How much do you love me? – is not an easy question to answer.
‘How much do you love me?’; this is something people ask each other frequently for fun. It could be between two partners, between a parent and a child, and most times we have a cute or funny answer- ‘I love you one million’; ‘I love you ten million’; ‘I love you to the moon and back’, and so on.
Have you ever wondered how much you actually love someone? You obviously cannot quantity something like this because it’s relative. However, this question is not tobe answered at a rational level. This has to be answered at an emotional level. Can you feel how much you love someone?
Emotional Disconnect
I’m someone who’s been completely disconnected with my emotions. When I started therapy, my therapist would ask me- ‘how are you feeling now? How do you feel? ‘. I wouldn’t have an answer. I just wouldn’t feel anything. I’ve come a long way since then, but I still have an even longer way to go before I can say I’m fully connected with my emotions.
I started with connecting with sensations in my body. I would say I feel pain at the back of my neck, or say my chest feels clogged, when asked how I felt. It took me a long time to get to the point of saying things like- I feel peaceful, I am angry, it feels exhilarating and so on. The lowest point of my breakdown came when I was attending a group therapy workshop and one of the facilitators asked me how I would feel if someone close to me decided to leave me. While my mind instantly gave answers- ‘I’d be devastated’, ‘I’d be lost’, I knew my facilitator wasn’t looking for those answers. Shewanted to know how I felt. And I felt nothing. So, I chose not to give my mind’s answer, and said I could not feel a thing. That workshop broke me further and brought out a lot of emotions. I feel better now, but I still struggle inconnecting with how I feel. It does not come naturally to me. Everyone has a stronger side- some people are more emotional than rational and some people the other way. However, being aware of it and working on creating a balance is sufficient enough progress.
Understanding what love meant for my wife
I would tell my therapist that I love my wife, but she does not feel my love. He had asked me to read the book- The five love languages by Gary Chapman, which gave me a new perspective of what my wife might potentially relate to as love, vis-a-vis how I express my love. There was obviously a gap. The details of our love languages are not important. When I tried addressing this gap and spoke her love language, everything changed. All I had to do what make a cup of coffee for her in the morning. Our entire equation changed. She felt loved. I could clearly see it. Our interactions changed. However, I could not keep at it. I still make coffee over the weekends and my wife absolutely loves it, but that wasn’t enough. My wife was still pulling a lot more weight on the home front than I was. I do have a more demanding job than hers at this point in time, but there is still way more that I can do even given my job.
Do I really love my wife?
I wondered then, why was I not doing it? When I knewthat it was my wife’s love language, why was I not able to do it? I hated chores even as a child and I’ve never had to do a lot of it when I was growing up. So, it did not come naturally to me. However, I did love my wife. That should have helped me get over my hatred for chores. And I was left thinking- do I actually love my wife? If I did love my wife, everything else should have fallen in place naturally. Was it just convenient? Having a wife, kids, running a family- everything that the society expects you to do?
This was very unsettling for me. I believed I loved my wife very much, but I wasn’t sure anymore. I probably used the word love very easily, and my definition of love might have as well been just how the society defines love- secure, settled marriage with kids; and this meant the couple loved each other. Even if there was no love as such, this was expected after a few years of getting married. That’s how everyone lives. Expressing love is considered childish and not normal when you are married for a decade, for example. I’ve worked on this several times in my therapy sessions, and in group workshops. Firstly, I had to accept the possibility that I might not genuinely love my wife. I then looked at what I wanted. I definitely wanted to get to point where I could genuinely love my wife. One thing I was sure of- if there was one person I would want by my side for everything in my life, and I could choose only one, I was sure it would be my wife. She was my best friend. We kept very little secrets. My therapist tells me that not a lot of couples have the level of transparency and trust we have between each other. The problem was, why wasn’t my love translating in to anything?
Dropping Roles
The only way was to drop roles; the role of husband and wife. Every time I talk to her, look at her, work with her on something, ask her or do something for her, I would remind myself this was a person I was living with, and sharing my life with, but she was not my wife. Automatically, all the expectations, the prejudices, the conditioning that come with those roles, the conditioning that operates through me sub-consciously disappear. I automatically started sharing work. I became more compassionate and understanding. We were truly a team only now, and I wish I was there when we got married. I’ve wasted years playing to the society’s tunes. Of course, it is part of the learning process, and I’m glad that way that I was depressed. If not for that, I would not have started therapy. And to be honest, I believe everyone in this world needs therapy; whether they know it or not and whether they are ready for it or not emotionally. I hope therapy becomes a core part of mainstream education, and not something someone needs to explore only when they have problems. Imagine if we teach children at a young age that it is OK to open up emotionally; the world would be a much better place.
Today
I keep slipping in and out of conditioning on a daily basis, and I think this is part of my evolution. I will eventually hit a place wherein I break role-conditioning completely in my marriage. I remind myself of an analogy that my therapist often quotes- ‘If both of you were playing a tennis match, you got to be doubles partners facing the world, not facing each other. You complement each other- you have to understand and learn to balance each other’s strengths and weaknesses. You become one hell of a team then. That’s what being married is about, not what the society defines it to be today’.