Falling in love as a choice
Falling in love as a choice
“One of the biggest areas in this culture that we are trained to relate to from a victim perspective is in relationship to romance. To paraphrase the quote from my book above: “it is necessary to change the way we intellectually view romance in order to stop being the victim of the old tapes.” We learned that romance was magical - that finding our prince or princess was a destination to reach where we would live happily ever after. We learn about “falling in love” as if it were a camouflaged hole in the sidewalk that we just happened to fall into.” “It was vital for me to start owning that falling in love was a choice I was making - not some lightening strike that I was powerless over. As long as I was reacting unconsciously - not owning that I had some power over the beliefs I was empowering and therefore the feelings I was set up to experience because of the perspectives and expectations those beliefs created - then I was in my codependency and powerless to make choices. I was then doomed to end up blaming her for not being a magical princess and/or blaming myself for being such an ugly frog.” “The reality is that I have choices in life, and I need to take responsibility for the consequences of those choices. If I choose to get involved with someone romantically, the responsibility for any emotional reactions are mine - not the other persons. I may feel like the victim of her behavior, but I can tell myself the Truth - which is that I am responsible for the feelings because I was the one who choose to give her some power over my feelings.”
This is an article in a series of articles focused upon issues involving gender, sexuality, romantic relationships, and directly related topics.
Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney is copyright 1995. Material on Joy2MeU web site (except where otherwise noted) is copyright 1996 thru 2017 by Robert Burney PO Box 98 Fallbrook CA 92088.
Falling in love as a choice was originally published online February 26, 2004 on Robert’s Inner Child/Codependency Recovery page on the Suite101.com Directory. Some slight changes were made in moving this article to Joy2MeU.com - primarily in removing references to other articles on suite101 and changing the links for those articles to counterparts on Joy2MeU.
Originally published at https://joy2meu.com/falling_in_love.htm