In my previous post, I asked which you’d choose: “passion,” meaning intense emotional desire, or “love”, defined as deep companionable affection. The question is absurd: in real life, you can’t choose which one you feel for a particular person. My hypothetical question was only meant to show something about yourself. For example, I would choose Door A in a heartbeat (not to make a pun), but I stayed in a marriage where there was domestic affection but no real passion from the start. When I finally had a passionate love affair, it was like having my insides revealed to me in an x-ray…I’d suppressed my desire for a different kind of love for half my life. And I suspect this state of things is not uncommon.

That’s my story, but it may not be yours at all. If I’ve learned anything in my many years on the planet and many years of studying this subject, it’s this: people have individual emotional barometers, and there’s a spectrum of awareness as to emotions, and capacity for emotions, very much including love. The question “Which is better?” is also absurd; the real question is “Which is better for you?”

What distinguishes passion and marital love (or “companionate” love, as sociologists call it), is not only intensity of desire, but the difference in ability to choose. You just can’t decide to have passionate feelings about someone, and once in the hold of passion, you can’t just shrug it off as a bad choice. The sense of helplessness and the feeling of absolute need for another are scary to feel, because the risk is heartbreak if that immense desire is not fulfilled. You depend on the beloved to return your passion, and if not, it’s like dying of thirst in a desert. Yet it’s difficult even to come up with reasons why you’ve invested so much emotion in this one particular human. Your rational brain may be aware that this feeling is irrational, and yet not have much power to do anything about it.

Deep domestic affection, on the other hand, is rational to the core: you know why you want to be with this person, you can name the traits that appeal to you, as with friendship. He or she is a good person, kind, caring, reliable, a candidate for a lifetime of sex, not to mention so-and-so will make a great mom or dad for your children. It’s about compatibility, the way that you get along with each other, how you line up as to tastes and values, and that’s why this form of love is associated with couples. In essence, passion is individual desire, while domestic love is the engine of an everyday mutual relationship.

Can you choose to have this gratifying “domestic” love? To a much greater degree, yes. You can also choose to “work” on the love relationship, alone or with the partner, to improve it (not that this always works out). There’s nothing to prove (or improve) about passionate love – it takes you over like a dictator, like a virus, until it somehow fades and dies. Domestic affection is meant to be mutual, very much about your life together, whereas passion can live in one person alone, though the hope is that it will be returned.

How could passion be better for anyone then, when the risk of heartbreak is so great? Why would I choose Door A over the secure and contented domestic affection behind Door B? Because the return, for me, having had both, is greater in a passionate love, well worth the risk. The ability to feel your genuine self, expressed in desire for someone who delights you extremely, is one way (not the only way) to know yourself, to be human, even if that hope for this love is not fulfilled. To be afraid of the price of possible unhappiness is like staying at home because it’s too risky to go anywhere; you feel secure but you’re missing out on some of the best things in life.

Domestic affection is safer, yes: when it “works,” it rewards us with a steady stream of contentment, a moderate feeling of real satisfaction rather than the wild pleasure of passion. And yet…that milder form of love is not risk-free either. The unhappiness of many couples can be found all over the place, and the rate of divorce actually goes up for people who remarry, trying to find the love that wasn’t satisfying after all. In fact, the more they remarry, the more the rate goes up. Most marriages do work out, yes, but at what price? There’s often an untold story as to what needs each partner has had to suppress in order to stay together. The fact that many people remain married doesn’t necessarily mean they’re happy or even content, but rather that they prefer stability, fear being alone, have financial considerations, etc., and make a bargain to stick with what they have.

Which is better for you – passion or domestic love – depends on your own emotional chemistry and can’t be figured out logically. There’s no Door A or Door B in real life, and there’s no stigma in choosing the path that makes us happy, or for that matter, unhappy, especially if you learn who you really are – at heart.

Image by Freepik.com