Читать книгу Coming Apart - Daphne Rose Kingma - Страница 15

Our primary and probably most potent myth about love is that love is forever, that when we make a relationship, it will last for our whole lives. Our marriage vows—“Till death do us part”—are the public ceremonial expression of that myth. We don't say, “I'll love you as long as it feels good,” or, “I'll love you until I find somebody else.” We say, “I'll love you forever; I'll live with you until one of us dies.” We expect the person we choose to be our partner to be with us for our whole lives.

It is this assumption in particular that makes breaking up so hard to do. In ending a relationship, we negate the myth of forever; we violate the assumption that our relationship will last us for our whole lives. What we see is that instead of being forever, our relationship was just an episode.

Because almost all of us have subscribed to the myth of forever, when our relationships end, the only thing we can say is, “I must not be any good; there must be something the matter with me. I created this relationship with the intention it would last forever, but now it's ending. It certainly can't be ending because the idea that love is forever is wrong, so it's got to be me who is wrong.” We spend an unbelievable amount of time in self-flagellation because we can't imagine that the notion of forever could possibly be inappropriate. But it is. There isn't a person in the United States who hasn't witnessed a divorce or the heartbreaking end of a romance. The truth is that relationships end. It is high time we explode the myth that love is forever, so that when we end relationships, we can do so without such devastating crises in self-esteem.