Why Does Love so Often Let Us Down?

There was once a popularly accepted script for living that seemed, at the time, to be tried and true. It said essentially this: find that special one, your real soul mate, and the riddle of life will be solved. From then on it would just be a simple matter of settling down into marriage and children and living contentedly to the end of one's days. The flush of being in love would carry us through the ups and downs and the ins and outs - because we'd found the one who could "make us happy".

Obviously, reality nowadays has not been living up to that fantasy for most of us. Divorce rates have skyrocketed to such an extent that many people now question whether marriage is a viable institution anymore. There are more children in single-parent households across America than ever before in its history. Have our very notions of love and partnership, then, proven themselves to have been illusions all along?

Most relationships that go sour do so because of resentments and disappointments; and these emotions most often arise for partners because of unfulfilled expectations. It seems as if unspoken pacts are sealed somewhere early in the history of relationships. Subtle promises are made on the wedding day or probably much earlier, and then the other person doesn't make good on that promise of conjugal bliss. But the very high incidence of broken relationships among us makes one wonder whether the efforts made on the parts of both partners is the issue or whether it's really the expectations, themselves, that they're holding onto.

When we are waiting for someone to come along and "make us happy", we are already in for a bit of trouble. We are leaving it up to another person to prove our worth to us and affirm our right to happiness. We won't be able to find and hold on to a fulfilling partnership until we stop expecting others to give it to us and discover that sense of self-worth for ourselves. Two partners who each believe in their own worthiness aren't likely to disappoint each other because they aren't expecting miracles from the relationship in the first place.

Perhaps the collective crisis that we humans are facing with our intimate relationships is meant to teach us to stop looking outside of ourselves for something that we can only find within. We don't need to succumb to cynicism and believe that the very ideal of love between partners is a lie or illusion. But we do need to take responsibility for our own lives and fulfillment, lest we be forever expecting others to love us in a way in which we can't love ourselves.