Read the book Love for Life by Harvilla Hendricks: online reading

Tell me, would you like to meet the love of your life ? Or maybe you have already done this? This bright feeling makes the heart beat, the soul vibrate, and there is no room for doubt. This is a relationship in which we feel respect and love from the other.

But there are views that can destroy our ideas about ideal love.

Because of them, we can make serious mistakes and accept circumstances that cause us great harm.

One of these misconceptions is that we believe that love is the only necessary ingredient for a successful long-term relationship. But that's not true. Love alone is not enough for this.

True love has no place for conditions, it is generous

In a situation where true love is involved, partners respect each other and never begin to judge the other. Such a partner never hurts with a word. He knows how to motivate and never clips his wings.

There are bad moments in every relationship when the worst in each of us comes to the surface. At this time, we tend to transfer all our own doubts and disappointments to those close to us.

If your partner truly loves you, he will be there for you at every moment. He will accept all sides of your personality, with all your mistakes and misconceptions.

The most important thing is that in such a union both people make an equal contribution to the relationship, enriching and developing it. It should not be that one of the partners gives more and the other less.

Generosity is the basis of successful relationships. If even one column shakes due to fatigue, everyday life and habit, the entire building, built with such difficulty, will collapse.

The love of our life is so generous that it can solve any conflicts that befall us. In any relationship there is a place for disagreements, disputes and problems that need to be discussed in order to come to a common decision.

Don't miss: Love and Obsession: What's the Difference?

Communication is vital for partner relationships to be successful.

When we keep silent about problems, avoiding discussing them at the right moment, in the future they grow, turning into monsters capable of destroying everything that we have created.

Text of the book "Love for Life"

Harville Hendricks, Helen Hunt Love for life. Guide for Couples

Scientific editor Inna Khamitova
Published with permission of Harville Hendricks and Helen Hunt

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders.

Originally published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company.

* * *

All names and individual characteristics have been changed. Some stories from different people have been combined for clarity, confidentiality, and clinical accuracy. We hope that the book will be helpful to couples, but it is not a substitute for the help of a licensed therapist.

Preface

Here is a completely revised and expanded edition of the book “Love for Life. A Guide for Couples." This is a classic book that has been helping change relationships for over thirty years around the globe! We are glad that you have decided to join this circle.

Here are some interesting facts.

In 1988, a few weeks after the book's release, Oprah Winfrey featured it on her show, which earned her an Emmy Award. Over the next twenty-three years, the book appeared on her show more than ten times and, largely as a result, made the New York Times bestseller list eleven times. This media coverage attracted approximately four million readers worldwide. About two and a half thousand psychotherapists have been trained in the Imago technique and practice it in more than fifty countries: now it is one of the most widespread and popular types of classical psychotherapy for couples.

But this is old information. And here are the new ones.

As you have already noticed, there are two names on the cover of this edition, and not one, as in all previous ones. The 2008 version listed Helen, my partner in life and work, as a co-author of the new foreword. This was the beginning of a process that has now been completed. I am very encouraged that Helen is now openly recognized as one of the creators of Imago Relationship Psychotherapy.

“Why only now?” - you ask. We discussed this option in 1988, but I [Helen] firmly rejected it. It was important to show Harvill, he deserved it. The publication gave him a chance to gain fame. It was a great honor for me to help develop this book. But I devoted a lot of time to the family business in Dallas, as well as to our family and children, so at that time my participation in the project was very modest and I chose to stay behind the scenes. It was Hendrix’s talent that made it possible to write a book and bring a great idea to life. Contributing to content is not the same as writing, which is why Harvill was the author. It was the same with the second work, Keeping the Love You Find: A Personal Guide (“Keep the Love You Find: A Personal Guide”); but in the third book, dedicated to parenting, he already listed me as a full-fledged co-author. This was the start of a trend. And yet we could not agree on how to talk about my contribution to the creation of Imago psychotherapy.

Let's go back in time and see where this story began. We met in 1977 - then we were both divorced, so we started dating. Over the course of several months, we discovered many common interests, and I asked Harvill what he saw for his future. At the time, he was retiring from his teaching position at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. One of his plans was to write a book. I asked him what it would be about, and he replied: “I’m curious: why do couples conflict? Why does a dream turn into a nightmare? I became interested in how he himself answered this question, and gradually the conversation began to look like this: one of us began a sentence, and the other helped finish it. This continued while we were dating and then for six years after we got married. In 1988, the book Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples [1] 1
Hendrix H.
The Bible of Love Relationships was published. M.: Eksmo-Press, 2020.

[Close]. Harvill and I have been discussing couples theory almost continuously for over forty years of our acquaintance!

When we were wondering how

The theory and practice of Imago psychotherapy was born, I [Harvill] came to the conclusion that we productively complement each other. Helen's right hemisphere of the brain dominates: she evaluates information through the prism of feelings and sensations, intuitively hears subtle features, and sees connections. For me, the left hemisphere dominates: I evaluate information through observation and logic and build a whole from individual elements. Helen is a source of creativity, and I am an architect and builder. The raw material collected from these different psychic approaches has evolved into ten published books on intimate relationships, a global organization of Imago Educators, and activists who believe in creating a culture of relationships ourselves.

Although we both created and developed the Imago theory for more than forty years, only my name appeared on the cover of the book and I alone was considered its author. For the first ten years after publication, I was the only one who professionally taught this technique and conducted master classes for couples, so for everyone, I was the only creator of Imago Relationship Therapy.

Helen is inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame for her work in the women's movement. She always fought for the fair sex to have an equal say in relation to the stronger half, not only in society, but also in relationships, at home. I was an office-based family therapist, and Helen was a global family therapist. Helping couples became her calling ten years before we met, and after we became partners, creating, developing and disseminating Imago ideas became part of her personality. Without going into details, we would like to address those who consider me to be the creator of Imago Therapy, and Helen as just an assistant. Years passed, our children left the family, the marriage became stable, and she became fully engaged in what she truly loved to do. The two of us began regularly conducting master classes for couples, speaking at national and international conferences, and writing books and articles about our method.

And then a series of happy accidents led to a profound insight. Our situation is simply a special case of a global problem, the historically inferior status of women and the unconscious bias towards her equal status with men. Helen and I, unwittingly, were involved in this.

Here is the episode that pushed us to this conclusion. I [Helen] published a book with Feminist Press called And the Spirit Moved Them. It was dedicated to several women whose contribution to the birth of feminism in the United States was underestimated. I was returning them their deserved place in history. When these individuals came out of the shadows, the film “Hidden Figures” appeared on the screens. It featured African-American women whose contributions to the US space program of the sixties had not previously been mentioned. At the same time, we learned about the existence of other books about representatives of the fair sex - politicians and doctors. It was a kind of trend of the time: to bring women out of the shadow of the men around them.

Helen brought a feminine perspective to Imago Therapy, which was important for both men and all humanity. It dawned on me [Harvill] that we are unconsciously supporting a cultural tradition that we consciously disapprove of. We are relegating women to secondary status. The fact that Helen's contribution to Imago Therapy remains obscure is simply a special case of a historical situation that is only now beginning to change for the better. This, on the one hand, was shocking, and on the other hand, it was liberating.

Epiphany destroyed all doubts: common authorship must be indicated. When Helen received full and fair recognition, there were tears in her eyes and joy in my heart. The release of the revised version of the book and the demonstration of Helen's key contribution to its creation and publication thirty years ago not only restores justice, but also promotes equality for both sexes throughout the world. Thus, this fully revised and updated edition with two co-authors is important for the global historical restoration of social justice and equality for women - and therefore equality for all. The processes described in it bring parity to readers in relationships, and now its co-authors themselves are equal. The time has come!

But that is not all! The theory continues to evolve!

Years of fighting for professional equality in our relationships and personal parity at home have taught us that inequality is a chronic dynamic in couples. This is not surprising: the social, economic and political equality of women has been an issue since the dawn of civilization.

We now understand that couples experience double the burden. The first and most obvious are childhood wounds, because of which people are so self-absorbed that they are not aware of someone else's inner world. It seems to them that their partner is very similar to them, and when reality diverges from expectations, they begin to complain both about their loved ones and about the whole world. This leads to conflict and disunity—the ingredients for unhappiness.

The second difficulty arises from the fact that the couple is permeated by a value system accepted in our culture, which encourages competition, pushes to be “the best” and win at any cost. When this attitude collides with the need to control stemming from childhood, the relationship turns out to be toxic and often simply unsustainable. Hence the 50 percent divorce rate, and 75 percent of couples who don't divorce are unhappy. This difficult situation spoils the lives of partners, since their understanding of emotional problems and solutions are dictated by the accepted value system. The external shapes the internal.

Traditional psychotherapy looked to the patient's inner world—feelings, thoughts, and memories—to help him gain a deeper understanding of himself. Such knowledge was supposed to free one to pursue healthier relationships. But this does not happen: the method worked in about 25 percent of cases.

This is why we [Harvill and Helen] have shifted our focus away from studying internal

processes on what happens
outside
a person,
between
people.
This is Helen's contribution related to the teachings of Martin Buber. We have found that if we help a couple change how they interact, rather than what they individually feel, think, and remember, a connection emerges and new thoughts and memories emerge. In such collaboration, it is how
the couples talk to each other that comes first, not
what
they talk about.
We started calling this Imago Dialogue
. This idea prompted the creation of an appropriate process.

It all started in 1977, at the dawn of our relationship. We had a big fight, and at some point Helen shouted: “Stop! Let one person speak and the other listen.” We did just that and, to our mutual surprise, we calmed down and began talking without shouting. This was one of the first times—but certainly not the last—that I [Harvill] incorporated Helen's suggestion into psychotherapy. Then it turned out to be the most important tool used by any psychotherapist working according to our method. The goal of the therapeutic effect was the interaction of partners: in essence, their external, not internal world. It became obvious that the way

partners talk to each other, it is more important not only
the content
of the conversation, but also their childhood memories and understanding
the reasons
for their behavior.

The rest is amazing.

Psychotherapy has become simple, precise and effective, although not easy.
When a couple uses the three-stage structured Imago Dialogue

security
appears in the relationship .
This cannot be compromised. Thanks to it, partners have the opportunity to show their vulnerability, stop defending themselves, open up and begin, in our terminology, to be present
for each other. The result is that one of them talks and the other really listens, without any negative attitude towards what he hears. An environment emerges in which existing intimate relationships heal childhood traumas and there is no need to delve into memories, feelings and thoughts, although for a hundred years after the emergence of psychotherapy this was considered the basis. External changes not only transform the inner world, but also heal the past. And being present for your partner and not judging creates an emotional equality that promotes a shift away from the competitive culture in which these wounds were inflicted. From personal to social and political. Everything is always interconnected.

Finally, we answered more accurately the questions we asked at the very beginning of our relationship. Why do couples conflict? Where does the nightmare come from? And what to do about it? It turned out to be easy. We are sure that the whole point is a “protest against differences”, and also that partners, due to unconscious competition, suppress each other morally and sometimes physically. This stems from a cultural value system that emphasizes fighting for emotional resources in relationships and being “right.” In addition, the conflict develops into a struggle for equality. If this problem exists, then there is inequality. Inequality causes anxiety, which makes you more defensive. In this state, the partner either leaves the scene and becomes indifferent, or the couple fights to the death - the relationship or one of the rivals.

This is why we insist that security cannot be compromised. This is a mandatory first step

any
Imago-dialogue
.
Through a three-step process, partners begin to talk about any topic without antagonism, and in other aspects they feel unity. Such conversations help to react less to irritants. The second stage
is to completely remove the negativity for safety.
This is also not up for debate. In the third stage,
partners should shower each other with daily evidence of support to strengthen the positive connection.

If stable security reigns in a relationship, the inner world changes. Anxiety is subsiding. There is no need to defend yourself anymore. The partner begins to be perceived positively. Interaction brings more joy! Spontaneous play and daily laughter appear. The feeling of fullness of life returns, and we feel comfortable in a connecting Universe. This was how it was at the very beginning of my life’s journey. The world seemed bright, everything was pulsating, interconnected. We felt curiosity and joy. This was before our parents turned out the lights and everything turned to shades of gray with a splash of black. If unity is restored, we will again see bright colors, the partner and the world will again emit a wonderful light. We will return to where we started: to the fullness of life and happy togetherness. This state is possible only in a relationship with a loved one, in a reliable and predictably safe space between

We hope to meet you in this book and show you the way to the promised land. We wish you pleasant reading and amazing relationships.

Harvill and Helen, May 2020

Part I. Unconscious partnership

Chapter 1: Love Lost and Found

For thirty-five years we have been helping people find love. We have witnessed numerous changes in the external aspects of relationships. For example, the median age has risen sharply[2] 2

Median age is the age at which the population is divided into two equal parts, that is, half of the population is older than this age, half is younger.
Note
ed. [Close] first marriage. When we started working with couples, it was 23 years for men and 21 for women. By 2017, this figure increased among men under 30, and among women to 27[3] 3

US Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, March and Annual Social and Economic Supplements (2017).

[Close]. Nowadays it is not necessary to start a family before the age of 30: a person can study, work and explore the world. Many get married even later, or even don’t do it at all. In addition, young people view marriage with suspicion and even refuse it, since before their eyes there are very few couples whom they want to imitate.

Thirty years ago, most of the couples we studied spent very little time together, and this took the energy out of their relationships. Today, digital technologies have further reduced face-to-face communication. Survey conducted in 2020[4] 4

Flurry Mobile, US Consumers Time-Spent on Mobile.

[Close] showed that adults spend five hours a day on portable devices, and this does not include time on TV, set-top boxes, laptops and personal computers. Apple devices - iPhone and iPad - are named very accurately. They emphasize I - “I” - and not the most important communications for us.

Another phenomenon of the 21st century - everything is about

greater tendency to rely on the Internet. In the 1970s and 1980s, people mainly met in educational institutions, at work and at various events. Today, millions meet their soulmates on dating sites. For a fee, the system will carefully analyze your personality and preferences and produce a list of those who suit you best than others. If you're lucky, the hit will be one hundred percent! Marriages are no longer made in heaven, but thanks to computer algorithms.

ETERNAL TRUTHS

In the new conditions of dating and pairing, two aspects remain unchanged. First, people are still looking for permanent relationships. We miss the deep feeling of affection, the joy that fills us with newfound love. Recently, at our master class, one participant said: “When I fell in love with my wife, I felt for the first time that I was loved and accepted for who I am. It's a heady feeling." John Keats, the 19th century Romantic poet, put it this way: “Love is my religion, and you are its only tenet. You have kidnapped me with a force that I cannot resist." When a person is in love, he ceases to be lonely, feels the fullness of life and joyful unity. The entire universe begins to feel like home, and the power and wonder of romantic love captivates you.

Secondly, people still experience heartache from love troubles. People complained about it even in the times of Cleopatra and Anthony; then the best option was suicide. One client whose girlfriend left him admitted: “I couldn’t eat or sleep. My chest felt like it was about to explode. I was constantly crying and didn’t know what to do.” This injury has been known since ancient times. A medical treatise written more than three thousand years ago in the Middle East identifies a disease called “love pangs.”[5] 5

Bottero, Mesopotamia, p. 102–103.

[Close]. According to the authors, such patients “are constantly depressed, their throats are tight, eating and drinking are not enjoyable, and they endlessly repeat, with deep sighs: “Oh, my poor heart!”

THIS IS A PERSONAL PROBLEM

We know the pain of lost love firsthand. Our first marriages ended in divorce. In my [Harvill] case, the difficulties began when the two children were still small. My wife and I valued our relationship very much and worked intensively with several therapists for eight years. Nothing worked and we filed for divorce.

When I sat in line to see the judge, I felt like a doubly loser: both as a husband and as a psychotherapist. That day I was supposed to be teaching a course on family and marriage, and the next day, as usual, counseling several couples. Despite my professional training, I felt as discouraged and defeated as those who were waiting for the call next to me.

For a year after the divorce, I woke up every morning with a keen sense of loss, and before going to bed I looked at the ceiling, trying to find some explanation for the failed marriage. Of course, my wife and I - like many - had a good dozen logical reasons to get a divorce. I didn’t like one thing about her, she didn’t like something else about me, we had different interests and goals, we looked in different directions. But I felt that behind this list of complaints there was some underlying disappointment, a fundamental reason for our unhappiness, which eight years of searching had never been able to formulate.

As time passed, my despair grew into a burning desire to understand this dilemma. I was not going to leave the ruins of my family without drawing conclusions. Two years later I met Helen.

I [Helen] also had two small children, and like Harville, I suffered greatly and could not understand why my first marriage had failed. I felt the estrangement between me and my husband growing. It seemed to me that the point was that he spends many hours at work, and I remain at home alone. But over time, I began to wonder: were there other, less obvious reasons for the widening rift between us? Why have we failed to identify these underlying problems and solve them?

IMAGO PSYCHOTHERAPY

The very day we [Harvill and Helen] met, we discovered an active interest in the psychology of relationships. Harville was a clinical pastoral counselor and Helen was working on her master's thesis in counseling at Southern Methodist University. During our courtship, we spent a lot of time collecting ideas from a variety of fields, including philosophy, religion, feminism and physics, and shared our discoveries on dates.

Imago therapy, which is the subject of this book, was born over decades of work together and was finally fused in the crucible of our marriage. Over the past thirty-five years, we have used this approach with thousands of couples, both in private consultations and in group workshops, which we now teach together.

Working with so many people has given us a deeper understanding of how marriage works, why it can fall apart, and how couples can reconnect and relive the joy and wonder of falling in love for the first time. Based on these ideas, we made Imago Therapy more and more effective and today we can help partners get the love of their dreams faster than before and with better results.

THE MAIN IDEA

One of the most important ideas of Imago Therapy is that the fundamental cause of dissatisfaction in most couples is not visible. Formally, partners argue about housework, money, raising children, the next vacation, who talks too much on their cell phone. Beyond awareness, however, everyone follows an unwritten plan, formed in childhood: to restore the sense of fullness of life and joyful unity with which a person comes into this world. The specifics of this program are unique for everyone, but the main goal is the same: to experience with your partner the same sensations that your parents gave. And people put this task before those closest to them! “Listen, I want you to meet the emotional needs that I carried with me as a child.”

Most of us greatly underestimate the power of the subconscious. To better understand its pervasive influence, let's give an analogy. During the day the stars are not visible. We say that they “appear” in the sky, although they never disappeared. Their number is also difficult to estimate. A certain number of dim dots are visible on the city sky, and we assume that there is nothing else there. If you drive away from the artificial illumination, the night heights strewn with sparks will amaze you with their brilliance. But only the study of astronomy reveals the truth: hundreds of thousands of stars that are visible outside the city on a clear moonless night are only a small part of the luminaries in the Universe, and many of the luminous points that we consider stars are actually entire galaxies. It's the same with the subconscious. Ordered, logical, conscious thoughts are just a thin veil over the subconscious, which functions constantly. When we fall in love, the unconscious, living in the eternal “now” and only vaguely imagining the outside world, tries to recreate our childhood, to resurrect the past. It's not a matter of habit or blind desire, but a need to heal old wounds.

Few people are aware of this plan, and many deny its existence altogether. “What is the connection between my childhood and my partner’s drinking? I need to solve the problem here and now.” But one of the sources of problems with alcohol may be that the other half is unavailable, and the situation that has arisen, in turn, supports this unavailability, lack of communication. Many more do not know that the mutual feeling of separation is a repetition of the childhood trauma of both spouses. Our partner is partly to blame for our complaints, but we subconsciously expect him to intuitively guess and satisfy our needs without asking for anything in return. We also chose it to relive old feelings, to heal the sadness and pain of the past.

AMAZING BRAIN

How to satisfy needs from the past without even realizing them? New insights into our brains are helping us better understand the potential we all have to regain our lost joy.

Let's take a quick look at the structure of this mysterious organ, which consists of many different sections. To make it easier, let's divide the brain into three concentric layers[6] 6

McLean, Man and His Animal Brains. This is one of several approaches to describing the brain from an evolutionary perspective. We use the terms “ancient brain” and “new brain” because of their simplicity and clarity.

[Close].

The brain stem, the deepest and most primitive layer, controls the flow of messages between the brain and the rest of the body and controls breathing, swallowing, heart rate, blood pressure and other vital functions. It is located at the base of the skull and is sometimes called reptilian, since all vertebrates, from reptiles to mammals, have it.

At the top of the brain stem is the limbic system, which is responsible for long-term memory and where strong emotions are formed. Scientists have learned to surgically stimulate the limbic system in laboratory animals and create spontaneous bursts of fear and aggression. In a relationship, you can both send and receive these kinds of impulsive outbursts!

In this book we will refer to the brainstem and limbic system as the ancient brain. Let's assume that this is a hard program, “embedded” in the subconscious, which determines most of your involuntary reactions.

The third region, the cerebral cortex, surrounds two inner layers on top. It is much more massive, covered with grooves and is best developed in Homo sapiens. This is where most cognitive functions are performed. We will call the cortex the new brain because it was the last to emerge in evolution.

The prefrontal cortex of the new brain is the conscious, waking part of your personality that interacts with the world around you every day. She makes decisions, thinks, observes, plans, anticipates, organizes information, generates ideas. The new brain is naturally logical and tries to see the effect of any cause, and to find the cause for each effect. In general, it is this analytical, researching, questioning part of the brain that you consider yourself

. If partners bring new brains into the relationship, it can correct and soften some of the emotional responses caused by the older brain.

THE LOGIC OF THE ANCIENT BRAIN

Unlike the new brain, most of the functions of the ancient person are not aware of, and they remain at the subconscious level. Experts say that the ancient brain cares primarily about self-preservation. He is always alert and constantly asks the primal question: “Is it dangerous or not?”

In doing its job—providing security—the ancient brain acts completely differently from the new one. One of the most important differences between the two is that the ancient brain has a hazy view of the outside world. Unlike the new, which relies on direct perception of the world around it, the old receives information from the images, symbols and thoughts formed by the new.

It sorts this data into large categories. For example, the new brain easily sees the difference between John, Susie and Roberto, and the ancient one decides which of six groups they belong to: 1) those who need to be fed; 2) those who feed; 3) those with whom you need to have sex; 4) those from whom you need to run; 5) those who need to obey; 6) those who need to be attacked[7] 7

These basic defense systems presumably arose in reverse order of evolution. Caring appeared much later than fear, which is considered a primary affect: it is believed that self-preservation as a basic instinct preceded the caring response by millions of years.

[Close]. Subtleties like “neighbor,” “cousin,” “mother,” and “spouse” elude him.

The ancient and new brains are very different from each other, but they constantly exchange information and interpret it. This helps explain why some of a partner's actions produce seemingly disproportionate reactions.

Let's assume that you are a middle-aged man, a middle manager in a medium-sized company. It's been a busy day at work, you've settled an issue with an important client and put the finishing touches on a multi-million dollar budget. Now you are going home, and you really want to share your success with your wife. On the way, you receive a message from her: she is delayed and will only be back in a few hours. But you hoped so much that she would already

is waiting for you! After parking your car in the garage, you enter an empty house. Now what? Recover from disappointment, enjoy a moment of solitude and do one last budget reconciliation? Of course, but first you go straight to the freezer and take out a scoop of vanilla ice cream - the go-to remedy for quelling your anger and frustration.

When your wife finally comes home, you feel cold and distant. The next day, you also behave with restraint: you lay out your work documents on the dining table and barely look up, and then watch sports programs on TV all evening.

As time passes, your reaction may seem strange to you. You know very well that your wife also has a very responsible job and she has to stay late. Why were you so angry with her? Where did the feeling that she betrayed you come from? The fact is that the absence of your wife has awakened in your subconscious the very feelings that you experienced many years ago. Your parents were constantly busy, and you had to stay in the after-school group until dinner, when your mother picked you up. You were jealous of your friends who went home straight after class. As a teenager, you would come home after school to an empty house and spend hours watching TV, waiting for your parents. Often they returned too tired and could not relax and pay attention to you.

Decades have passed, but your previous experiences do not leave you alone and seem to be gnawing at you from the inside - that is why you react so sharply to the late return of your spouse. For your ancient brain, it's the same feeling of abandonment that you had as a child.

FORMING NEW PATHWAYS

If you realize

If you recognize the unwanted intrusion of the past into your subconscious and begin to manage it, your relationship with your partner will become less emotional and more reasonable. The ancient brain will not set the tone for your behavior, and you will learn to be guided by reason rather than feelings. Your stress levels will decrease, you will open up to each other, and you will be able to enjoy your time together.

But how to achieve this? How to reduce the influence of past experiences if we are not aware of painful episodes even from our own life, not to mention the life of our other half?

If your partner makes you suffer, he is not the love of your life.

Sometimes we realize that a truly loving person would never make us suffer. But often we continue to live out of habit, moving forward by inertia, reassuring ourselves with phrases like “but he (she) loves me so much.”

It should be remembered that a loving person will never manipulate a partner in his own interests, or try to subjugate the other. He will never take advantage of others for his own benefit, as if his personality were of no value.