real love versus infatuation « Conscious Transitions

Love is a Bowl of Oatmeal

By Sheryl Paul, on April 8th, 2013

Originally published on The Huffington Post

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One of my favorite authors, Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, says that good love is like a bowl of oatmeal. A bowl of oatmeal? How unromantic, you may say. How prosaic, you think. Love should be an ice cream sundae with cherries and sprinkles on top. Love should be a decadent Italian dessert. Oatmeal? How depressing.

In our romance-addicted culture, this concept rubs many people the wrong way and often elicits questions like: Where’s the passion, the drama, the excitement? Isn’t love supposed to make me feel alive? Isn’t it supposed to fulfill my every need, even needs that I didn’t know I had?

What Johnson means is that love is not the cure-all that we set people up to believe it is. When love is true and real, it feels warm and sweet in your soul the way oatmeal feel warms and … Click here to continue reading...

Alanis and the E-Course: Lesson 3 (In Praise of the Vulnerable Man)

By Sheryl Paul, on December 13th, 2010

Lesson Three of the Conscious Weddings E-Course is “What If I Don’t Love My Partner Enough?” or “Real Love versus Infatuation“. I’ll say it bluntly: Our culture is dangerously deluded when it comes to ideas of real love. From the time we’re old enough to absorb information, we’re inundated with a fantasy that says that you’re supposed to feel head-over-heels, stomach-churning, butterfly-inducing “love” from “yes” to “I do.”

painting by Daev Finn

Once the spark of infatuation fades (which it always does, if it was ever there to begin with), the once dewy-eyed couple wonders, “Is this love? Is this it?”

We’re addicted to that feeling, which is really nothing more than a chemically-induced hormonal reaction which points to a window of possibility of what it can feel like to connect with an open heart. It is not, in itself, love.

We’re also conditioned to associate love … Click here to continue reading...