A To Zen

The Book(s) of Love

"Love is hard." Over the years, my mind has transmuted the opening sentence of M. Scott Peck's 1978 classic, The Road Less Traveled. It actually said, "Life is difficult." But I suppose if love were easy, life would not be difficult. That book helped propel my boyfriend and me along the bumpy path that became our marriage. We were in our twenties when we read that book, and it helped us discard, or at least box up, our Cinderella and Prince Charming images of love as the happily-ever-after end of the story.

Peck told the truth. Life and love are hard, and mature love involves a selfless desire for the growth of the beloved. Almost 20 years later, with our two children nearing adulthood, we are finally entering into a relationship based on such a mature love. We barely made it.

In Getting The Love You Want, Harville Hendrix helps us understand why it is so hard for us to experience a mutually satisfying loving adult relationship. It is impossible for the adults raising a child to meet every single need of that child. As a child grows, he or she will experience frustration and sometimes hurt when that idealized, perfect parent lets the child down.

Hendrix explains that this is a universal experience. Every child grows into adulthood with some wounds, with some unmet needs. When we move towards marriage, we are naturally drawn to the person who unconsciously triggers the wounds we need to heal. Of course while we are "falling in love" we are blind to these triggers. Rather than seeing love's blindness as a weakness, we can understand its natural mechanism leading us into commitment that will challenge old patterns and help our maturation process.

In Giving the Love that Heals: A Guide for Parents, Hendrix tells us that we will pass on the wounds of our childhood to our own children, unless we have faced and healed them. In fact, the times we remember as the most difficult and conflict ridden from our own childhood will most likely come up in our lives as parents. We will have those same types of conflict with our own children.

Just as the conflicts with our romantic partner can help us recognize and heal old wounds, interactions with our children provide an opportunity to explore and transform unresolved issues from our childhood. When the adult partners work through old wounds towards a conscious way of loving, they can recover their innate wholeness. As parents experience and model this way of living, they can more effectively provide the structure, support, and safety that children need.

Following the classic life pattern of wounded parents unconsciously raising children who become similarly wounded, many people grow up without a deep sense of self-worth. We can struggle so much to love ourselves that we have a hard time receiving love. In Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself be Loved, Hendrix admits that he has struggled to allow himself to be cherished for who he really is. We often wall off aspects of ourselves that we unconsciously find unacceptable. He says that we can look for clues of our repressed traits by observing what we dislike in others. When we consciously reclaim and embrace what has been repressed in us, we are freed to love and be loved.

In The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman suggests it is more than just our wounds that can make it so difficult to experience love. He says that there are five distinct ways that we receive love, and each of us has a tendency to express and receive love according to one "language." If a parent who sends love messages through physical touch has a child who receives love messages through "words of affirmation," that child may not feel he is receiving the love he craves even though the parent is trying to send those important love messages with touch. When we understand that we aren't necessarily speaking the same language as our loved ones, we can learn to consciously communicate our love in ways that will be received by others—a hug to one, a kind word of appreciation to another.

The validity of this theory is obvious in my home. Even though the stereotype of the teenager includes embarrassment about and lack of contact with parents, I have one who still wants to hold my hand while walking in the store. Her love language is touch. My other daughter, whose love language is "quality time," enjoys telling long stories about school as the family sits around the dinner table.

Life is difficult. But we can make it easier, make our loving relationships easier, by developing consciousness that empowers us to experience healing, love ourselves, love others, and receive their love in return.

Nancy Hirsch is a mom, writer, and activist with a focus on transformation, both personal and public. She can be reached at njh02@earthlink.com.