Recipe for a Perfect Marriage

[MJontheMend]

I came across a quote by Schnarch the other day in which he seemed to indicate that the summation of his teachings or philosophy would be "Desire is a choice." I think we can all pretty much get the concept that in a mature relationship "Love is a choice." Rather than a noun that you fall into, love becomes a verb. So Schnarch is basically saying the same thing about desire. In a mature relationship, desire is an action not a feeling.

Over and over again on this BB we see examples of interactions in relationships that go like: One spouse is HD. One spouse is LD. Cr*ppy cr*p happens for many years. HD spouse leaves and suddenly LD spouse "feels" desire. Unfortunately, at that point it is usually too late because the HD spouse, depending on his/her level of differentiation, no longer "feels" love or desire or has made a choice to no longer love or desire their spouse. Of course, this can go vice versa, I'm not trying to pick on either HD or LD manifestations of fusion as being worse. The point I'm trying to make is that the partner who flip-flops in his or her "feelings" because of the behavior of the other partner in leaving ends up suffering due to his or her own inability to understand that there was a behavioral choice that could have been made.

So I'm going to take another stab at defining differentiation and suggest that if you are differentiated you understand that "love" and "desire" and other emotional states or feelings can instead be choices that we make about our behavior (and I am definitely not talking about repression but rather expression). From this definition it necessarily follows that it would be almost impossible to maintain a relationship with anyone who was at a different level of differentiation from you.

I think this is really clear if you look at how two women like Corri and myself came from opposite ends of the spectrum to the point that we are mostly in agreement with each other on many issues. Corri has given many examples of how she works on desire as a verb in her current relationship. In my case it's more a matter of that I don't believe that anybody owes me the feeling of desire although I will almost definitely freely choose to not be in relationship with a man who doesn't choose to verb on desire. lol This is exactly the same as me saying that I would freely choose to leave a relationship in which I was not treated in a loving manner. The reason I would leave would be that I would know that my partner was either freely choosing to treat me unlovingly or was not differentiated enough to know that he had a choice about his behavior.