The Road Less Traveled
    A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
M. Scott Peck, M.D.

Falling in "Love"

- Most powerful misconception about love is belief that "falling in love" is love
- Problems with experience of "falling in love":
    - We fall in love when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated
    - Experience of falling in love is invariably temporary
        - We sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough
        - We don't stop loving the person, but ecstatic lovingness always passes
- Interaction between mother and infant is the ground out of which the child's sense of identity begins to grow
    - During first year, we learn fundamentals of who we are, who we are not
    - These limits are our ego boundaries
- Ego boundaries
    - Isolated from others by our individual identities, boundaries, and limits
    - It is lonely behind these boundaries
    - Most of us feel our loneliness to be painful and yearn to escape from behind the walls of our individual identities
    - Falling in love is temporary collapse of our ego boundaries
    - Permits us to merge with another
    - Ecstatic
- In some respects, this is a regression
    - Reexperience the sense of omnipotence which we had while children
- Sooner or later, individual will reasserts itself
    - Sickening realization that we are not ONE with our beloved
    - They continue to have their own desires, tastes, prejudices and timing different from ours
    - At this point, one of two things happens:
    1) Dissolve the ties of relationship
    2) Initiate the work of real loving
- Real love often occurs in context in which feeling of loving is lacking
    - We act lovingly despite the fact that we don't feel loving
    - May fall in love with someone who is unsuitable
- We can choose how to respond to the experience of falling in love, but we cannot choose the experience itself
- Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.    Falling in love is not.
- Falling in love has little to do with purposively nurturing one's spiritual development
- What is "falling in love", if not real love?
    - Partial collapse of ego boundaries
    - Instinctual component of mating behavior
    - A trick that our genes pull on us to trap us into mating or marriage

The experience of falling in love is not real love, but a sexual attraction.   Falling in love is a temporary condition in which our ego boundaries collapse.   Real love is distinguished by the fact that we choose to love another even when the feeling of romantic love is not present.