Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time

Rating:
Summary: The last illusion.....
Review: Dr. Stephen Mitchell was a respected psychoanalyst in New York City prior to his untimely death following the publication of CAN LOVE LAST? THE FATE OF ROMANCE OVER TIME. In this book, Mitchell explores the nature of romantic love -- the love two individuals unrelated by blood can have for each other but lose over time. These couples can be hetero, homo, married or not.

Mitchell suggests most relationships don't last because of romantic love. If romantic love exists at all in a long-term relationship, most of the time it does so in spite of other key factors that hold the couple together. In other words, there are many 'ties that bind' and most if not all kill romantic interest.

The most common motivation for coupling is the perceived need for security most people associate with connectedness to another person. Romance is not associated with security, however, it is associated with risk and unknowing. In the end, the need to acquire security via knowing all the details about the beloved, i.e. objectivity or elimination of the 'unknown', overwhelms romantic love. Generally, individuals who grew up in chaotic situations have an excessive need eliminate the unknown and are therefore very likely to kill romantic love.

Dr. Mitchell provides a number of case histories in his book to illustrate his key points -- ideas others have explored that he presents in a fresh and unique way. In the end, he seems to side with the existentialist Sarte who suggested that security is an illusion since death intervenes in every life. Dr. Mitchell asks, will you regret the things you did or did not do in your effort to secure your life? To truly live, one must work past the last illusion.

Rating:
Summary: Lasting Love
Review: How can love survive despite the vagaries of hectic schedules, work and parenting pressures, aging, and boredom? That is one of the many questions Stephen Mitchell attempts to answer in Can Love Last? While considering the oft-posed questions about "chemistry," real love, and soul mates, he looks at whether you can determine if you've found "the one"; and how to keep them if you have.

Dr. Mitchell, who died suddenly in 2000 at the age of 54, founded the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues and was renowned for his work in relational psychoanalysis, which features a more collaborative approach than traditional psychoanalysis. As Mitchell's widow, Margaret Black, C.S.W., points out in her foreword to the book, when it comes to his analysis of relationships, "Freud's formulations have not been particularly helpful, certainly not very optimistic."

A shame, really, since it is love, according to Mitchell, that makes life worth living. But nurturing love is no easy task since, as he points out in his introduction, "Modern life, at all points on the socioeconomic scale, is difficult, draining, and confusing." That's where his book comes in, offering guidance on how to look at the differences between love and desire, and how to have both in a relationship; doing so with prose that is often illuminating and even poetic. Describing the need for both security and adventure in a relationship, Mitchell writes, "Romantic passion emerges from the convergence of these two currents," which are "at once both erotic and sacred."

Based on modern divorce rates, Mitchell argues modern relationships are "based on fantasies of permanence." Although we seek committed relationships for security, in reality, rather than safe, these relationships are actually dangerous. "Love, by its very nature, is not secure;" Mitchell concludes, although "we keep wanting to make it so." The key to Mitchell's approach to making love last lies in acknowledging this danger exists and harnessing its energy to restore desire and passion through spontaneity and romance.

He makes a good point when he argues it is curious how separated couples often resolve to recover their "lost youth" through reckless abandon, when in reality, during their youth they longed for commitment and security. Hence, one's youth was not "lost," but willfully abandoned. And when he takes this premise one step further, it stands to reason that within a relationship, we actually avoid adventure for fear of destabilizing our comfort and security. Subconsciously, it's a Catch-22 situation.

The book can be slow going at times, but only because Mitchell's theories - understandably so, given the complexity of human dynamics - are complicated. But if you take the time to sort through them, the rewards could be significant.

It's a fantasy most of us have shared: the-knight-in-shining-armour boy meets his girl-princess; girl marries boy and they live happily ever after. But in the real world, "back in our imagined castle, both the knight and the damsel, alas, often lose their allure." The most common reaction is to deduce that we have been deceived - that the knight was no knight, or the princess was no princess - which is often the "safest" recourse since blaming the other partner precludes the need to look at oneself.

When a patient not named Carl entered therapy with Dr. Mitchell, he discovered that although he still cherished his wife's many admirable qualities he could no longer tell her so since doing so would leave him vulnerable. To him, it would feel like "begging" because "He had come to feel that his stalwart performance as husband had earned him the right to her love. To approach her appreciatively or seductively would be to renounce those claims."

Coming back to the "danger" in a long-term relationship theme, Mitchell explains "falling out of love" with your partner can be a defense mechanism, and "What is so dangerous about desiring someone you have is that you can lose him or her." Especially revealing is the fact that our "ever-intensifying fascination with celebrities seems to feed our hunger for idealization and our fear of its consequences by glorifying and then exposing and destroying our 'stars.'"

At least one age-old question ("Why do opposites attract?") is finally answered here. According to Mitchell, "Opposites attract because they are inversions of each other, the same thing in different forms." If Harry is attracted to Sally because she is outgoing while he is shy, it could be because Harry also has a desire to be outgoing but has suppressed that desire.

When it comes to other advice, Mitchell says it's okay to be "made for each other" as long as you don't take it too far, for "fantasies of perfect harmony and synchrony can be enormously destructive if taken too seriously, as a steady expectation, rather than a transient, episodic connection." But the answers Mitchell offers to his question, "Can love last?" aren't always altogether romantic; especially his advice that "the capacity to love over time entails the capacity to tolerate and repair hatred."

At last, he suggests that instead of doing something to improve our relationships, "Time might be better spent on reflecting on what one is already doing!" "Spontaneity," he notes, is discovered not through action but through refraining from one's habitual action and discovering what happens next." And although "Desire and passion cannot be contrived," they "occur in contexts, and we have a good deal to do with constructing contexts in which desire and passion are more or less likely to arise."

Many of the case studies in the book - although sometimes perverse - are utterly fascinating, and Mitchell has taken relationship theory to a new level.

Rating:
Summary: Not fade away
Review: One of the stressors of my life, and I suspect of many other people's lives is the nagging feeling that somehow we're approaching love wrongly. On the one hand, we want to experience it and we want to believe that the experience is real. On the other hand, our own experience and the experience of other's around us inclines us to feel as though it's a little bit foolish past the age of 16 to believe *too* much in the idea of enduring passion.

Does passion always fade? Do we need to choose relationships at the base of the pyramid of needs-- passionless but sustaining, predictable but safe? Can we ever sustain that passion that we feel at the beginning of a relationship?

What Mitchell says (with quiet authority that makes me believe him) is that yes, we can, if we are brave enough to really want that to happen. What he argues is that passion, while desirable, is ultimately quite threatening and that it takes both personal mastery and courage to be willing to let it into your life. Mitchell asserts that it is not romance which is the illusion, it is safety which is the illusion. Romance is the thing which brings the reality of the world to us-- with all its danger and complexity. Safety is a veil which we throw over others potentially close to us to keep them from coming close enough to hurt.

Mitchell created a readable book which should appeal to professionals in the field as well as ordinary folk looking for some answers to complicated problems. He builds his arguments carefully using a combination of prior work and original thinking derived from his practice and patients.

Very impressive, thought provoking, and blessedly free from overly complicated language.

Rating:
Summary: Try to use your common sense first
Review: This book emphasizes the chance of not knowing for sure the real situation in your relantionship, I suggest to read the book but also to have an own oppinion of your situation

Rating:
Summary: Should be required reading
Review: This is the best book I've read on love and marriage. I've been a relationship consultant for 30 plus years and recommend this book to all my clients. If you want to know why I love this book, visit me on line at www.logicalmating.com, and send me an email. cathy crawford

Rating:
Summary: Should be required reading
Review: This is the best book I've read on love and marriage. I've been a relationship consultant for 30 plus years and recommend this book to all my clients. If you want to know why I love this book, visit me on line at www.logicalmating.com, and send me an email. cathy crawford