Adult Love Nurtures Spiritual Growth and A New Perspective On Infidelity

Recently whilst answering questions posed to me, I have been writing a lot about infidelity.  Again a client of mine who has difficulty committing to his marriage asked me very important questions.  They were sparkled from my comment to him that he is afraid of caring deeply for any single women long enough because he cannot face the pain of the idea of losing her.  I suggested that the faces of the women will always change until he reaches the maturity to experience the adult love.  Here you will find some valuable questions he asked, which may be asked by many men having affairs, together with my answers.

What is ‘Adult love’?

I like Scott Peck’s view of love.  He differentiates the ‘falling in love’ or stage of lust from when the sexual attraction becomes the norm.  Once through this stage, the real work of love begins. It is not a feeling, but a choice, an act of will and investment.  It consists of what you do for another person.

Peck writes that “Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”  Love is primarily actions towards nurturing the spiritual growth of another. It is about giving yourself and the other person what they need to grow. It is about true self-awareness and understanding.

Erich Fromm talks about love as an art.  In the same way as learning to play piano or carpentry the person committed to refine his ability to love needs to approach the subject with focused interest, discipline and patience.

Adult love is not something that happens to the person. It requires cultivating.

“I am aware that I am afraid of losing people I love, but aren’t we all?  How can ‘adult love’ inform my approach to this fear differently?”

 Life is difficult and by definition involves a series of challenges. They are often associated with painful feelings such as anger, sorrow, guilt, regret, loneliness and anxiety. When we can be brave and immerse ourselves to experience these painful states we grow.

However many of us go to extremes to avoid feeling them at all costs.  That is what turns life’s normal challenges into problems. Addictions, changing partners, having multiple partners at the same time are all different forms of distractions from feeling what we believe will be painful.  It is a root of mental illness.

When we lose somebody we love we suffer but we also survive.  Thinking about it when everything is normal, when there is no cause for concern can be painful.  Although our unconscious holds such painful feelings for us, it  does not stop us from acting on them.  These unconscious actions create problems for the person and for the people around that person.

We need to approach our fear of losing our loved ones realistically, without avoiding the possibility.  This means cultivating adult love with one chosen person.

“Why should the couple force staying together if it does not come to them naturally and that they have to make an effort to change either to please their partner or not to lose being loved? Isn’t it artificial?  Aren’t they losing time? Where does this ‘adult love fit in this?”

One has to look at the reasons why they want separation. These reasons tell a lot about our personal disowned aspects.  From just reading this question we can say that this person’s understanding of love is focused on pleasing their partner in order to be loved.  This is a narrow, and ultimately selfish, definition of love.  Sometimes one has to upset the person they love in order to further the psychological growth of the partner.  It benefits them to face reality, even if they suffer.

As I said before love needs cultivating. This is the investment we make.  Changing partners is losing time as each time one has to start, more or less, all over again.  We cannot expect commitment to occur naturally.  Commitment is a choice each of us makes every day, every moment in a relationship.

“What are the merits of doing everything to stay with one partner, especially for a couple without a child when the solution may be simply to move on? Isn’t saying goodbye when necessary part of adult love?”

 Yes, moving on from the relationship would be a solution to something, but to what?  Especially if it is accompanied by feelings of lust for another person it would be a solution to avoid real intimacy.

When we are in love we are under the impression that we can be united as one. However this state of lust is temporary.  Every relationship after a while will reveal that there are differences between people.  And pleasing is not a prerequisite of being loved.  When the questioner is ready to make progress on his spiritual growth he will have to experiment with alternative ways of experiencing his relationships than pleasing the other.

As I said before adult love needs cultivating. One has to be very careful about the romanticised ideas about perfect match. They might be used by our unconscious to play tricks on us to avoid the possibility of pain that comes with intimacy.

“I read that changing from one partner to the other creates instability for everybody.  But couldn’t it be the sign that they have not found the adult love, what they were looking for from a partner?”

It is true that over time partners might grow in different directions and the choice of separation can be made. However this would not need to be associated with an affair.  If the person cannot finish one relationship before starting another one, there is instability already.  How do we know whether it is the ‘wrong person’ as opposed to our inability to commit to the reciprocity of adult love?  Sheryl Paul writes about such an anxiety associated with doubts whether the partner is the ‘right’ one.

However adult love is not something we find passively on a  spectrum of a right and wrong person; it is something that we make a commitment to cultivate with all the people around us, including our partner.

In Greek mythology travelers to Athens were put on Procrustes’ bed. If they were too short they were stretched, if they were too long they were cut down so that they fit. Even though all went through this process only a minority fit to this bed.  The rest had to pay a heavy price; severance of their connection to the source of their vitality and joy.

That is how, many people thought to be successful in businesses, in governments, on stage, become depressed.   Some are associated with scandals, self harm, substance abuse and so many men and women are involved in complicated affairs.  They feel life is dull and devoid of meaning.  They need to reconnect with the parts they have lost on their journey to conformity but they have not got a clue how to do this.

I believe cultivating love by choosing to extend ourselves to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth might be one way of doing this.  This is the love of the adult.

Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)image:Petras Gagilas