Masks that oppose to love

By: Juan L. Pedraz

If there is an important decision in a human being’s life, it is that one of getting married. However, we never really think about it.

Why does love at first sight or better yet- desire at first sight makes courtships and marriages to fail?

There are three tricks that can deceive us regarding love matters:
• Believing you love each other when you only want each other.
• Believing you have a lot in common, when you hardly have a few things you share.
• Believing you are thinking, when you are really feeling.

And I call them tricks, because tricks cause to believe that they are not tricks, and that is why people feel confident, stop being alert and all of a sudden they are helplessly trapped.

a) Love or Desire?

The first trick is to confuse passion with love. People involved in this problem realize that they have to find out if they really love each other or they mainly want each other. The most important thing is to find out if my boyfriend or my girlfriend is the way he/she seems to be, or if he/she is only acting or pretending to be something he/she is not. Love demands a number of renounces and sacrifices, and at the end of the day it is very difficult to be what your really are not.

There is a very easy way to find out if your boyfriend is what he really seems to be, for example, if he is understanding, considerate, responsible; he will be that way with everybody not only with you. The same thing happens if someone is only respectful, considerate, obliging with some people and with some other he/she is not, definitely he is not respectful, considerate nor obliging. It is important to observe how that person behaves with people he/she is not expecting anything from, and how he reacts before the normal frictions and tensions of everyday life. How he behaves with his/her parents, siblings, friends and enemies, fellow workers, waiters, etc.? That is the clue.

But the truth is that couples only judge the other by the way they treat one another. If the girlfriend feels he is good to her she thinks he is that way. She does not care how he behaves with others because that does not affect her, she does not have to suffer that and she says: “he is different with me”. We could tell her: “for now, just wait time goes on and he stops wanting…” If he acts differently with her, it means he is not really that way, he is pretending.

The big mistake is to believe he will always be different with her. That means being very naive, because he is not always going to be like that, his personality will emerge eventually. Beauty calms down rude men and sooths the character, but once beauty or the impact are gone, a human being goes back to what he/she really was.

There is a reason that prevents people to show the way they really are: not enough opportunities to show how they really are. Human beings are really known in moments of stress, crisis, failure, and frustration, Saint-Exupery says: obstacles measure man.

“Marriage is the existential situation that offers more happiness to most human beings”. That is why everybody wants to get married even when they see so many unsuccessful marriages. We can find capricious, selfish wives, who only want to exploit a man to pay for her caprices, or homes that become torture rooms. When marriage is a structure that has been created by love to express and perpetuate.

b) They believe they are similar when they only enjoy being together

Physical attraction is the second trick. Marriage is not the contemplation of the other; it means to share, to live together. It is necessary to be friends too. They have to share interests and values. When spouses are not friends, marriage ends up dying of boredom or bleeding (because it is very difficult to live permanently frustrated). This stress is also very strong when they belong to different religions, or when only one of them practices his/her faith.

c) Believing that they are thinking, when they are only feeling

This is the third trick. They believe they think but they are only following their desires. When one really thinks one considers the good and the bad things; when one only feels one thinks only about one’s desires. One does not really think about bad things, one avoids them. It is very typical for example when someone tells the girlfriend: “that boy is lazy or alcoholic or fond of chasing women”. And she immediately thinks: “yes, but I am going to change him with my love”. Reality shows that he does not change because he has already well defined habits.

Naturally, the more vehement is the passion or the desire, the more the inability to think objectively. Few desires are as violent and intense as the physical and sexual desires. That is why when a couple is deeply in love with each other they cannot think very clearly. It is said that love is blind; love is again confused with desire. True love, on the contrary is pretty lucid, because love is based on the mutual knowledge of the person and that is why it grows with that knowledge. Desire, on the other hand, does not see and does not want to see; it only sees what it wants to see.

A couple must think when they are still able to think, that means, when they are not still in love. At the beginning they do not think because they do not care, because they are not in love. That is why it is very important to think, “Who I am going to fall in love with”.

It is important to see how most courtship relations start: they like each other. They keep on going out and liking each other more and more each time. They become boyfriend and girlfriend. Now they cannot think, they can only feel. They do not reason out they just rationalize. They fell in love without finding out if it was advisable to fall in love. Once they are in love, even if he is “Peter the Bad One” they will get married anyway.

The only time a boyfriend and a girlfriend have to think objectively if they are suitable for each other is when they still do not like each other. A girl friend could say: “my case is different” but in the end, her case is exactly like the others. What makes her think that her case is different? That she wants to believe it. Every couple thinks that their love is unique.

All feelings last as long as we believe they are forever. That is why when someone has a love disappointment, he/she thinks that life has no meaning any more. Some people even think in suicide, if they wait a little they will laugh about it.

Some others say: “I, will change him”. Once man takes her for granted he goes back to what he was. It is not about a tactical change; the boyfriend makes real efforts and sacrifices, sacrifices that everybody does when he/she wants to obtain something, and it will last, as long as the desire is alive. The girlfriend mistake is to think that her influence is going to change him. “Everybody can change…” Yes, but when a boy changes he changes with everybody around him not only with his girlfriend.

It is frequently to hear girls saying: “I love him so much that I do not care what he might do in the future”. When you actually hear the insults, bad words, when he gets home drunk, when you feel his indifference towards you, when you feel he is not interested in you any more, then is when you should not care, but the more you love him the more you care.

(Summary by Rebeca Reynaud, based on the book by Juan L. Pedraz, S.J.: “Tres Trampas del Noviazgo”).

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