Post-Romantic Stress Disorder by John Bradshaw

Author:John Bradshaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: honeymoon, over, new, discoveries, lust, love, saving, marriage, after, before, late
Publisher: Health Communications Inc
Published: 2014-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

We’ve already dealt with number 1, the false beliefs surrounding our understanding of the romance program. Most researchers see being in-love as a nonworking prelude to love, not love itself. I’ve discussed how the “love molecule” dramatically raises each person’s sexual drive (testosterone level) and how in twelve to eighteen months, people more or less go back to their normal testosterone levels. The heightened state of the in-love stage is nature’s way of ensuring that we meet, mate, and reproduce, so that life will go on. It “did not evolve to help us maintain a stable, enduring partnership,” as Helen Fisher wrote.

For the individuals who are or were in-love, the diminishment of the romance program can be an enormous jolt. It must be understood that the post-infatuation period, with its possible PRSD, is the end of the prelude to love and the beginning of the first stage toward experiencing real grown-up love. If you look at Chart 7C, I’ve outlined what I (and many others) believe are the three self-generating stages of maturing love, which begin when the in-love/lust stage (romance program) ends.

I use variations on the word dependency because I express the developmental stages of childhood as a struggle that starts with being co-dependent (symbiotically bonded with our mothering sources). From that we move to counterdependency, as we find our earliest sense of self by separating from our mothering sources. This is a stage of oppositional bonding. Toddlers fight for their selfhood by having tantrums and saying “No!,” and a pure self-boundary statement, “It’s mine!” From the counterdependency struggle for separation and selfhood, in later childhood we begin to establish our unique independence. This is the adolescent’s struggle, par excellence. Teenagers often fantasize that they live with an “imaginary audience” watching them. Teenagers make a “personal fable” starring themselves.

They must make their lives unique and special. In late teenage years, high school, or the early years of college, we generally fall in-love and find ourselves ensconced in the mirroring eyes of our beloved. We find ourselves in a symbiotic bonding for the second time. Once our in-love trance ends, we begin the journey to mature interdependence.

I believe the romance program is the starting point of mature love. It is a wondrous time for most people, but to confuse it with mature love has, as we’ve seen, serious and potentially evil consequences.

In her book The Anatomy of Love, Helen Fisher discusses the length of marriage. For our ancestors, marriage seemed to last a very short time. In the animal kingdom, staying together for more than four years was unusual. This was enough time for the couples to have offspring and care for them. In four years, the offspring could fend for themselves. As marriage moved from being a political or social contract and merged with the in-love poetry and romance of the troubadours, it became a love affair.

As life expectancy grew beyond what ages had known in the past, we developed a new challenge—the long-term marriage. We still have scanty knowledge of how enduring marriage is supposed to unfold.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.