like or admire the object of our passion, yet, try as we might, we may not be able to fall in love with a person whom we deeply respect and with whom a deep relationship would be in all ways desirable.

This is not to say that the experience of falling in love is immune to discipline. Psychiatrists, for instance, frequently fall in love with their patients, just as their patients fall in love with them, yet out of duty to the patient and their role they are usually able to abort the collapse of their ego boundaries and give up the person as a romantic object. The struggle and suffering of the discipline involved may be enormous. Bur discipline and will can only control the experience; they cannot create it. We can choose how to respond to the experience of falling of love, but we cannot choose the experience itself.

Falling in love is not an extension of one’s limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them. The extension of one’s limits requires effort; falling in love is effortless. Lazy and undisciplined individuals are as likely to fall in love as energetic and dedicated ones. Once precious moments of falling in love has passed and the boundaries have snapped back into place, the individual may be disillusioned, but is usually none the larger for the experience. When limits are extended or stretched, however, they tend to stay stretched. Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience. Falling in love is not.

Falling in love has little to do with purposively nurturing one’s spiritual development. If we have any purpose in mind when we fall in love it is to terminate our own loneliness and perhaps ensure this result through marriage. Certainly we are not thinking of spiritual development. Indeed, after we have fallen in love and before we have fallen out of love again we feel that we have arrived, that the heights have been attained, that there is both no need and no possibility of going higher. We do not feel ourselves to be in any need of development; we are totally content to be where we are. Our spirit is at peace. Nor do we perceive our beloved as being in need of spiritual development. To the contrary, we perceive him or her as perfect, as having been perfected. If we see any faults in our beloved, we perceive them as insignificant – little quirks or darling eccentricities that only add colour and charm.

If falling in love is not love, then what is it other than a temporary and partial collapse of ego boundaries? I don not know. But the sexual specificity of the phenomenon leads me to suspect that it is a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior. In other words, the temporary collapse of ego boundaries that constitutes falling in love is a stereotypic response of human beings to a configuration of internal sexual drives and external sexual pairing and bonding so as to enhance the survival of the species. Or to put it in another, rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage.

THE MYTH OF ROMANTIC LOVE:

To serve as effectively as it does to trap us into marriage, the experience of falling in love probably must have as one of its characteristics the illusion that the experience will last forever. This illusion is fostered in our culture by the commonly held myth of romantic love, which has its origins in our favourite childhood fairy tales, wherein the prince and princess, once united, live happily forever after.

The myth of romantic love tells us, in effect, that for every young main in the world there is a young woman who was ‘meant for him’, and vica versa. Moreover, the myth implies that there is only one man meant for a woman and only one woman for a man and this has been predetermined ‘in the stars’. When we meet the person for whom we are intended, recognition comes through the fact that we fall in love. We have met the person for whom all the heavens intended us, and since that match is perfect, we will then be able to satisfy all of each other’s needs forever and ever, and therefore live happily forever after in perfect union and harmony.

Should it come to pass, however, that we do not satisfy or meet all of each other’s needs and friction arises and we fall out of love, then it is clear that a dreadful mistake was made, we misread the stars, we did not hook up with our one and only perfect match, what we thought was love was not real or ‘true’ love, and nothing can be done about the situation except to live unhappily ever after or get divorced.

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because the represent and embody great universal truths, the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lied in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.

Mr and Mrs X acknowledge to each other that they have fallen out of love and then proceed to make each other miserable by mutual rampant infidelity as they each search for the one ‘true love’, not realizing that their very acknowledgement could mark the beginning of the work of their marriage instead of its end. Even when couples have acknowledged that the honeymoon is over, that they are no longer romantically in love with each other and are able still to be committed to their relationship, they still cling to the myth and attempt to conform their lives to it. All couples can learn that a true acceptance of their own and each other individuality and separateness is the only foundation upon which a mature marriage can be based and real love can grow.

EGO BOUNDARIES:

Having proclaimed that the experience of ‘falling in love’ is a sort of illusion which in no way constitutes real love, let me conclude by shifting into reverse and pointing out tat falling in love is in fact very, very close to real love. Indeed, the misconception that falling in love is a type of love is so potent precisely because it contains a grain of truth.

The experiencing of real love also has to do with ego boundaries, since it involves and extension of one’s limits. One’s limits are one’s ego boundaries. When we extend our limits through love, we do so by reaching out, so to speak, toward the beloved, whose growth we wish to nurture.

For us to be able to do this, the beloved object must first become beloved to us, in other words, we must be attracted toward, invested in and committed to an object outside of ourselves, beyond the boundaries of self. Psychiatrists call this process of attraction, investment and commitment ‘cathexis’ and say that we ‘cathect’ the beloved object. But when we cathect an object inside of ourselves we also psychologically incorporate a representation of that object into ourselves.

What transpires in the course of many years of loving, of extending our limits for our cathexes, is a gradual but progressive enlargement of the self, an incorporation within of the world without, and a growth, a stretching and a thinning of our ego boundaries. In this way the more and longer we extend ourselves, the more we love, the more blurred becomes the distinction between the self and the world. We become identified with the world. And as our ego boundaries become blurred and thinned, we begin more and more to experience the same sort of feeling of ecstasy that we have when our ego boundaries partially collapse and we ‘fall in love’.

Only, instead of having merged temporarily and unrealistically with a single beloved object, we have merged realistically and more permanently with much of the world. The feeling of ecstasy or bliss associated with this union, while perhaps more gentle and less dramatic than that associated with falling in love, is nonetheless much more stable and lasting and ultimately satisfying. It is the difference between the peak experience, typified by falling in love, and what Abraham Maslow has referred to as the ‘plateau experience’. The heights are not suddenly glimpsed and lost again; they are attained forever.

In summary, the temporary loss of ego boundaries involved in falling in love and in sexual intercourse not only leads us to make commitments to other people from which real love may begin but also gives us a foretaste of (and therefore an incentive for) the more lasting mystical ecstasy that can cause ours after a lifetime of love. As such, therefore, while falling in love is not itself love, it is a part of the great and mysterious scheme of love.

LOVE IS NOT A FEELING:

I have said that love is an action, an activity. This leads to the final major misconception of love which needs to be addressed. Love is not a feeling. Many, many people possessing a feeling of love and even acting in response to that feeling act in all manner of unloved and destructive ways. On the other hand, a genuinely loving individual will often take loving and constructive action toward a person he or she consciously dislikes, actually feeling no love toward the person at the time and perhaps even finding the person repugnant in some way.

The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies the experience of cathecting. Cathecting, it will be remembered, is the process by which an object becomes important to us. Once cathected, the object, commonly referred to as a ‘love object’, is invested with our energy as if it were a part of ourselves, and this relationship between us and the invested object is called a cathexis. The misconception that love is a feeling exists because we confuse cathecting with loving. This confusion is understandable since they are similar processes, the there are also striking differences.

First of all, we may cathect any object, animate or inanimate, with or without a spirit. Second, the fact that we have cathected another human being does not mean that we care a whit for that person’s spiritual development. Third, the intensity of our cathexes frequently has nothing to do with wisdom or commitment. Finally, our cathexes may be fleeting and momentary.

Genuine love, on the other hand, implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. When we are concerned for someone’s spiritual growth, we know that a lack of commitment is likely to be harmful and that commitment to that person is probably necessary for us to manifest our concern effectively.

As has been mentioned, couples sooner or later always fall out of love, and it is at the moment when the mating instinct has run its course that the opportunity for genuine love begins. It is when the spouses no longer feel like being in each other’s company always, when they would rather be elsewhere some of the time, that their love begins to be tested and will be found to be present or absent.

This is not to say that the partners in a stable, constructive relationship do not cathect each other and the relationship itself in various ways; they do. What it does say is that genuine love transcends the matter of cathexis and with or without a loving feeling. It is easier – indeed, it is fun – to love with cathexis and the feeling of love. But it is possible to love without cathexis and without loving feelings, and it is in the fulfillment of this possibility that genuine and transcendent love is distinguished from simple cathexis.

The key word in the distinction is ‘will’. I have defined love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truly love does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present. If it is, so much the better; but if it isn’t, the commitment to love, the will to love, still stands and is still exercised.

Conversely, it is not only possible but necessary for a loving person to avoid acting on feelings of love. I may meet a woman who strongly attracts me, whom I feel like loving, but because it would be destructive to my marriage to have an affair at that time, I will say vocally or in the silence of my heart, ‘I feel like loving you, but I am not going to’. My feelings of love may be unbounded, but my capacity to be loving is limited. I therefore must choose the person on whom to focus my capacity to love, toward whom to direct my will to love. True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.

The common tendency to confuse love with feelings of love allows people all manner of self-deception. It is clear that there may be a self-serving quality in this tendency to confuse love with the feeling of love; it is easy and not at all unpleasant to find evidence of love in one’s feelings. It may be difficult and painful to search for evidence of love in one’s actions. But because true love is an act of will that often transcends ephemeral feelings of love or cathexis, it is correct to say, ‘Love is as love does’.

Thanks Suzet,

Food for thought <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />

Thought it would be a good idea to bump this thread.

This was very confusing reading. I am in love because I love being with this person all of the time. I get excited when I am going to see him and we have been togehter for a year now. We are not married, but sooon one day will. He treats me so great: takes care of me emotionally, sexually, financially if needed, he treats me with respect and love and affection and he makes me feel safe. He says I do all of the same to him and he feels the same way about me. To me, that is being in love, getting excited to see one another, can't stop holding one another, saying sweet nothings to one another constantly, pleasing one another sexually whenever someone desires or just both wanting it the same time, love doing the same things together and even sacraficing trying new activities together, just plain old loving one another and wanting to make the other person happy is our goal. Please explain in short words in English what you mean by your version of love, cause it's very confusing... Please respond in my posts if you can so I can read it there also. It's under general questions, I want to be honest but don't want to hurt my spouse NEW POSTS. Thanks so much for listening!

Iwanttobehonest,

Maybe this thread: What is love? will help to explain it in more simple terms for you. In short, everythings boils down to the fact that "real" love is an ACTION. Real love is the agape (Godly) love we can have for all people. "In love" is the romantic (sexual) love that exist between intimate partners. It IS possible (and necessary) to have both these types of love for you spouse/partner, but often "being in love" is the beginning of love and mature to a deeper level of "real" love.

<small>[ May 26, 2004, 08:44 AM: Message edited by: Suzet ]</small>

^^^Bump for James117^^^

Thanks Suzet.

I have a very battered & well thumbed RLTd in my locker.

It has been my Bible since about 16.

It's one of the few books that I do constantly learn something more from the more often I read it.

It is a book that can bring great relief & understanding.

When read with an open mind, I question & acknowledge my own feelings & reactions.

There are 2 other newer versions in our home for anyone who might care to read at there leisure.

Consider it Reader's Digest for the Soul.

Wouldn't it be great to make it part of the Educational Curriculum for all teen-agers.

Living with hope.

Loving instinctively despite myself <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Thanks again Ktulu.