Intensity vs. Intimacy

Well, Psychology Today comes through again for some more very sage relationship advice. 

...intense feelings, no matter how consuming, are hardly a measure of true and enduring closeness. Indeed, intense emotions can block our objectivity and blur our capacity for clear thinking.

While I'm all for intense feelings, they are truly the Devil.  I remember when I broke up with my first real boyfriend in college, it was so easy to confuse the pain of a break-up with "love".  I thought because I was hurting so much, that maybe we SHOULDN'T have broken up.  So, we got together and broke up about a million times, and each time, I dumped him for the same reasons (he was a crying, controlling, drug using freak, but you know, whatevs...). 

It's amazing how intensity of feeling will cause normally rational human beings to do completely irrational things.  We'll stick with horrible, soul-draining people for much longer than we should, we'll allow others to treat us in ways we'd never allow in other circumstances, and we'll, well, put up with a lot of shit just because it either feels so good (or feels so bad) that we can't imagine how boring living without those emotions would be.

Anyway, they said it better...

Read the whole article here!

Comments

[Kodi]

Ahh! I just read a chapter about that for my social psychology class yesterday! It's so true and so almost frightening. I mean, I consider myself a pretty rational person, but when it comes to things relating to love, always involving people close to my heart, I can be entirely irrational. And I don't feel like I'm being irrational until I look back on it later. I did the same thing with my first 'real' boyfriend in high school and the beginning of college...we were together for three years and at least two of it was breaking up and getting back together when I really should have ended things and walked away. When I finally did end things and decided to walk away for good, it was so much harder for him to understand that I was really serious. It could've been so much easier on both him and me if I was just RATIONAL and stayed away the first time.

[Kim]

I've read so many things in Psychology Today that I've honestly put to use in my relationship. I have a few bookmarked favorites that I go back and visit online.

As for intensity of feeling, it exists in an odd way in my relationship. We love each other intensely, and when we fight, it always seems like the most horribly horrendous fight possible and makes us think we shouldn't be together. Last week the boyfriend said to me, in the middle of this fit of intense emotion, "I'll settle for less[than me and what I'm worth to him] to suffer less". I've been guilty of it too. And it's that same intensity of feeling that makes us think that there's no better option than to be together.