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Relationships might be very intense, but that doesn’t make them healthy. You can find yourself in an interaction that involves powerful jealousy, huge fights and amazing make-up sex. Nothing may make you feel as horrible or as terrific. You can find yourself flipped between two extremes. When it’s good, nothing is better. When it’s bad, it’s really, really bad.
Some relationships can be like a drug.
You might find yourself saying and doing crazy things in this relationship. You may have a hard time imagining life without this particular insanity, but that doesn’t make it love.
The love in fables and stories can be pretty weird, if you’re trying to live a functional, productive life. It can be hell on the children, if kids are involved. All relationships involve conflict—and hopefully working through that conflict to find a healthy resolution—but not all relationships involve this kind of turmoil.
Being intense, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good.
Relationships can seem to go from zero to eighty in a matter of minutes. You might have felt an amazing, instantaneous connection. In this kind of interaction, you may feel this person knows you better than anyone ever has. You can feel known, without being known, though. Immediate intimacy is an oxymoron. Intimacy can't be immediate, it takes development.
The person you just met might not know the name of your fourth grade teacher, where you went on your very first date or who you voted for in the last presidential election. He doesn't really know much about you, but you might still have the emotion of connection, even when there is little actual connection.
Love involves knowledge. This doesn't mean a knowledge of facts. After all, a dossier of facts doesn't convey knowledge of a person, but real intimacy requires you to know the other person and them you, before you can get to the place where you actually love one another. While it is very true that you might have friends and acquaintances, who know the data of your life and who you wouldn’t even consider dating. But real, lasting, functional love involves knowing the loved one. You can have knowledge of the other without love, but you can’t really have love without knowledge.
You can’t get around this.
If love on the grand scale involves fostering the love one to be the best he or she can be, some actual understanding of the person is required. This may not be the stuff of books and movies, but this is how the real life nuts-and-bolts of relationship works.
This doesn’t mean that functional relationships are boring. They aren’t. Real relationships involve working through conflict. That process has fire-works of it’s own. You may argue until you’re both blue in the face.
There will probably be times you won’t feel loved. Workable, fulfilling relationships, though, help you to become a better person. In order to be in the relationship, you have to look at yourself seriously and come to terms with the changes you need to make.
Intensity can feel both magical and scary. Be careful that your particular intensity is helping you be the best you.
