Here’s a conception of love that you may not have heard before, and I happen to think it’s excellent. Probably the clearest articulation of it is in M. Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled” so we’ll start there. In that stimulating tome Peck delineates between ‘falling in love’, and what he calls ‘real love’.
For him, falling in love involves a collapse of ego boundaries. In this case, ego refers to sense of self – so when we fall in love we feel like we are one with the other person, which obviously feels great – “the sudden release of oneself from oneself, the explosive pouring out of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most of us as ecstatic. We and our beloved are one! Loneliness is no more!”[1] Sounds great right? But Peck argues that falling in love is actually quite unhealthy, because the romance inevitably fades. You start to realize subtle differences in each other – we have very little in common, I hate his friends, he hates my political affiliation etc, and slowly those ego boundaries fall back into place, and the love ends. Moreover, people in love tend not to go anywhere in their lives. They are content in their togetherness, mostly because they aren’t lonely. They don’t want the other person to change because then they might no love them anymore, and they no longer think in terms of making themselves better but in terms of making the relationship better.
Instead of this, Peck recommends real love, which he defines as: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Please note the word growth. The idea here is that both parties retain their ego boundaries and encourage each other to be unique and seperate. That is that male X experiences female Y, and says “you’re awesome, I really like how cool you are, I want you to be everything you can be, because the more awesome you are the more I’m going to like you,” and female Y does the same to him. In this way, both parties motivate each other to grow and mature and fulfill their individual potential. This cannot happen without ego boundaries, and it represents a much healthier approach to relationships because each party is constantly reminded of and affirms what they like about the other.
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