With Valentine’s Day is coming up shortly, now is a good time for dealing with questions about love. Love is an important part of your marriage and family relationships.
I also know that there’s a huge difference between loving someone and being ‘in love’. When you love someone, it includes commitment. When you’re ‘in love’ as it’s used with many affair situations, you’re dealing more with lust or in some cases, being ‘in heat’.
Sure, being in love brings with it a flood of endorphins and other feel-good sensations, but it’s only love in name only. Relationships built on those sensations typically include building a fantasy about life in the future.
Being ‘in love’ amounts to being in an altered state of consciousness, which is why I chose to use the term ‘affair fog’. It’s not about love, but about living a fantasy about love.
The affair fog doesn’t excuse what happened or the choices made. It describes the addled thinking and state of consciousness that happens during the affair.
The fantasy kind of relationship doesn’t consider real-life issues like following through on marriage vows, dealing with the challenges of broken washing machines or the limitations of family budgets. Real-life love includes these situations and more.
Real-life love considers caring for each other when you’re sick, staying with each other even when parts of you are sagging and wrinkled. Real-life is based in the here and now with validation from the past.
A reader wrote wanting to know how to end an affair when they’re ‘in love’. The place to start is realizing the huge difference between being ‘in love’ which is a temporary state and following through on your commitment and responsibility day in and day out in true love.
In terms of further steps, I cover them in the video “Help for the Cheater: Starting the Road to Recovery”. You can download it at the link above. The video guides you in what is involved in bringing closure to the whole affair situation.
Once you realize that being ‘in love’ is about a fantasy, you start seeing that you can end it. You start dealing with real-life rather than in fantasies.
Eventually being ‘in love’ loses its allure. The excitement and thrills come to an end. The affair where you’re ‘in love’ always takes you further and deeper than you intended to go.
The time to stop the affair is now. Bringing it to a close may require you and your spouse to work together through the weak moments and temptations. The peace of mind that comes with ‘real-life love’ is worth it.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
