Nothing is a proxy for love.

Love is like oxygen, water, and sunlight: humans absolutely need it for survival.

Can we survive without love? In material, technical terms, yes - a person deprived of love will not simply cease to exist, but the life they lead will necessarily be lacking in significant ways.

A child deprived of adequate love and human interaction in early development may be rendered completely unable to form emotional bonds with others. They are alive, but what fulfillment will they find when they are unable to meet one of their own most basic needs?

There is an epidemic of love proxies in our society today - words and actions that people wrongly believe replace love, or prove the existence of love that isn't felt in their hearts. Children don't know if their own parents love them; adults don't know if their spouses and partners love them. Relationships are increasingly unstable and adversarial, and interpersonal trust has declined noticeably over the years.

So in these dysfunctional relationships, the people trapped in them look for ways to prove to themselves that their relationship is "normal enough," and that there really is love there, even if it never seems like it in any practical capacity.

What is love?

This is easily one of the most elusive philosophical questions articulated by the human species. Artists of all kinds, across many disparate cultures, have spent entire lifetimes trying to answer the question, "What is love?" Yet even in the twenty-first century, this question remains inadequately answered.

The trouble is, love's intangibleness makes it fundamentally impossible to condense into a formula. Unlike our basic material needs, the need for love can't be met by adhering to a set of criteria which are guaranteed to properly meet an individual's need for the same. There are certain elements which naturally arise in a genuinely loving relationship, but these elements can be produced by other means, which means the presence of something which may be the product of love isn't proof of that love.

I'm not even going to attempt to define love. Instead, I want to focus on some of the most common love proxies. Understanding these concepts will not only help you avoid dysfunctional relationships; it can enhance the love you do have in your life, by better understanding the practical means by which love beautifully enhances our lives.

The Warm, Fuzzy Stuff

Among other things, we humans are generally happier when our lives include companionship and consistency. These two separate ideas are related in an important way: the consistency of a committed, long-term relationship.

A loveless relationship can offer both companionship and commitment, even reasonably so, but it's important to never mistake these signs of familiarity and comfort for genuine love.

Love & Companionship

People are miserable when forced to live alone and in isolation for years on end. This is quite literally why solitary confinement for POWs is banned by the Geneva Convention, and why it's used as severe punishment by prisons today. Isolation not only makes us unhappy and depressed; it can - and often does - cause us to succumb to serious psychological disintegration, including total psychotic breakdown.

We often mistake the need for companionship with the deeper feelings that motivate what we might term "love." Those of us who were confronted with parental rejection and a lack of adequate love in childhood might struggle as adults to differentiate between the desperate need for companionship and the real, lasting bond that forms out of love for another.

Not wanting to be alone is normal and natural. Wanting to find a partner with whom to share your life is also normal and natural. Basing your choice of long-term partner on the simple desire to avoid loneliness is a terrible idea.

Companionship is a benefit of love; it is not the basis of love. Seeking out and finding real love gives you a better chance of lasting companionship than choosing a spouse or partner out of desperate fear of protracted loneliness.

The Reverse

A total lack of companionship in a relationship is a pretty good sign your relationship is not only loveless, but bad for you. Even a loveless relationship can offer reliable companionship, so if you and your significant other are so disconnected from each other's lives that you fulfill all your companionship needs outside your relationship, it's time to make a major change, and fast.

On the far other extreme end of this particular spectrum, another dysfunctional form of companionship is codependency - where you and/or your partner are unable to function as an independent adult without the other person. This sort of obsessive relationship dynamic is extremely damaging as time carries on.

Love & Consistency

My years of life have taught me an important fundamental truth that I can say is as close to universal as any statement about humanity can reasonably be: humans need consistency.

In fact, all life prefers consistency over chaos. Inconsistent weather patterns can lead to inconsistent plant health and production. Inconsistent food supplies cause predators to engage in behavior otherwise left dormant. Inconsistent training causes a domesticated animal to misbehave more often.

People need consistency, too. We need stability and predictability in our lives. These are means of keeping us grounded through the unpredictabilities of life.

It's very easy to mistake familiarity for love. We get comfortable with the people we already know, and it can, over time, be easy to slide into a permanent relationship - marriage - with someone, simply because they're familiar, consistent, and comfortable.

Two people who are comfortable together might get along just fine in marriage...but they might not, on the longer timeline of one's entire life. Without the intangible bond created by genuine love, comfort and familiarity can become suffocating and oppressive. The sense that something is "off" in a stable relationship can lead one - or both! - involved parties to intentionally manufacture chaos out of overwhelming boredom.

Consistency and stability are the foundation of a lasting relationship, but, like companionship, they are not the reason to embark on a relationship.

The Reverse

It's important to underscore here that the inverse is a different story: instability and chaos are the hallmarks of a dysfunctional relationship. Sometimes, chaotic relationships can be brought into good working order with effort, life changes, etc. But a lot of the time, what people think is "passion" is really just dysfunction, leading to endless chaos and instability. This kind of relationship is unbelievably unhealthy. As in, it's what leads to chronic inflammatory and autoimmune conditions, as your body revolts against an untenably toxic environment. Remaining in a dysfunctional, chaotic relationship will shorten your lifespan, so you owe it to yourself to find someone better!

Consistency is something that is often viewed with derision in our modern cultural landscape. Consistency is considered boring, uninspired, static, and mediocre. Adults of both sexes are too often encouraged to ruin their relationships in the quest for something new and different. Boredom can happen, but the benefits of consistency in your most important life relationship(s) cannot be overemphasized.

If and when you find yourself struggling with feelings of quiet boredom with your daily life, take the time to think about how much better your life is - and will continue to be - on such a stable foundation. Love is the magic that leads us to recognize consistency for the gift it is, instead of something to be rebelled against for the sake of doing so.

The Hard Stuff

There are two other aspects to a functional relationship which, especially over a long period of time, become proxies for love.

Compromise and sacrifice are two necessary components of any functional relationship with between humans, because no two humans are alike, and sometimes, interests and needs won't perfectly align. When those conflicts occur, both compromise and sacrifice become the means through which a positive, mutually beneficial resolution may be achieved.

These are, of course, a lot harder than thinking about what meets our own needs, because we have to reach into our altruistic, unselfish aspect to meet others' needs. But it's also a method of conflict resolution, and it can be employed in any interpersonal relationship, entirely separate from love.

Love & Compromise

Compromise is part of the unspoken social contract. We recognized long ago that most conflicts can be solved with words rather than violence, which tends to keep people happy - and alive - much more reliably. As we mature over our lives, we learn how to communicate in the interest of peacefully resolving (and avoiding) conflict.

Empathy makes it much easier to proactively minimize conflict, and part of growing up is learning and practicing empathy on a regular basis. This also means that empathy and compromise are aspects of how we relate to others in all contexts - not just within our romantic relationships.

When love is involved, you and your partner are both in tune with each other's interests, and instinctively look for what's best for you both. With love, compromise is enthusiastically offered - and never begrudgingly surrendered.

Without love, compromise is just compromise.

The Reverse

Dysfunctional relationships often involve unequal application of compromise. This occurs when one person finds themselves making all the concessions, while the other person dominates and ensures their own interests and opinions inevitably win in every conflict.

Another less obvious dysfunction is when a relationship is nothing but compromise. This may be a means of preventing conflict, but it can really become a serious problem between two conflict-avoidant individuals. While both may be naturally accommodating enough that this doesn't appear to lead to long-term problems, it often results in neither person really having their needs met and interests acknowledged. On a long enough timeline - over a lifelong relationship - this imbalance becomes untenable, and really bad things tend to happen, like infidelity and abandonment.

Love & Sacrifice

In the context of genuine love, sacrifices are no longer what the word says on the tin. When done out of genuine love, there is no possibility of silent resentment building over time, because every act of sacrifice is just as gratifying for the giver as it is for the receiver.

We sacrifice for those we love because we love them, and sacrifices done out of love are not done out of obligation.

Although love makes sacrifice much easier, sacrifice is possible without love. When we sacrifice ourselves for others, it doesn't "prove" our love - including to ourselves!

Too many people today wrongly believe the love will come with the sacrifice. What happens far more often is that the sacrifices compound, building resentment and hostility between partners until the relationship collapses in a tremendous firestorm of outrage.

The Reverse

Like compromise, sacrifices are a natural part of the committed relationship dynamic. And, like compromise, dysfunction arises when one person in the relationship is disproportionately sacrificing themselves while receiving nothing in return from their partner. While self-sacrifice is a normal part of human existence on occasion, endless self-sacrifice is not. Our physical bodies break down prematurely when we're kept in a state of constant stress and unhappiness. While life should not be centered on the pursuit of what makes you happy in any given moment, endless misery is toxic to us in very holistic terms. What starts out as something psychological and spiritual - the choice to remain in a bad relationship that creates a lot of suffering - becomes physical, as the years of misery take their toll on the body.

Your body matters. Your physical self matters. As we are reminded every time we fly, you must put on your own oxygen mask before attempting to aid those around you, because if you're unconscious, you can't help. Take care of yourself. Make sacrifices for those you love with enthusiasm, but do not fall for the malicious lie that sacrificial suffering is meant to be the foundation of your life.

Now what?

What does all this mean for you personally, as a unique individual in a unique relationship with another unique individual? If reading this essay brought to mind some difficult questions or thoughts, don't be afraid to give those some real consideration. It doesn't mean you should run out and upend your life and relationship(s) over something you read online.

But you should take all your relationships seriously. You only have this one life on Earth, and you should make the most of it. If you're miserable, staying miserable for the sake of someone else is a dead end, because your misery will inevitably bleed over and negatively impact the person or people you believe you're protecting with your choice.

I've been in happy, stable, committed relationship for almost fifteen years, and we've been married for the last eight. I've spent much time trying to understand where we went right. I come from a dysfunctional childhood filled with terrible relationship role models. Statistically, I should have been fated to end up in a similarly dysfunctional marriage.

Instead, my husband and I found each other, and we are genuinely soul mates. I couldn't have imagined a better partner for myself.

I believe the key factor which led to us finding each other was our individual recognition of how our childhoods were incorrect examples of marriage and family. Before we ever met, we both realized it was up to us to properly understand how adult relationships are supposed to function if they are to survive the trials and tribulations of our imperfect existence.

Throughout my childhood, I watched as these necessary components of human interaction - companionship, consistency, compromise, sacrifice - were used by the adults around me as tools of control, self-defense, and justification for abusive behavior. I recognized early on that it was a poor life choice to end up in a relationship for the wrong reasons, and I paid careful attention to all the reasons - small and large - why my parents were so catastrophically wrong for each other.

Don't fall for the siren song of love proxies. Understand your needs as a person, and recognize how crucial it is that you seek fulfillment of your needs in a way that is healthy, constructive, and offers the best chance of a wonderful, lifelong relationship that enhances and illuminates your life.

Life is truly beautiful, and life is exponentially better when shared with someone in the bonds of a lasting relationship built on real love. Make the most of the life you have. Seek love earnestly and honestly. Recognize the difference between love and love proxies, so you have the best chance of finding the right partner, before it's too late.

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