Helm Communications

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Topics of Interest – Love: ROMANTIC PASSIONATE LOVE: WHAT CREATES IT--WHAT DESTROYS IT by Fonya Lord Helm, Ph.D., ABPP Falling in love offers an opportunity for transformation of one’s sense of self and can provide a sense of completion and transcendence of oneself because of the involvement with the other person. As the romantic passionate relationship develops, it offers the opportunity to truly know and accept another person. Communication between lovers is conscious, nonconscious and unconscious, and nonconscious and unconscious communication predominate when the lovers are falling in love. A good match needed between the lovers' styles of communication and the lovers' ideal images of the loved one. In addition, both people need to be in a state of readiness to fall in love. There has to be room for a new person. As the love relationship develops, the style of communication assumes even greater importance and is crucial for the continuation of love. Misunderstandings can cause the destruction of love. Many have tended to devalue romantic passionate love and believe that it can't last. Even if it doesn’t last a lifetime, it offers exceptional opportunities for growth and development. For some, love lasts. As long as lovers share a mutual fascination with one another, they can sustain a long-term passionate relationship--one in which the capacity for passionate engagement remains alive and emerges intermittently, even though the lovers may not be as obsessed with their love as they were in the courtship stage (Person, 1988). The Ideal Image A good match between the ideal images of the lover enables the lovers to recognize one another. In describing this ideal image, Person quotes (1988) quotes something H.G. Wells wrote toward the end of his life: "I think that in every human mind, possibly from an extremely early age, there exists a continually growing and continually more subtle complex of expectation and hope; an aggregation of lovely and exciting thoughts; conceptions of encounter and reaction picked up from observations, descriptions, drams; reveries of sensuous delights and ecstasies; reveries of understanding of reciprocity; which I will call the Lover-Shadow. [W]hen we are in love, it means that we have found in someone the presentation of the promise of some of the main qualities of our Lover-Shadow. The beloved person is for a time identified with the dream--attains a vividness that captures the role, and seems to leave anything outside it unilluminated" (p. 34). This idea of the Lover-Shadow, or the idea of the ideal image, can make us somewhat uncomfortable, because we all want to be loved for our uniqueness. We want to be special. The idea of loves that have gone before, even if some of them came from early childhood, makes us feel jealous and unappreciated. Basically, we want to be loved totally and unconditionally (Person, 1988). These ideal images of the lover that people carry with them are unconscious to a great extent and very hard for a third party to know about. Blind dates give us an example of how difficult it is for people who are matching up the couple to know if the match will be good.

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