GREENER PASTURES: Love is not Enough.

Love is not enough. Just loving another, however strongly, with whatever commitment one can muster, is not enough. Enough for what? Enough to secure the relationship, to assure the relationship’s well-being, even its continuing survival.

It takes two to make and sustain a relationship, that’s for sure. One person cannot long perform double duty, as if to say, “I have enough love for both of us.” That harder working person is destined to burn out, typically around the time the relationship finally burns up. This state of relational affairs is called an “uneven yoke,” like two oxen yoked together to plow a field in yesterday’s farmland. If one is doing most of the work, they are headed for trouble, travail and usually, a breakup.

Yet even if both people love each other equally, that does not guarantee the viability and vitality of their relationship. I have known numerous couples who really loved each other, but could not make their relationship work.

The first time someone told me that “love is not enough,” I was an idealist youth. I felt revulsion at the thought of love ever being somehow insufficient. Love was to be ever honored as some vaulted, irresistible force for good, for gratitude and celebration. Loving another was all about getting there; wow, to be in love, to attain a standing of mutual affection, this was an end greatly to be sought.

I resisted learning how it is that love is not enough. Later, rather than sooner, I became an advocate for this muted, essential, not to be denied but resolutely accepted dictum. Thus, to someone who tells me about their happiness in being “in love,” I want to say “Congratulations and I’m sorry.” To explain my meaning, I use an analogy. I tell couples in premarriage counseling that falling in love, mutual love, with all the light and darkness thereof, is like receiving the gift of a thousand acres of prime farmland. That is the good news. Get ready for the difficult news: now they have to work it. If they do not work on their relationship like farmers work on their land, it will become overrun with weeds. And instead of being something of beauty and pride, the relationship would become a source of sorrow, regret and embarrassment.

Love requires work, never-ending tending to, growing into. As the poet Gibran said, “A love that is not always springing, is always dying.” The notion of “homeostasis” in a love relationship, wherein things are supposed to hover in unchanging mutual satisfaction, is a lie, pure and simple.

There are psychological and spiritual rules or laws which must be recognized and honored for a long-term, mutually satisfying relationship to come into being. Ignorance or denial of the significance of these essential “do’s and don’ts” will likely lead to relational failure.

For example, the “quid pro quo” rule. These Latin words mean literally, “You do, I do.” Or, to express it in more colloquial terms: “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” Failure to attain and maintain relational parity or equality, generally leads to an untimely and ugly end of a relationship. If you are giving but not getting, or getting but not giving, something vital is not working in your relationship. If recognized and resolved early enough, the relationship can grow rather than wane.