How and Why Leaving Must Come Before Loving

One major mistake that contemporary lovers make is to try to carry too many people along in their love life. Some of those we attempt to carry along could be parents, friends, and even siblings to mention but a few. The outcome is that our love lives would be weighed down by too many external influences and their divergent agendas. If your love life must work, you must learn to travel light. Real love is a game of two and for two. This is not to say that you disregard people, but you have got to prioritize your lover above all else. Here are a few ways you must leave for your love to work.

YOU MUST LEAVE GEOGRAPHICALLY

This particularly applies to married individuals. The worst thing you can do in love is to marry into your parent‘s home. The adults who do this will end up being treated like children by such parents. Besides, such a love lifestyle will stir up diverse conflicts between the parents and the married couple. There isn’t likely to be freedom of expression and the pressure of such an approach to love will almost completely destroy your love for each other. What works is for there to be the significant geographical distance between emerging lovers and their extended family for their love to thrive. Just as planting two respective plants too close to each other can cause a fierce competition for resources that leads to stunted growth, not giving your love life the needed geographical distance can lead to stunted love.

YOU MUST LEAVE FINANCIALLY

One adage insists that whoever pays the piper dictates the tune. I have also noticed the tendency of some lovers to receive Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) financially from external parties like parents and family members. It is one thing for parents to bankroll your wedding, but it is counterproductive for them to bankroll your marriage. What this does in most cases is that it robs you of the much-needed respect in their eyes. It also leads to massive interference by them, in the decision-making process of your love life. After all financial shareholders must have a say in the organization they are investing in. What every lover must strive for is absolute financial independence from their extended family in other to obtain dignity in their eyes. This might be tough on young couples who have limited finances, but it is worth doing for the sake of the dignity of your marital relationship.

YOU MUST LEAVE PSYCHOLOGICALLY

Marriage and love are for adults and not for babies. It is for those who relish the idea of independence not for those wallow in the muddy waters of dependence. This means that though you honour the role the people in your past have played in your life, you are not governed by those roles. There is no such thing as “my daddy said, my mummy, said” in a marital relationship. You are expected to be a man and a woman of your own if it is to work. Some men either still have mummy coming over to cook for them, or they go over to eat mummy’s delicacies, in spite of the fact that they have their own wife. This is the epitome of childishness. One vital sign that you haven’t left psychologically is the tendency to compare the people in your life now, with people in your past. Except you get it into your head that you are over with the past, you are bound to have problems in your love life.

YOU MUST LEAVE IDEOLOGICALLY

Many lovers claim to be through with their past but they insist on doing things how their parents or former partners used to do it, in their current relationships. This won’t work. What you are in is different from what you were in. You can’t impose the old way of doing things on your new relationship. Each relationship will have to work out their unique way of doing things, guided by timeless principles. Any lover who is an ideological slave to the past is bound to fail.

Leaving must always come before cleaving in love. In fact, leaving is what creates room for cleaving in love. Those who want to argue with this reality will automatically know the depths of emotional failure, may it not be you.

THE GREATEST IS LOVE