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The Benefits of Using Reason and Emotion in Relationships
Perhaps you’re familiar with how marriages used to be several centuries ago when women were considered property and people married not for love but for survival. Essentially every union was an arranged marriage.
Nevertheless, both men and women still had their passions and some would form extra-marital relationships with those they felt that zing! for.
For the last 200 years or so we’ve tried to be more honest and simply married the people we felt that zing! for instead of suffering through a relationship with no passion or cheating on our spouses.
And as you’re well aware, we’ve had some mixed results.
It hasn’t yielded the pleasure we hoped. Perhaps short-term pleasure, yes. But couples who have had long-term relationships that are still healthy are revered and sacrosanct. They are what people strive for. These couples wouldn’t be so envied if they were common.
It’s like Patty Smyth sang: sometimes love ain’t enough. And that’s demonstrably true. We’re no better than we were centuries ago with arranged marriages. Some of those worked out well too. And in the cultures that still practice it, some of them continue to prove that they work.
So with the various theories and ingredients that have been posited to make love…
