"A2person" on: "I Just Wish He Would Have An Affair!"/PL Responds!

Here's A2person:

I recently had a lengthy dialogue with a friend and mentor of mine about this very subject. Married to his wife for over 20 years, he described to me a sort of cyclical process of falling in and falling-out of love. "While I always *love* my wife, I am not always in-love with her," was how he phrased it and he went on to describe the cycle in which the two of them continually fall in-love and fall out-of-love only to fall in-love once again, and how they have built their relationship by enduring, accepting and celebrating this overall cycle together. This approach suggests that people are perhaps too hasty to end a relationship when eros/in-loveness initially fades. Moreover, it suggests that a capacity for a long term partnership is the ability to respect and care for a person during those inevitable troughs of "out-of-loveness." I'm wondering if you had any comment on this approach. There is, on one end of the continuum, a 'staying-in-a-relationship-long-past-the-expiration-of-eros' problem; but are there not also problems of impatience, seeking instant gratification, and premature romantic endings at the firs sign of trouble? (Especially for us me-me-me, now-now-now Millennials, it’s challenging to discern the difference!)

Here's PL:

Indeed, A2, Eros, like all the great forces of nature, has "tides," "currents," "surges," even "seasons," as such, and yes, there are times when it may seem to ebb. However, as the excellent Pathwork Guide Lecture on this subject makes clear, it is holding back from revealing yourself to your loved one, and/or believing there is no more to discover about your partner-in-love, that leads to the constriction of Eros.

Falling in love, that "free sample" of Eros as I have come to call it, is something that most people can experience. Staying in love, however, requires a determined level of self-work in order to facilitate the continuing personal self-revelation and the willingness to explore another needed to maintain Eros.

We are human, magnificent, true, but all works in progress, and so we are inclined at times to shut the door to our inner lives and to the person we love. If two people are truly in love, though, they will inevitably, and sooner rather than later, re-open the door to Eros. What your friend and mentor is describing as "falling in and out of love," for example, I would call opening and closing the door to the Eros that has always been there. On the other hand, if Eros is truly gone between two people, it is gone, and in my experience and observation, usually for good, even if there is a fair amount of love between them.

It is the last reality that human beings find so hard to accept, and as I pointed out in my original post, it is why so many people experience the endings of a relationship with anger, trauma and drama, or why people linger in passionless relationships.

Valuable and important question, A2. Thank you!