Television and movies are rife with clichés and myths about love. Let’s take a look at some of these myths and what’s really true about them.
Save
MYTH 1: Love is blind.
The thought behind this myth is that if he truly loves you, he will overlook all your flaws (and you will overlook his).
This might be true during the “honeymoon” phase of a relationship, but that stage doesn’t last forever.
The Reality: The reality is that we all have flaws.
It’s often said that what attracts us in the beginning is the thing we most resent or that drives us crazy as time goes on.
For example, at first, you love that he’s always cracking jokes, but after you’ve heard the same joke 150 times, you cringe when you’ve just ordered a meal and you hear him lead into the setup with your server yet again.
Or, you notice that whenever you’re starting to talk about something serious, he finds a joke in it, completely destroying the mood or the moment.
These might seem like petty complaints, but if you don’t address them, they can grow into major rifts in the relationship, which leads us to our second myth.
MYTH 2: Love is easy.
Lust is easy. One-night stands are easy (sometimes). But love? Love takes much longer to develop, and takes tending.
Imagine you are planting a garden. You take lots of time to prepare the soil and plant the seeds at just the right depth.
Then you just let it go. You don’t water, you don’t pull weeds. What’s going to happen? Everything dies.
The Reality: Relationships take work
Your relationship is just like that garden. It takes watering, nurturing, and attention to make it grow and thrive.
Depending on your and your partner’s preferred Love Language, different skills are required for you or your partner to feel loved and cherished.
What often happens is that each partner has a different love language.
For example, yours is Gifts. When your man surprises you with flowers or stops to pick up your favorite candy or even makes a card for you, you feel loved. It isn’t the amount of money he spends, but that he was thinking of you and brought home a token of his affection.
On the other hand, imagine that his primary love language is Acts of Service. He feels loved when the house is clean, or you pick up his dry cleaning, or you’ve cooked a meal instead of bringing home takeout.
Perhaps you see those tasks as menial, and because you’re a liberated woman, you feel he isn’t appreciating that you’ve been working all day, too, and all the other things you do, like bring him little tokens of your affection!
It’s important to have a conversation around your love languages, because this is often the easiest way to educate each other on what helps you feel loved.
MYTH 3: Love is never having to say you’re sorry.
Way back in 1970, there was a movie called Love Story. The most famous line in that movie (rated the #9 most romantic movie of all time by the American Film Institute) was, “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.”
It worked great in the movie, but it doesn’t work so well in real life.
In fact, it’s the willingness to apologize that could save your relationship. There a “joke” that goes something like this: If a man speaks in a forest and there’s no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong?
Somehow, it has evolved that men think that if they speak their minds, it will lead to a fight and they will end up in the doghouse.
Clearly, this is a stereotype. We can probably find just as many instances where a woman speaks up and gets hit or put down.
The Reality: Communication saves relationships.
There’s nothing wrong with apologizing, even if you think you are right! For one thing, offering an apology is the best way to accept responsibility for the miscommunication.
The more both parties are willing to do this, the less they will fight and the more they will communicate. I’ve found that what you are fighting about usually has nothing to do with the surface problem.
For example, he leaves the cap off the toothpaste for the thousandth time. You say something and it leads to a fight.
Is it really about the toothpaste? Or is it about all the other things you have asked him to do that he doesn’t do, and you feel disrespected because you think he doesn’t listen?
Is it because your parents made a big deal about the toothpaste when you were a kid?
Or, are you just a control freak and always have to get your way?
Looking at it from his point of view, maybe he was thinking about a problem at work or getting ready to play golf and it he absently wandered off before he put the cap back on.
It wasn’t a diabolical scheme to annoy you.
Would it have helped if he just said, “I’m really sorry—my mind was elsewhere”? Then, instead of turning it into a fight about you “always” nagging him, the whole thing could have been over very quickly.
This is a minor example, but too often we don’t say what’s bothering us for fear of it leading to a fight. According to Brad Blanton, author of Radical Honesty, withholding is the worst form of lying and does the most damage.
Most people say they don’t speak up to avoid hurting someone else’s feelings.
However, what really happens when we keep quiet is that the incident–and our resentment–keep growing in our minds, until we lose it over something really trivial (like the toothpaste cap).
Instead, if we can clearly and specifically state what the person said or did that made you mad, you can get over it, and you might get cooperation to avoid that problem in the future.
The Bottom Line
Every myth, like every stereotype, has some truth to it. But myths tend to be shallow and a little too convenient to dismiss a big issue. Digging beneath the myth, taking a look at your own responsibility for the problem, and hesitating before blaming the other person all go a long way toward strengthening your relationship.