Page 40 - The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts

tumbling. It is difficult to study when you are in love.
Tomorrow you have a test on the War of 1812, but who
cares about the War of 1812? When you’re in love,
everything else seems irrelevant. A man said to me, “Dr.
Chapman, my job is disintegrating.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I met this girl, fell in love, and I can’t get a thing done. I
can’t keep my mind on my job. I spend my day dreaming
about her.”
The euphoria of the “in love” state gives us the illusion
that we have an intimate relationship. We feel that we
belong to each other. We believe we can conquer all
problems. We feel altruistic toward each other. As one
young man said about his fiancée, “I can’t conceive of
doing anything to hurt her. My only desire is to make her
happy. I would do anything to make her happy.” Such
obsession gives us the false sense that our egocentric
attitudes have been eradicated and we have become sort
of a Mother Teresa, willing to give anything for the benefit of
our lover. The reason we can do that so freely is that we
sincerely believe that our lover feels the same way toward
us. We believe that she is committed to meeting our needs,
that he loves us as much as we love him and would never
do anything to hurt us.
That thinking is always fanciful. Not that we are
insincere in what we think and feel, but we are unrealistic.
We fail to reckon with the reality of human nature. By nature,
we are egocentric. Our world revolves around us. None of