What Guys Get Wrong About Love
5 Things Guys Still Get Wrong About Love
For some, love is tight-knit family bonds. For some, love is ruby-red rose petals and boxes of chocolates. For some, love is candlelit dinners while a live jazz band plays. For some, love is a trip for two around the world.
Whatever your love is, love itself is a fascinating concept. It’s something that’s invisible, intangible, and sometimes subjective. You can’t mine love from the ground, you can’t detect love in the atmosphere, and you can’t test for the presence of love in the bloodstream. It’s existed in some form or other for millennia, and its presence (and absence) have had world-shaking effects.
But for all the talk about and obsession with love, it’s also something that suffers from myriad misconceptions. Some men grow up with incomplete, inaccurate, or even dangerously unhealthy ideas of what love is, what it means, and how it allows you to act.
That’s not necessarily all their fault, however. Growing up, boys are taught about love and relationships by their parents, their peers, and the pop culture of society surrounding them. It’s difficult to absorb such a message when the words spewed out are formed in a different way by everyone you know.
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Whatever it is that you believe when it comes to love, here are a few lessons about it that you should consider. You — and those you love — might benefit from them.
1. Love Isn’t Something That Develops Out of Nowhere
You’ve probably seen a movie or TV show where a guy professes his love to someone he barely even knows. The object of his affections is often a beautiful woman whom he’s become entranced with after watching her from afar, but the main constant is the fervent belief that he’s deeply in love with this person, and his feelings are important and worth acting on.
Sometimes the person is flattered, but other times, they’re creeped out since the two don’t have a strong bond with each other. Now, it is valid to have strong feelings for someone you don’t know, but that’s not love — that’s a crush. An attraction that develops in the absence of romantic intimacy, not in its presence, is something that’s all in your head.
"This unhealthy, unrealistic romantic focus can be caused by what I call 'romantic scarcity' — a perceived lack of dating options," says Connell Barrett, a New York City-based dating and self-development coach. "If a guy feels he has a shortage of quality romantic options, he can get hyper-focused on one person, even if he doesn’t know them. He thinks he’s in love, but it’s just an infatuation that comes from too much focus and too few dates. He 'falls for' someone he barely knows, thinking he or she is The One."
As a result, attempting to woo said person by saying “I love you” or with grand romantic gestures doesn’t make you look loving and attractive so much as it could make you seem a bit unbalanced. Until you really know someone, it’s difficult to truly say that you love them.
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2. Love Isn’t Something That Manifests Quickly
Many people might believe the stereotype that women are more prone to saying “I love you” first in heterosexual relationships. Whatever the truth of that may be, it doesn’t mean men don’t have a history of saying it first, either — as in, really early on in a relationship. Like, say, in the first few weeks.
"Actually, there is some research that suggests that men fall in love sooner than women, they just aren't as good about expressing and sharing that love with their partners," says Jor-El Caraballo, a relationship therapist and co-creator of Viva Wellness. "By contrast, women tend to be more measured with their approach in love, which contrasts stereotypes on both ends about love and monogamy."
Regardless of who says it first, it can be easy to mistake feelings such as “I really like spending time with you,” “I really like not being alone anymore,” and “We’re having a lot of sex and it’s exciting” for actual straight-up love.
Rushing into saying “I love you” can give the person you’re dating the wrong idea about your intentions and the seriousness of the relationship. That can either convince them you’re in it for the long haul when you aren’t, or scare them into thinking you’re about to propose when you’re really not. Either way, it’s an opportunity ripe for misunderstanding.
It can be hard to know when exactly to say “I love you” for the first time. If you’ve only been dating for a few weeks, your high levels of happiness and enjoyment don’t necessarily constitute a lasting bond that’ll stand the test of time.
3. Love Isn’t Just About Sexual Attraction
Sexual attraction is an incredibly powerful force. And no wonder: Sex is directly responsible for all human life on Earth.It’s hardly surprising that we’d evolve to have a very intense relationship with it. When you’re in the throes of sexual arousal (or even just sexual attraction), your ability to rationally process your feelings can easily be thrown way out of whack.
The cliché of someone saying “I love you” for the first time during sex exists for a reason. In the heat of the moment, it can feel like exactly the right thing to say, and that no other words appropriately convey the depth of the passion you’re feeling. But good sex is a bit like a drug; it can influence your thoughts and actions and cause you to do and feel things you wouldn’t otherwise; it’s also been shown to cause people to open up and become more talkative.
If you have strong feelings about a sexual partner you don’t interact with outside of sex, or someone you love having sex with but don’t love hanging out with before or afterward, it’s probably a stretch to call that love.
"Many men express themselves physically in many aspects of life. Some researchers will argue that's a function of primarily evolution and biology, but it's also hard to say how much of that focus is due to social gender conditioning and reinforcement as well," notes Caraballo. "Therefore, it's no surprise that immediate attraction is what drives many men to think about sexual chemistry. It's a way to express that attraction and love in a language they are often more familiar with. The land of speech, especially around emotional issues, is foreign to many men, leaving them feeling out of their depth and unable to speak about love meaningfully without ongoing intentional work to learn how to do so."
Love is something you’ll feel for a person not just when you’re in bed together, but also when you’re taking care of them while they’re sick, or standing next to each other at a party while talking to other people. It encompasses the whole of a person, not just how they look and what they’re like in bed.
4. Love Isn’t Possessive or Controlling
Being in love with someone can be scary. When you care about someone a lot, you’re at their mercy to a certain degree; their actions can have a massive impact on your emotional (and even physical) well-being.
While there is something beautiful about that vulnerability, it’s also something that can seem incompatible with masculinity to a degree. If you’re a guy who’s not used to or comfortable with letting other people have much of an impact on your emotions, you might feel compelled to try to control how they act.
You might be tempted to tell your partner what to do, how to dress, who they can hang out with, and so forth with the excuse that “It’s because I love you.” There might be some truth to that. After all, you’re probably not trying to control the actions of random strangers on the street who you have no relationship with, but the real culprit here is a misunderstanding of what love is.
"A controlling man is looking through a distorted lens," explains Barrett. "He defines love in an unhealthy, toxic way. He views total acceptance and adherence to his rules as signs of love. And the one who’s being controlled can often feel like they’re being loved because they mistake intense interest and attention for love, rather than seeing it as what it is: a form of abuse."
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If you really love someone, you recognize that they have just as much control over your feelings as you do over their feelings. You don’t seek to control or limit what they do, you seek to be in harmony with them. You want them to feel happy, not limited, threatened or suffocated.
5. Love Isn’t Violent and Doesn’t Excuse Violence
An extension of the above-mentioned urge to control a romantic partner is what happens when they don’t obey — when they act like another person, say, instead of your personal servant.
In situations like that, some men turn violent, whether physically or emotionally, and take their fear out on their partner. That’s the sad truth at the root of the horrifying statistics about domestic abuse and intimate partner violence. More than one in three women murdered in the world dies at the hands of an intimate partner. But if you really, truly love someone, not only would you not murder them, you would never even think of hurting them.
"An abusive partner might conflate love and violence in this way. He or she has a need for their lover to give them complete acceptance and adherence to their rules," warns Barrett. "When the abuser does not get those things — the suit isn't pressed, the roast is burnt — that makes the abuser feel unloved. So he makes sure these signs of love will be there in the future by becoming violent. In his mind, he can excuse violence because it's necessarily to keep love coming to him. Of course, it's the opposite of loving: It's hurtful, selfish and traumatizing."
Unfortunately, some men can grow up with twisted understandings of love that convince them they need to control the person they’re with and act on their feelings rather than trying to understand and work through them.
"I think many conflate love with violence (or believe love excuses violence) because that's what has been modeled for them or that they think is acceptable," says Caraballo. "In cultures where masculinity and patriarchy are prioritized over all things considered feminine, masculinity has become synonymous with toxic power, destruction and competition. That is, men are taught over and over again that their partners are inferior and that their own opinions and needs are what matters most."
If men had a better grasp of what love really is — a feeling that grows over time through getting to know someone closely and wanting to be close to them, support them and help them be happy — as a society we might find it easier to recognize that some things that we used to call romantic are actually violent, controlling, toxic, clueless, or otherwise unhealthy.
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