The Courage to Love: Surviving and Thriving in Your Relationship

Courage includes tolerating your own inadequacy, accepting your own limitations, inhabiting your helplessness, befriending your limits—and still having confidence in your own self. It takes courage to stop self-rejection. It takes courage to stop thinking that there is more you should be doing, there is more you should have, there is more you need to chase.

There is something about love that will see you not loving the person but loving the courage in them. You love the courage of your small child—you see this when the very small five-year-old runs onto a very big soccer pitch. You love the courage of your partner, who carries a great burden without complaint. You love the courage of your mother or father, who keep hidden the pain of illness.

Here is someone who should make me feel more secure, confident, important, significant and worthy than I am. Here is someone who should help me forget my inadequacy, isolation and sense of confusion. Here is someone who should help me to not feel so vulnerable.’ The narcissist might seek a trophy partner to achieve this; the dependent might seek a partner to hand over responsibility; and the control freak might seek someone to submit. To greater or lesser degrees, we all seek someone who makes us feel good and right about ourselves.

You prefer to turn your face away from the cliff edge, from the terrifying and majestic landscape of creation, towards the small corner you have secured. There, you arrange and rearrange your achievements, gathering honours, successes and mementos, lining them up to display them to the passing world with pride.

Every time your partner lets you down, they expose you to the truths of life. The uneasy truth is this: both of you are ordinary, fumbling and beautiful mortals.

Excessive criticism proves to us, in the most primitive of ways, that we are achieving some kind of victory.

Our relationships must not be the only well from which we draw the sustenance to find meaning and significance in life. They must not be the only place within which we encounter the divine. They must not be the only vessel within which we empty the anxieties and terrors of life.
We must draw from other sources. The qualities, inspirations, virtues, visions and imaginings from these other sources are poured over the angst of

. There is usually a tipping point where you realise that the primary purpose in the relationship or the marriage is no longer to love, but to serve your self-importance.

I must acknowledge the seminal work of anthropologist Ernest Becker. Those familiar with his writings will see his influence throughout this book. Becker’s commentaries on life and death provide a compelling counterpoint to the

Love is more than just a reminder of our mortality; it exists because of it.