“I just don’t love him anymore,” Jennifer, a 40-year-old divorcee, said to me recently. “I don’t really understand my feelings. I really cared about Dan for a long time—then everything about him started bugging me.”

“Tell me about your feelings,” I said.

“Well, this has happened before. I’ve been with Dan for a year. Before him I was with a guy for two years and I just cut and ran.”

“Sounds like a lot of guys I’ve been talking to lately,” I told her, smiling. “I thought cutting and running was what guys did?” 

“Nope. Believe me. Women can do it too.”

Jennifer and I explored her pattern of leaving a relationship when things got rough. We talked about our final criteria of readiness for love:  expanding your spiritual and psychological self in a relationship.

As Scott Peck said in his book, The Road Less Traveled, “Life is difficult.” He should have said, “Relationships are difficult.” It would have been no less true. Relationships require us to move beyond the “honeymoon” phase of relating into the real nitty-gritty aspects of relating.

You know the dance: Boy meets girl. Boy falls for girl; girl falls for boy. Things go great for months. Life is exciting. Hormones are raging. This must be love. Then, sometimes gradually, sometimes overnight, the hormone buttons turn off and you see the real person.

If you are really ready for love, you understand this relational shift will happen, and rather than cutting and running, you see this as an opportunity for growth. We fall in love, enter into a committed relationship, get married, grow up and then live happily ever after. Now think about that.

Okay. I hear some of you murmuring, “Are you nuts?” “Dr. David, you don’t understand. He spends too much money on his toys. She spends too much time on the phone with her friends.”

Not to worry. Just opportunities, I tell you. Each of these situations is an opportunity for spiritual and psychological growth. Cutting and running, or blaming him/ her for all of the problems is a way to stay stuck. It is a way to stay small. These issues are places for you to explore, avenues to expand your spiritual and emotional self.

“But, I didn’t sign up for growth classes when I started dating this guy,” you say.

If you are really ready for love, you are ready for the changes that take place in a relationship that provide opportunities to sand off the rough edges of your personality. In fact, there is no better place to sand off those rough edges than together while creating a relationship. 

A love relationship offers enormous potential for expanding character, stimulating our capacity to love, leading us to care both more deeply and with wider scope.