© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete text of Human Action, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's philosophy of human achievement.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Human Action Table of Contents
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But that's just seeming, of course. Maybe your parents or grandparents concealed their major conflicts from you. Perhaps they were miserable with each other, but in those days you just hung in there and suffered. Or perhaps you really do live in a more complicated world than they did. The key fact remains that expecting your love life to play out the same way your parents or any previous generation's love lives played out is unrealistic. This expectation is a major box that can hold you back. You've got to destroy the box. To shatter the box totally, you've got to come to the realization that your love-life is strictly your own. The external images of someone else's love life just do not apply to you. There are really no rules in love. Our buildings keep getting taller and our machines keep getting more sophisticated. Great works of art keep coming to stimulate and expand humanity's horizons. But love is always love. You have to learn it for yourself, define it for yourself, seek it for yourself—without models. From a position of freedom. And freedom brings responsibility.

You attain that freedom through personal Trope. Personal Trope takes work, even pain. It means time spent alone, away from the temptations of the shallow half-love you're starting to mistrust. Old habits die hard; it might take some time.

One of the hardest parts of the work required to reach a turning point or Trope in your love life involves “what other people might think.” We all have images of ourselves, and often reputations to keep up. I admit, way back in the past, if I were dating a woman, the way passers by would view my girlfriend (and thus judge me) was for a long time more important than who the woman was. Unhappiness and discontent made me interrupt this image and re-order my priorities.

The question is, do you judge a potential partner through the eyes of your friends, your parents, or some other you that lives in your Hollywood daydreams? That's not the way to find a living, breathing human being to love. Instead you need to work to free yourself from these habits and static boxes. In the realm of love, the work may turn out to be much harder than in any other area. The reason for this is that we all need love so very much that we have a primitive static tendency to reach for it whenever we see any faint glimmer of it on the horizon. We need to develop our own techniques to grow out of that tendency, and we can do that growing if we learn to delay gratification.

Exercise: Doing the Work

Write out short “strategy” paragraphs on some ways in which you might change your attitudes in the following areas:

• Pushing back the need not to be lonely so you can see love in perspective.

• Freeing yourself of the daydreams that tend to “package” your potential partners.

• Breaking free from considerations of “what other people think.”

• Playing out family-related scenarios.

• Feeling sorry for yourself or feeling that “life isn't fair.”