Apr 6, 2009
In Episode 5, I finish up the three part series on friendship. A major challenge to male-female friendships is the ideology of romantic love. The ideology of romantic love tells us that we cannot be happy unless we find our one true partner, which severely restricts the possibilities of male-female friendships. One way to get around this is to expand our understanding of intimacy, to see that sexual relations is not the only way for men and women to be intimate.
I spend some time explaining where we go from here. The next few podcasts will be on romantic love, followed by several on spiritual love. Then we will take a slight detour to look at what is happiness. As we work our way through romantic love, spiritual love and happiness, we will look at two common mistakes I see people make 1) They expect their romantic partners to make them happy, 2) people expect their romantic partner to give them a sense of spiritual meaning in life. Romantic love cannot satisfy these expectations, which often leads to the needless failure of relationships.
In two weeks we will begin looking at romantic love with the story of Peter and Cheryl, how they feel in love, and what happened when the excitment of falling in love faded.
This podcast series is based on my book The Six Faces of Love which can be viewed at craigowen.net