There is no life without love. “Existence” requires nothing more than food, air, water and shelter, but human “life” demands love. Sabotaged love is the most pervasive of all forms of self-hurt, if only because the opportunity presents itself most readily. Knock on any door in any town anywhere and you will find a story.

In love and marriage, relationships that succeed are usually those in which both parties make some kind of leap out of their “comfort zones” in a way that improves their ability to communicate with each other. For this to happen, both parties have to not only want the relationship to succeed, but each needs to recognize his or her own agenda of self-damage. In many relationships, only the first of these qualifications is met. The result is a tragic one: you do hurt the one you love; you don't understand why, but you can't help yourself. In many other relationships the self-damage impulse is so strong that neither qualification is met. The relationship finally ends, each partner find somebody else “more suitable,” and then the miserable drama goes into re-runs.

It is advisable to enter into the realm of love well-armed, sword in hand. The sword is not designed to use against the person or people you are trying to love. The sword's purpose is to act as a reminder and a deterrent to the only love-enemy you have, yourself. Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th century German “philosopher of pessimism,” called blind, unreasoning will the most powerful human force. To further muddy the waters, it was Schopenhauer who wrote that “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” It is too bad, then, that successful love requires two or more participants. It is understandable also that love too often resembles war, the type of war that, like a nuclear war, you cannot hope to win.

Men and women are different. The differences appear to cause problems. But the core human flight from reality which affects men and women equally presents itself on a far more basic level than any question of gender. The other side of closeness and intimacy is vulnerability and terror. If you enter into a close human relationship, whether with someone of opposite sex, same sex, sexual, platonic or otherwise, you need to cross the self-sabotage frontier before you can even consider questions of temperament or gender.

When both partners sabotage a relationship, they usually cooperate, especially when they come from opposite sides of the fight/flight dichotomy. Each of the partners knows fairly well what he or she is doing to sabotage the relationship, probably because he or she has done it all before. Even if the perpetrator doesn't actually articulate the words “I am sabotaging this relationship by…” he or she senses the urge to self-destruct bubbling right beneath the surface, and yet lacks the power to slam on the brakes in time to prevent a collision.

Jane (all these examples are real people) approaches her love life from twin platforms of hope and fear. She hopes this next man will be “the one.” She fears the unknown in the men she has yet to meet, the unknown in herself and, more than anything else, the hard task of making compromises with and adjustments to another person. And so her reaction to the whole process of meeting and getting to know men is one of fight and flight. She fights with reality, insisting on filtering events through the infallibility of her own judgment and taste.

Like many aggressive people, she has another side, a mirror side, a soft inner core. Her emotional decision to fight is also an emotional decision to flee from the middle course, to shoot and ask questions later. Jane is proud, and to admit a variance from her point of view would be to open up too many wounds from the past. Her outer shell is hard and aggressive; her soft inner core flees from reality. Un-spontaneous, she never breaks through the confines of her personal agenda. Faced with the fear and uncertainty of love, and the infinite complexity of other human beings, Jane's response is to fight for “her way.” She has a strong sense of what is “right,” of how other people should act in various given situations, and of the rewards that should be hers at various points in her life. She believes she has a right to be right, since she's put so much time and effort into the study of relationships. And yet in fighting off the men in her life she is also fleeing from the intimacy she might experience if she let herself go.

Jane is 33 years old and is beginning to hear the biological clock tick. She's already had a few false starts, thinking that this man is the one, visualizing the life together, the home, the babies. When she meets Hal, a man of 35 who has a ten year old child from a previous marriage, Jane puts into motion a series of events that bring out the worst in both. Hal's own self-damaging behavior fits in with Jane's like a hand in a glove. First Jane fights, spewing blind aggression where none is needed; Hal’s first reaction is to freeze. As battle is joined, Hal, though he loves Jane, slides into flight mode, over-reacting and failing to handle problems he is perfectly able to handle. Sensing disaster, proud Jane goes into hyper-romantic overdrive, grabbing onto glory until the end.

Divorced men with ten-year-old children do have second families. In no way was this relationship doomed from the start on the basis of circumstances. Hal's daughter is well-adjusted, and in fact gets along well with Jane, who has natural maternal warmth. But after the first few passionate weeks, Jane begins to pound Hal with the baby issue. “When we have our own child together,” Jane says in mock jest, “I'll let you choose the name.” Jane is brimming with confidence, but it's simply too much too soon for Hal.

Jane has no clue to the discomfort Hal feels every time she raises the baby issue, which she usually does lightly, in mock jest or in passing. She knows she's serious, and so does he. Hal doesn't help. He doesn't sit down with Jane and tell her that he thinks the “baby talk” is inappropriate at such an early stage in their relationship. Instead, he broods. Hal constructs a scenario in his mind in which Jane threatens his loyalty to his daughter. All sorts of final words to Jane flash through his mind during Hal's lengthy day-dreaming sessions.

At this point, not only have both parties determined that the relationship is going to fail, but each has sketched out large chunks of the script for the remainder of the relationship. Each is determined to play the relationship for what it's worth. Jane will take another six months or so to completely alienate Hal, and Hal will take an additional few months after that to end the relationship as sloppily as he can.

After the first critical conflict arises, when each knows war has been declared, Jane threatens Hal's integrity by trying to buy him in several ways. An attractive, voluptuous woman, she carefully sounds out his tastes and sensibilities. She grills him as to how he likes a woman to dress and groom herself. She does careful research on what foods he likes, what type of music he likes. To Jane, acting in accordance with these tastes becomes engraved in stone. Hal enjoys Jane's behavior at first, but he becomes uneasy soon enough. Jane never misses an opportunity to demand that Hal acknowledge what she is doing.

At the same time, as a single professional woman, Jane has more ready cash than Hal. She uses it. She arranges for elaborate dinners out that Hal doesn't even really want. She buys Hal expensive gifts. The steamroller revs into overdrive when Jane orchestrates and pays for a week-long trip to Hawaii for the two of them to celebrate Hal's birthday, and won't even let “the Birthday Boy” pay for his own golf lessons.

In fact, Hal's doesn't need any of Jane's pampering. His initial reaction is to freeze, to float. When he is with Jane he gets brief enjoyment out of what she does for him, but later it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. His early protests are mild: “You know, honey, you don't have to go to all this trouble for me.” Jane always has the right thing to say, and so Hal will float a few more weeks.

The birthday trip proves to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. When Jane insists on buying an expensive gift at the resort to bring back to Hal's daughter, Hal becomes angry for the first time, steams for a while, but fails to confront Jane.

A business manager, Hal has significant interpersonal skills. Soon after the trip, he tells a friend that he feels he has the ability to take charge of the relationship, using diplomacy more than aggression, but that now it's just not worth it. Hal has his own fatal relationship flaw, one which he now intends to use. Hal was born in the right year. Demographically he operates in the midst of a man shortage. He's never had trouble moving from one girlfriend to the next.

At this stage let's take a breather. Remember, this is not a soap opera. This is real life, and these two people really love each other. This relationship is not going to make it, and after it is all over, the wounds will not easily heal.

Jane has been insensitive to Hal, pressing him, testing his love, in effect, not trusting his love. Hal now uses the power he has to hurt the one he loves. Over the last few months of the relationship he alienates Jane to higher and higher degrees by talking about other women: ex-girlfriends, his ex-wife, office-mates. “Quit being so sensitive,” he tells her. “Why can't I let my hair down with you and talk about what comes into my mind. Don't you have the confidence to know you're the only one?” He maneuvers Jane to a point where she feels he has been ungrateful for all the things she has done for him; in a self-righteous huff, she ends the relationship.

It's easy to criticize either of these fallible human beings in love. They criticize themselves readily enough afterwards. But they're not bad people. They simply don't know how to interrupt self-defeating behavior. Each one leaves the relationship with the firm belief that the other is “dysfunctional.” The fact is, however, that neither lover is neurotic or dysfunctional. Self-hurt in the face of the responsibility of love and intimacy is a mainstream human tendency, not a distortion. As Edmund Bergler taught, “well-balanced” humans can fall prey to it, and some may never be able to learn from their mistakes or break the pattern.

Exercise: Love Hurt

• Catalogue your love life (unless you're just starting out). Detail which of your relationships contained self-damaging aspects like the story of Jane and Hal.

• Have you learned from your own errors in dealing with people or in choosing partners? Can you find sequences of relationships where each seemed to be a sad repetition of the previous relationship, following a similar script?

• Have you dealt with a self-damaging partner in a way in which your reactions made matters worse? Better?

• Finally, take a hard look at yourself. Have you ever basked in love hurt, in a feeling of righteousness after unpleasant love events? Assume that at some strange level, you enjoyed the pain. Look at yourself as if looking at a stranger and ask, why?