re: Are any of you baws married or in a relationship where you don’t love you SO

LucasP was in a good relationship until....

OP sounds like a soy sucker

(no message)

quote:

---

Are any of you baws married or in a relationship where you don’t love you SO

---

Love is a choice. Just as one falls in love, one can also fall out of love. Getting together is easy. Staying together is harder. But it can be worth it, providing both realize that the relationship isn’t just necessarily for themselves.

Doesn’t mean there won’t be difficult times and it does not mean that you won’t want to quit at times, But in order to get back to that phase of being able to fall in love again, it’s almost as if you have to start over with that same person and really get to know them again, just like you would do with someone new. Fear, anger and resentment are real, but they don’t have to control you.

quote:

---

That's why they invented divorce.

---

That mindset is why the No-fault divorce rate is so high. People either don’t understand that love in the marital context isnt just a feeling, it’s a choice, or they never took their marriage vows seriously to begin with.
Sometimes you may not feel like “loving” your spouse, but you choose to do so. Sometimes it’s hard work and it takes two people willing to communicate and put in the effort, rather than just shutting down and letting resentment fester.

From 2,500 years ago and still the best explanation ever given

quote:

---

“What is the cause, Socrates, of love, and the attendant desire?

See you not how all animals, birds, as well as beasts, in their desire of procreation, are in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union; whereto is added the care of offspring, on whose behalf the weakest are ready to battle against the strongest even to the uttermost, and to die for them, and will, let themselves be tormented with hunger or suffer anything in order to maintain their young.

Man may be supposed to act thus from reason; but why should animals have these passionate feelings? Can you tell me why?”

Again I replied that I did not know. She said to me: “And do you expect ever to become a master in the art of love, if you do not know this?”

“But I have told you already, Diotima, that my ignorance is the reason why I come to you; for I am conscious that I want a teacher; tell me then the cause of this and of the other mysteries of love.”

“Marvel not,” she said, “if you believe that love is of the immortal, as we have several times acknowledged; for here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old.

Nay even in the life, of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation-hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing.

Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and going; and equally true of knowledge, and what is still more surprising to us mortals, not only do the sciences in general spring up and decay, so that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them individually experiences a like change.

For what is implied in the word ‘recollection,’ but the departure of knowledge, which is ever being forgotten, and is renewed and preserved by recollection, and appears to be the same although in reality new, according to that law of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving another new and similar existence behind unlike the divine, which is always the same and not another?

And in this way, Socrates, the mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but the immortal in another way.

Marvel not then at the love which all men have of their offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of immortality.”

---

quote:

---

Are any of you baws married or in a relationship where you don’t love you SO

---

This is pretty unacceptable if you're an adult. Life is too short to be unhappy, and no one is making you stay in a relationship with a person you don't love.

quote:

---

I slept on the couch last night for the first time. Not because of a fight or anything like that.

---

There really isn't anything wrong with this. I always thought growing up that it would be strange not to sleep in the same bed, or that the parents I knew who were always away from each other at night were loveless. But sometimes I stay up later than my wife and watch TV/frick around online. I don't want to wake her, so I'll sleep on the couch. It isn't often, but it's really not that crazy. Why would I bother her tossing and turning to uphold some arbitrary standard. If it was an every night thing, sure, that may not be good, but I'd say I sleep in the other room once every 2 months or so.

The normal progression of human emotion WRT to the topic of "SO in a decades-long relationship" such as marriage is for the Eros to gradually give way to the Agape. Ideally, Agape should continue to grow until the Self is no longer recognizable within the Self, because it has given way to Agape, which works to dissolve the notion of Self.

It's all quite simple.