“Don’t ever be with someone
because someone else
pressured you to. I got
married the first time because
I was raised Catholic and
that’s what you were
supposed to do. Wrong. I got
married the second time
because I was miserable and
lonely and thought having a
loving wife would fix
everything for me. Also
wrong. Took me three tries to
figure out what should have
been obvious from the
beginning, the only reason
you should ever be with the
person you’re with is because
you simply love being around
them. It really is that simple.”
– Greg
Before we even get into what you
should do in your relationship, let’s
start with what not to do.
When I sent out my request to readers
for advice, I added a caveat that turned
out to be illuminating. I asked people
who were on their second or third (or
fourth) marriages what they did wrong.
Where did they mess up?
By far, the most common answer was
“being with the person for the wrong
reasons.”
Some of these wrong reasons included:
Pressure from friends and
family.
Feeling like a “loser”
because they were single
and settling for the first
person that came along
Being together for image —
because the relationship
looked good on paper (or in
photos), not because the two
people actually admired each
other.
Being young and naive and
hopelessly in love and
thinking that love would
solve everything.
As we’ll see throughout the rest of this
article, everything that makes a
relationship “work” (and by work, I
mean that it is happy and sustainable
for both people involved) requires a
genuine, deep-level admiration for each
other. Without that mutual admiration,
everything else will unravel.
The other “wrong” reason to enter into
a relationship is, like Greg said, to “fix”
yourself. This desire to use the love of
someone else to soothe your own
emotional problems inevitably leads to
codependence, an unhealthy and
damaging dynamic between two people
where they tacitly agree to use each
other’s love as a distraction from their
own self-loathing. We’ll get more into
codependence later in this article, but
for now, it’s useful to point out that
love, itself, is neutral. It is something
that can be both healthy or unhealthy,
helpful or harmful, depending on why
and how you love someone else and
are loved by someone else. By itself,
love is never enough to sustain a