Have you ever felt that you are too much in love? Are there times when your head and your heart say different things? Does it occasionally seem that the love you lavish on someone else is like casting pearls before swine? Is your life made miserable because you care too much? These questions deal with the issue of one person loving another person too much. But sometimes we wonder whether two people can love each other too much. Let’s address both issues.
As we discuss in our book, The Compatibility Code, successful relationships are the blending of the cognitive and emotional aspects of life—the heart and the mind. We often try to figure out which of these is more important. If you are all heart and no mind you ride a roller coaster of emotional highs and lows that makes your life miserable. If you are all mind and no heart you experience an emotionally distant relationship that lacks the intimacy so important to marriage. Both conditions typically end in divorce.
Loving too much might be better defined as love out of balance. Think of it as emphasizing the emotional aspects of love and neglecting the important thoughts and actions that accompany mature love. When the in-love teenager girl says, “But I love him so much – I just KNOW it’s right – even when he doesn’t always treat me right” we are observing love out of balance. This young girl looks at feelings but ignores that her boyfriend is antisocial, psychopathic, critical, and just plain unpleasant. In North America when teens marry the divorce rate is 90%. Were they in love with each other? Your bet! But you see the fallacy of loving too much, or, the failure to integrate the emotional and the cognitive aspects of loving.
But there are instances when a mature couple is intensely in love with one another. Is that “too much?” Sometimes—if they are out of balance. This would predominantly show up when each individual is focused on their own feelings—as opposed to mutually focusing on each others needs and the health of the marriage. But joyfully, there is a way to love that is both deep and mutual.
In the marriage of C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham (depicted in the 1993 film Shadowlands) you find an intensity of emotional attachment seen only occasionally. Joy, whose cancer is in remission, speaks to “Jack” about the fact that she will die. She asks how he will deal with it. Lewis’s says, “Don’t worry, I’ll manage somehow.” Joy’s response is insightful. She says, “We can do better than that. The pain you will feel then is part of the joy we experience now.”
Your ability to love deeply today will be mirrored by the pain you will feel when that love is lost. That is not “loving too much” but experiencing life to the full.
