We are often unsure of our feelings: is it just friendly sympathy, or have we really finally found our “half”? Scientists offer three questions, the answers to which will help us better understand our feelings.
Saying “I love you” is like saying “I want to be with you, and when you are not around, I feel bad and I miss you.” To say “I love you” is to say “When I look at you, something softens in me and I want to hug you and hold you close.”
It means to say with the Yanomami Indians: Ya pihi irakema – “I have become infected with your being.”
It means to say, “A part of you has entered me and lives in me. Because I see you in my dreams, because I feel your presence even when you are not around. Because I can’t imagine what it’s like to live without you anymore.”
And after we sincerely said all this, putting our whole soul into words, after we repeated it in the registry office or in the city hall, we get divorced – in more than half of the cases.
So what should we say to ourselves to know if our union is destined for a long life?
The Love Lab in Seattle, created by John and Julia Gottman, studies the life of couples in the long term. They strive to understand what distinguishes strong and harmonious unions from those couples that flare up and quickly go out.
According to this lab, a strong marriage requires both partners to honestly and sincerely answer “yes” to three questions. These questions only seem simple – in fact, everything is somewhat deeper.
1. Would you like to be friends with this person? In other words, could you have had a rich and fruitful relationship with this person if you were not sexual partners and were not going to have children?
Such a question immediately excludes those with whom we are connected primarily by physical attraction or plans that are not tied to the ordinary reality of everyday life.
When I say “I love you”, am I saying “I like living next to you, even if we do not caress each other and do not make common plans for the future”?
2. Do you respect this person as a person (with his preferences, lifestyle, values)? Do you respect his attitude to the world and relationships with other people, regardless of his behavior towards you?
This allows us to evaluate whether we love another person not only for what they give us (and what may end), but also for how they interact with the world (and this can go on forever).
Is our declaration of love equivalent to the words “I love you as a gift to the world, your very presence in it is a gift”?
3. Are you willing to accept that some flaws will never go away? The flaws that already annoy you day in and day out will almost certainly continue to make your couple’s mechanism creak and rumble: the habit of throwing things around or the need to meet friends every weekend …
Does my “I love you” mean that “I managed to convince myself that in time everything that does not suit me will smooth out”?
Or can I say, “What I love about you is so powerful, so unique, and so desirable that I love you in spite of everything that separates and will always separate you from my ideal”? Can I tell myself with the utmost frankness that I love the real you?
As for me, I rejoice when you can combine romance and reality like this. I like it when love takes its rightful place: with its feet on the ground, and with its head it reaches the stars.
Author: David Servan-Schreiber is a psychiatrist, one of the first doctors in cognitive neuroscience in the United States and the founders of MSF. Best-selling author of Anti-Cancer, who fought brain cancer for 19 years.