Strive for Interdependent Love

When we’re OK on our own, and we’re both better off together.

The fallacy of romantic love is that your “soulmate” will somehow accept responsibility for your negative emotions and make you happy.

As TV philosopher Jason Silva asks, “Can you blame us? For squeezing so tightly around one another?”

“It’s OK to be codependent. It’s not a bad thing.”

— Jason Silva, Shots of Awe

Well… maybe it’s not morally bad. But leaves you with the problem of how to control some other person’s behavior because that’s the only way you can make yourself feel the way you want to feel.

And that’s no way to live.

The codependent myth is very popular, because it promises so much — i.e., that our partners will love us the way that our mothers did when we were infants.

As babies, we could not communicate our needs. We could only cry. Our parents took responsibility for figuring out how we felt, and how to make us happy.

The co-dependent myth of romantic love says that, if only we can find our true soulmates, then they will love us the same way — without requiring anything of us.

The classic…