What Woody Allen Can Teach Us About Love

Woody Allen has some interesting thoughts on love. He says....

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness."

Sure, this is funny as hell. But I am here to remind you -- your "love life" does NOT have to be your "suffering life."

I received an extreme amount of private emails in response to an article I wrote a few months ago on Huffington Post about how to break free from dating Prince and/or Princess Harmings.

I'm intuiting there's a book on this topic, and so I've been researching - and discovered the brilliant Dr. Paul Dobransky, who theorizes on how we fall in love -- and how best to stay in a lasting, lusting relationship.

According to Dr. D our human brain has 3 parts -- ALL of which need to be satisfied to feel love towards our partners.

1. Our Reptilian Brain - which is all about animal attraction - feeling that sexual chemistry - also famed for the animal instinct of fight or flight

2. Our Mammalian Brain - which is all about emotional connection - feeling a friendship bond.

3. Our Higher Brain - which is all about the exchange of mature thinking and a high level of conscious processing of emotion.

The problem?

Some people don't think and act from their higher brain when experiencing anxiety and anger.

Instead people react to anger and anxiety from their lowest brain -- their reptilian brain -- by engaging in fight or flight - going towards addiction, stonewalling, screaming, acting impulsively/destructively, or turning the anger inward towards depression.

Meaning?

If you and/or your partner are unable to properly process the inevitable anger and anxiety which sneak into relationships, well, then you will have an unhealthy, bad relationship!

THE CLIFF NOTES FOR THE ABOVE: Anger/anxiety will ruin your relationship if you and/or your partner do not learn how to best process them with your highest level of brain activity - your maturest level of brainwaves.

Dr. D offers up a simple description for love which explains why "improperly processed anger and anxiety" are the mighty enemies of love.

HEALTHY LOVE = the exchange of positive emotions.

ANGER AND ANXIETY = the exchange of negative emotions.

Hence, healthy love has a hard time co-existing around anger/anxiety.

For this reason, Dr. D warns against getting involved with people who you up front recognize as being consistently negative, angry, anxious, bitter, resentful - regularly reacting to life with tantrums, addictions, and/or stonewalling.

Dr. D suggests "courage" is the number one quality which both you and your partner need to share in common to experience healthy love.

He describes "courage" specifically as "the decision to speak, act, empathise, and operate from your highest self -- no matter the anxiety and anger you are feeling."

YOUR ASSIGNMENT: If you want to make sure you and your partner find more of this needed "courage," seek the safety of a journal to express your anger and anxiety. Let your pen release your pain. Let your pen be your mighty sword to slash away all those bad feelings -- so you go at it alone on paper -- and not with the one you love.

Dr. D also advises that if the exchange of emotions between you and your partner becomes incredibly negative, then you might need to tap into the courage to walk away from what is not working -- knowing that Woody Allen's love advice is wrong. Love is not about suffering.

Oh...and Woody Allen's also wrong about his cooking methods.

Woody instructs: "Who bothers to cook TV dinners? I suck them frozen."

If you're going through a difficult break up, you can find tips for bouncing back by clicking here ...

And for more happiness tips, visit www.notsalmon.com.

Comments

[pranabsharma]

Nice post
Pranab
www.goguwahati.com

[suek]

I love the wisdom in describing love as the exchange of positive emotions. When love does go awry it is indeeed because it becomes more of an exchange of too much negative emotion. We must all better learn how to manage our anger and anxierty if we hope for healthy love. Thanks for sharing this, Karen!

[JerseyBob]

What can make walking away very difficult is the memory of all that was good in the relationship. I look at the faces, on but not into the eyes, of some, and a bit unconsciously wonder "What goes on there?" There seems to be, once in a while, when you get to know someone better, behind those eyes, a room where memory persists. The trick I think is to accept that others have similar memories. Because they will always be there, they need to be acknowledged. Some small comfort perhaps; one needs recognize that many others have experienced the same. Same memories, same rooms. Other relationships.

Woody's thoughts on love and suffering suggest Rumsfeld's:

"As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know."

Apply this to matters of the heart. "But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know." Again, same memories. Same rooms. Other relationships. I think I, for a small part of a second, sometimes wonder what others might have in their rooms. Mind, nothing pathological here, just a fleeting Rumsfeldian virtually unknown thought. At the checkout counter. On the subway. On the street. As much as we are different we are the same. Of course Vive la difference!

[Hopalongpoppyseed]

Speaking figuratively, I lurf Woody.

[Theda]

I'm sick of Woody Allen and his professional whining and kevetching. The routine is irritating, old and passe now.....it's how our GRANDFATHERS used to sound, always complaining.
I'm not even gonna comment on his wife--stepdaughter!

[MikeDu]

The man's seminal work was over twenty years ago. But that's not to belittle the work. Most directors NEVER manage to produce a film of the caliber of Manhattan, Annie Hall or Interiors. You're dumping on him because he only produced one of each? About his "wife-stepdaughter". How old is she now, 40? So only Republican politicians are allowed to have younger wives?