“All You Need Is Love”, said the man who admitted to hitting and beating his wife.
So what even is love? According to the dictionary:
Sounds great, right? Well, from my experience, most of the time it’s not.
Love often keeps us in relationships that make us unhappy and miserable.
Unrequited love, for example, is one of the most painful things we could ever experience.
Ultimately, Love alone is never enough. And whether it’s good or bad depends on the following:
01
Trust
You don’t check their phone. Not because you can’t, but because nothing in your gut is telling you to.
Trust is believing your partner without needing evidence every week.
A relationship without it invites paranoia. It slowly rips you apart and makes you question everything, including yourself.
Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.
02
Respect
You’re out with friends and they tell the story you asked them not to tell. Everyone laughs. Not cool.
Respect is valuing each other’s feelings, opinions and boundaries. Disagreeing without disregarding.
It’s also what happens when you’re not in the room. Where there’s respect, both people feel appreciated and safe enough to grow. Where there isn’t, one of you slowly gets smaller, attraction dies and the relationship goes downhill from there.
Respect is how to treat everyone, not just those you want to impress.
03
Connection
Something funny happens and they’re the first person you want to tell. Not the last thing you mention that evening. The first.
Early on, connection is easy. Everything is new and you’re discovering each other constantly. You message all day, every day, and get that warm feeling every time their name pops up.
Over time it has to become something else, because the novelty runs out. It moves past physical attraction into emotional and intellectual territory, or it fades.
Emotional connection grows through actually talking about your thoughts, your worries and what you want. Physical connection grows through the small stuff. A kiss on the forehead. Playful intimacy. Thoughtful gestures that cost nothing. You need both.
Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.
04
Communication
They ask what’s wrong. You say nothing. They know it isn’t nothing. You know they know. Three days later it comes out with a vengeance, during an argument about something stupid.
Almost nobody has a communication problem. They have a saying-the-thing-while-it’s-still-small problem.
Good communication is just expressing what you think, feel and need before it grows into something bigger. Bottle it up and you don’t avoid the argument. You schedule it for later, at a worse time, about the wrong subject.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
05
Values
You want to move abroad. They want to stay near their mum. Neither of you is wrong. That’s the problem.
Values are what you consider most important in life, and they quietly decide every big call you’ll ever make together. Where you live. Whether you have kids. What you do with money.
If you both value financial stability, saving for the future is an easy conversation. If one of you doesn’t, you’ll be having that conversation for the next thirty years. Shared values don’t remove conflict. They just mean you’re arguing about the route rather than the destination.
Your values are your current estimations of truth. They represent your answer to the question of how to live.
06
Compatibility
It’s Friday night and you want a quiet one. So do they. No negotiation required.
Sounds boring. It isn’t. Compatibility is how well your lifestyles, interests and personalities actually fit, and it decides how much friction sits in an ordinary week.
The test is friendship. Strip out the romance and ask whether you’d still choose to spend a Sunday with this person. If the answer is yes, most of the ordinary week takes care of itself.
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
07
Adaptability
Money, stress, libido, age. Nothing stays the same, whether you like it or not.
In business, adaptability is the difference between winning and losing. Relationships work the same way. The couples who last aren’t the ones who avoided change. They’re the ones who adapted when things got hard.
Staying flexible and open to new ideas also keeps things interesting, which is a nice side effect of not being rigid.
All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation.
What about love?
Love can be excruciatingly painful or the most fulfilling, comforting feeling we get to experience. It hits fast and hard, and it’s very good at convincing you the rest is already handled.
Without trust, respect, connection, communication, shared values, compatibility and adaptability, love will almost certainly cause more pain than joy.
From a young age we’re taught that love is something magical. An irrational emotion that can’t be explained. Find your soulmate and you’re set for life. In reality, love needs maintenance.
Love can keep you in an unhappy relationship for years. It will slowly destroy you if you ignore the things that make it worth having.
So no, love isn’t overrated exactly. It’s just not the starting point.
Get the other seven right and love tends to turn up on its own. Start with love and hope the rest follows, and you’re setting yourself up for misery.