Episode 1 - Two Major Problems With Love As We Know It

Jun 7

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Show Notes

Episode Summary:

In this transformative episode of the "What's Wrong With Love?" podcast, Isa delves into the common misconceptions and pitfalls of love in modern relationships. She sheds light on the pervasive conditional and dependent nature of love that often leads to dissatisfaction and conflict. By sharing her personal experiences and insights, Isa invites listeners to reflect on their beliefs about love and offers a path towards healing and authentic connection.

Key themes explored include:

The impact of conditional love on relationship dynamics
The role of perfectionism and people-pleasing in fostering inauthenticity
The need to shift from dependent to unconditional love for true fulfillment

Key Takeaways:

Conditional love drives individuals to seek validation through pleasing others, leading to inauthentic connections.
Perfectionism and people-pleasing can strain relationships and contribute to emotional distance.
Expectations based on conditional love often lead to unspoken conflicts and power struggles.
Healing past wounds and shifting beliefs about love are essential steps towards experiencing authentic connection.
Embracing self-love and acceptance paves the way for nurturing, unconditional relationships.

Timestamp Summary :

0:11 Healing Feminine Wounds to Foster Genuine Love

4:56 The Pitfalls of Striving for Perfection in Relationships

7:35 The Pitfalls of Conditional and Dependent Love in Relationships

12:13 Transforming Love from Conditional to Unconditional and Nurturing

16:06 Transforming Relationships Through Awareness and Personalized Guidance

Notable Quotes:

"We please in the hope of receiving this genuine, unconditional love that our soul craves."
"Conditional love drives relationships to fail because we deny who we are and connect inauthentically."
"Expectations placed on others create unrealistic pressure and feed into inauthentic behaviors."
"Our conceptions of love shape relationship dynamics and determine how we experience love."
"Shifting from dependent to unconditional love can lead to genuine and fulfilling connections."

Links mentioned :

To Submit your Question :

https://isa_relationship_coach_for_women.ck.page/160a61afc8

To learn how we can work together :

isacote.com/work-with-me

One of the most sought after and nurturing human experience is to love and be loved. We all seek it, we all yearn for it. This need is so deep inside of us, it’s a desire that never stops calling us. We all dream to be truly loved, seen and respected by a caring and conscious man with whom we feel aligned. We all aspire to share a genuine connection, a partnership and a complicity with our man that fulfills us deeply. This desire is part of the human experience.
Unfortunately, this ideal love that we crave so deeply rarely manifest itself into reality for a sustained period of time. Of course, in the beginning of a relationship, things are smooth and lovely and almost perfect, but soon enough, we find ourselves being disappointed. Things change, we discover traits that we don’t like in our partner. We start arguing. Reality catches up on us and the magic disappears. We may even start to wonder if we’re with the right person. We may also stay longer in an unhealthy relationship, trying to fix it at our own detriment, hoping to feel the kind of love that our heart wants. But why is it this way? What’s the problem with love?
That question haunted me for a while during my first years with my man, where indeed, things were not as they were and I started to feel more and more distance between us. Even though everyone around me was saying that this was a normal part of the evolution of a relationship because of, you know, life and its obligations and responsibilities, I still didn’t swallow this answer. Deep inside, it didn’t make sense, it didn’t feel right. It was « logical » and yet, I felt that there was something deeper at play that needed to be uncovered…
It’s only 6 years later, when I started my healing journey because of my relationship crumble that I got the answer to that question.
I realized that the only kind of love we know is conditional. We learn early on that to be loved, we have to please. We please to attract a man. We please to keep a man. We please to feel adequate. We please to avoid rejection. We please to try to save a relationship from dissolving… We please in the hope of receiving this genuine, unconditional love that our Soul crave. But we also please because at a deeper level, if we are not loved, we make it mean something about ourselves. We make it mean that we are inadequate, not beautiful enough, not good enough. We learn to tie our value to the love that we receive.
Therefore, this conditional and pleasing kind of love that we know has insidious and sneaky effects on our psyche. It unconsciously drives us to strive for perfection. Slowly but surely, we seek to become first the perfect girl, then the perfect friend, the perfect lover, the perfect woman and the perfect mother.
This drive towards perfection is not just a trait. It’s a strategy to avoid or to get something. Reaching for perfection has been my go-to strategy to avoid rejection and to get recognition for soooo many years. I slowly and steadily became a Superwoman without even knowing it. I was doing everything for everyone. Caring for my man, for my children, for my friends, positioning myself as strong and independent, resourceful and always happy, qualities that I perceived as ideal, valuable and attractive. I was denying my own needs on a regular basis and I had very porous boundaries with others. Acting as a Superwoman had disastrous effects on my relationship. I was accepting things that I didn’t want to, like forcing myself to make love when I didn’t feel like it or doing all the housework without asking for help because that’s what I thought was « expected » from me (In fact, I was the one expecting it from myself, I just didn’t know it at that time.)
So, ultimately, this Superwoman thing led me to frustration, annoyance and resentment towards my man and it got bigger and bigger over time. I started to blame him for all the things that were not working in our relationship. I was often short with him. It was causing conflicts, triggering the worst in me and obviously, the worst in him. Over time, we ended up with this massive emotional distance between us that we didn’t know how to solve.
But perfection is not only a strategy. It’s also a compensation mechanism. In my case, I wanted to be perfect to compensate for the low self-esteem that I was feeling inside. On a deeper level, I was not trying to prove my worth to others, I was trying to prove it to myself. To have myself believe that I was indeed beautiful, loveable and that I truly was a good person despite all my flaws. I was wounded and I didn’t know it. So instead of healing, I was compensating with perfection, always trying to prove my worth and to be right. This tendency was accentuating conflicts and tension in my relationship, turning almost all our discussions into power struggles. I couldn’t admit that I was wrong because for my ego. Being wrong would have meant that I was imperfect, that I was flawed. My identity as a perfect woman would have died, and so would have my ego. Because I didn’t knew any better, I continued to act from my wounded self, only worsening the situation with my man, which ended up needing a big revamp and a reconstruction.
Through my healing journey, I also realized that the other problem with our conception of love is that it makes our happiness depend on our partner and vice-versa. The kind love we know is not only conditional, but it’s also dependent. We need him to behave or be a certain way to be happy and the same is true for him. This creates expectations that are either placed on us by our man or that we place on our man.
The problem with expectations is that they are often unrealistic and unspoken. We put them onto someone, without that someone even knowing it, expecting that person to satisfy them, which almost never happens, leaving us frustrated and angry! Expectations are often a big source of conflict and power struggle in a relationship, especially when one partner is trying to force them onto the other. I have been there on both sides, forcing myself to satisfy the expectations of my man and forcing my own expectations on him. I have spent a humongous amount of energy doing this in the early years of our relationship, well, looking back, I’ve done this for the first half of our relationship, which means during the first 12 years at the moment of this recording!
Wow, this is a long time and I’ve got to tell you, even if I tried very very hard, it never worked. All it did was leaving me feeling exhausted, annoyed and bitter! I would also like to add that for us women, the expectations that are placed on us create people-pleasing behaviours and they reinforce our « striving for perfection » game, which steers us away from our true selves. No wonder so many of us don’t recognize themselves in their thirties or wake up one day without knowing who they really are anymore which is another problem that affects our relationship that I will talk about in another episode.
So, if we mix together everything we’ve talked about so far about love as we know it, we need our man to be happy AND he has to behave/be a certain way to make us happy. The same is true for him. He needs us to be happy and we have to behave a certain way to make him happy. This is the kind of love that we know : conditional and dependent love.
Do you see the problem with that?
Conditional Love is driving us to put on a mask of perfection. To hide our « dark side » (our shadows, our flaws, our wounds) for as long as we can in a relationship. We feel like we have to play a role and we fear that if we’re truly seen, we won’t be loved. We become inauthentic with an half open heart trying to connect authentically with someone equally inauthentic and half-openhearted. It works on a basic level, but not on a deeper one and certainly not for the long run. Eventually, we cannot hide our true selves anymore and we have to face our shadows, our own and the ones of our partner. This is often where our relationship starts to struggle. The conception of conditional love is driving relationships to fail because we deny who we are all along and therefore, we connect on the very unstable ground of inauthenticity, which is not sustainable over time.
On the other hand, Dependent Love is teaching us to find fulfillment and happiness outside of ourselves, in the other. It is telling us that our partner is responsible to make us happy and that we are also responsible for his happiness. The result is an enormous pressure on everyone’s shoulders, often driving us unconsciously to be different than we are, which, in turn, feeds inauthenticity again. Moreover, this kind of love transforms us into victims, because it leads us to think that our unhappiness in relationship is caused by our partner only, by outer circumstances, but more often than not, our unhappiness in relationship is a result of us not taking responsibility for how bad we feel and for not looking inside to address where this feeling comes from.
Dependent Love is training us to only try to change our man in the hope to feel better instead of taking responsibility for our emotions and looking at the root cause of our unhappiness in relationship. Often, we are just caught up into a poor dynamic that took root without us knowing how or why and if we blame our man for our unhappiness, we will never uncover what’s going on under the surface. We will continue to react to each other’s behaviour and we won’t be able to fix our relationship.
So Conditional Love and Dependent Love are the two major problems with love as we know it. This kind of love is really ruining our relationships over time! But what else can we do? This is the only kind of love that we have been exposed to. This is the only kind of love that we know and it’s everywhere! It’s in our movies, our songs, our families, it’s deeply in our culture. No wonder why this is the only kind of love we have integrated and that we experience with the man of our life!!
But rejoice because even though love as we know it is flawed and causes our relationships to degrade over time, we can still shift the whole thing. We can learn to show up in a different way in relationships, with our hearts wide open, courageously embracing and accepting our true selves despite our shadows and flaws, learning to love ourselves unconditionally, and our man also. This way, we can connect with our man from a deeper and pure place, with authenticity and acceptance, so we can finally feel what a true, genuine and fulfilling love is like.
I believe that this is exactly where humanity is heading in this new Era and it’s really exciting because the way we experience love is going to shift entirely from conditional and dependent to unconditional and nurturing. I also believe that we’re here to make this shift happen but to succeed, we have to heal ourselves first. We have to heal our past conditioning, our relationship heartbreaks, the betrayals, our resentment, our emotional baggage, our smallness, our not enoughness… We also have to change our beliefs about love if we want to create something different in our love life. Only then can we show up differently and change the vibe, change the dynamic of our relationship.
It may seem like a lot to do, but we don’t have to be fully healed to see this shift happen. We only have to pay attention to how our misconceptions about love and our hurts are driving us away from our true selves and happiness and to course correct along the way. If you pay attention, the rest will follow. What needs to be corrected, released or healed will always show itself to you every step of the way. You just have to start the journey and to go one step at a time.
What I’ve shared here today is really food for thoughts. I’d like you to take a step back and reflect on your own love life, past and present. Have you experienced conditional love? How? How does it make you feel? Do you feel that somehow, your partner’s happiness lies on your shoulders? Do you have unspoken expectations towards your man that your are subtly trying to have him conform to? With your man, where are you reacting from your wounds instead of responding from a higher level of consciousness? Take a moment to sit with these questions, to reflect on them.
Observe your love life, your reactions, your behaviours. All of it is going tell you what your beliefs about love are and how they affect you, because our conceptions of love or our beliefs about love, they shape our relationship dynamics and patterns and in the end, they determine how we experience love. So as I said, sit with these questions. Don’t pressure yourself to find answers. Just contemplate what is. The first step to any change is awareness. What you need to see is gonna be shown to you effortlessly. Just trust the process. It always does that!
Meanwhile, if you have a burning question about what you’ve just heard or if you’d like my perspective on a problem that you’re experiencing in your relationship and that you haven’t been able to solve despite your dedication, please submit your question. You will be entered my monthly draw to get a chance to have me personally answer you via email. If your question isn’t picked, I will keep it for an upcoming Q&A Podcast episode where it will be featured and answered anonymously. You can find the link to submit your Question in the show notes.
All right! This is what concludes today’s episode. I want to thank you for sharing this space with me and for being part of the New Era of Women in love. I truly believe that we are change instigators in our relationship and that the men in our lives are transformed by our own healing and growth. My experience has proved it to be true because this is exactly how it played out in my relationship and it is my highest intention that you experience the same. Thank you for being here. Until we meet again, take care.