By Dr. Laurie Betito
People often ask me what is love, what is intimacy? You would think the answer was simple, but there are many myths we buy into that actually hurt us.
Many of us think that love in a relationship should be unconditional—but this is not so. The only love that is unconditional is the one you have for your children. When we talk about love in the romantic sense, we are basically trying to embody something that is pure and perfect within two individuals who are neither perfect nor pure themselves.
We often look to love as the answer– the solution to all of our problems. It’s as if because we think love is perfect, we feel that once we have it, everything in our lives becomes perfect. This is the story that we were told growing up. This is the story that we continuously see portrayed in books, movies and TV shows. Our culture feeds us an ideal and urges us to find it for ourselves.
The problem is that such an ideal doesn’t exist.
