Love and pain seem to go together. Taylor Swift and Patsy Cline hit the top of the music charts with songs about heartbreak. Everyone needs love and though we’ve heard these songs and stories about love going wrong, we keep searching for it anyway; we want to find the right one. It’s a natural thing to do.
Here’s Patsy Cline, a famous singer from the 1950s, singing “I Fall to Pieces”, a song about love and pain.
My Work as a Therapist
It’s a rare couple who can go through life without hitting some bumps in the road. I was a family and marriage therapist for 25 years and saw many couples from all walks of life, people suffering from love gone wrong. I wrote about that journey in Along Came A Gardener, a memoir of my therapy practice including examples of people I helped (their identities are kept confidential). The book also contains how-to-help-yourself ideas, no matter what personal problem you’re tackling.
The title Along Came A Gardenerr comes from a poem a young woman sent me after I’d helped her and her sister deal with a schizophrenic mother who they couldn’t rely on for the love they needed. The poem was called The Seed of Hope. And I was the gardener who came along to plant that seed of hope.
What Goes Wrong
Why do love and pain go together way too often? Some of it has to do with the way our brains work; how we are tricked by lust. We fall in love and don’t think clearly.
Falling in love is a wonderfully delicious feeling but it can quickly sour once you start making decisions about whether to marry or not, where to live, who to see, what you spend your finances on, whose family to visit, what vacations to take (if any and where), whether to have children or not, where to go to church, or the synagogue or the mosque, or not go at all. The decisions are endless.
Robert and I have been married for 62 years! Wow, huh? I was 19; he was 24 when we got married. We were madly in love (still are), but oh so much of what we needed to learn was yet to come. Love and pain go together, when one of you gets hurt in the relationship. It can be over the smallest thing; or it could be something major. To experience that disconnect is common. And that is why there are so many stories and songs that underline the passion that can blind us to what lies ahead.
Here’s our favourite song, one that was played at our wedding. The lyrics “Wise men say, only fools rush in, but I can’t help falling in love with you,” says it all.
Healthy Communication
Very few think about all the decisions they will have to make when they are in the heat of passion, when they are in lust, when they are in love. All of these decisions can put a strain on a relationship. That’s why communication is so important.
In Along Came A Gardener, I write about the importance of healthy communication (what’s helpful, what’s not) and the power of genetics. Our families shape who we are; it’s where we learn how to communicate. But each family is unique with it’s own patterns of communication. And we’re not born with a blank slate. We are who we are right from the get-go. So there’s a lot to contend with when people fall in love.
It’s not easy navigating relationships, but well worth it when you fall in love, hopefully, with someone who will love you back and treat you with the respect you deserve. When that respect is missing, that’s when a relationship or marriage falls as quickly as dominoes.
Love and Pain are strange bedfellows, but from them, we learn some valuable lessons in life if we take the time and care.
Finding Love Today
I write about the challenges of finding love today in my latest Substack newsletter on Enduring Love. If you want to read my post, you can sign up to receive my monthly newsletter, Hearts and Pages, here.
I hope you enjoy life, and meet the downs with hope in your hearts. ❤️
