Have you ever wondered why people fall in love? It is because everyone longs for wholeness, completeness, personal maturity, and happiness.
Such longing is a good thing. It is motivation to grow and become the good person we have the potential to be.
Each of us enters adulthood with imperfections and immaturity. We have unhealed wounds that cause us pain, and many feel insecure and inadequate. Our parents were imperfect people, and they were not up to the task of bringing us to maturity. We fall in love when we meet someone who our instincts tell us can help us become whole.
We all need nurturing people to love us, accept us, and help us in life. When we are children, usually those nurturing people are our parents, but they might include others close to us. Those people form an image in our minds of the type of person from whom we can receive love.
Those characteristics may be based on the good or bad qualities of our parents, or a mixture of both. Have you ever wondered why children of alcoholics often marry people who turn out to be alcoholics? That is because their alcoholic parents left an image of an alcoholic in the subconscious of their children as a person from whom they can receive nurture.
We fall in love when our subconscious identifies someone from whom we can receive nurture and help us on our journey to wholeness. That is, we fall in love with someone whom we believe can make us happy.
When we first fall in love, if we are fortunate enough to have that experience, the world is painted in our minds in brighter colors. We have hope that now, in this person, we can at last become happy, full, and complete. This euphoria often leads to marriage or a life partnership.
Early in their relationship, couples will often experience a honeymoon period in which their lives are full of passion, hope, and excitement. For better or worse, however, the expectation that another person can make us happy is an illusion.
Happiness only comes when we are on the grow as people and overcome some of our problems. Another person cannot make us grow. That is not to say that a life partner cannot help us in the growth process, but we, ourselves, have to do the work. We are the ones who must change. We are the ones who must work through our issues. We are the ones who must deal with our past and learn to live in new, more productive ways, laying aside our bad behaviors, abusive language, negativity, and destructive habits.
While another person cannot make us happy, if we resolve to do all we can to meet the needs of that person we love and are committed to, it can lead us to grow in order to meet their needs.
If a partner needs someone to be patient with them and we work on becoming patient people, then we will grow to become more patient. If a partner needs someone to affirm them instead of cutting them down and we decide to learn to complement them instead of criticizing them, we will grow into being more positive and affirming.
In other words, if we learn to serve others the way Jesus served, we will grow as persons. That growth leads us to maturity, which produces the fruit of happiness in our lives.
So, the next time we feel anger rising inside of us because somebody implicitly or explicitly promised to make us happy and we realize we are not happy, instead of acting out that anger against them, perhaps we should be asking ourselves, how we can make our partners happy.
Instead of expecting them to meet our needs, we must strive to meet their needs. Learning to serve is the key to maturity, which results in personal happiness.
Jesus said, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48, KJV). Jesus did not mean that we should never make a mistake. He meant that we should strive to love others with His perfect love.
Loving like Jesus loved implies positive change in ourselves and produces increasing maturity and happiness. Wholeness is our destiny and is God’s plan for our lives, let us pursue it through being willing to change to meet the needs of our partners.
Dr. Dan Darby is a retired United Methodist pastor.
