How to love and have passion for the same person?
Want vs. Have – Passion vs. Love and the age-old question — Can we have both in the same person?
We can and we can for sure. It is simple, but as sure as hell not easy. But to cover the how, we will need to cast a wider net of prerequisites needed to have passion and love, want and have for the same person.
When we love someone, we not only love them with our hearts but with our minds as well. We share our lives with them, our value system, deepest secrets and feel safe with them. They, in turn, find the same things in us and the feeling is mutual.
When we have a passion for someone, it means we are deeply attracted to them. This usually comes from fantasies, mystery and the image of the person we have in our heads. Also, a huge contributor here is the fact that we don’t “have” the other person so we get the thrill of the “hunt.”
It is like the cat string effect. If the cat gets’s the string, it doesn’t want to play with it. But when the string is so close but yet out of hands reach, that’s when the cat wants to play with it so badly.
It is possible to have both of these. It is possible to have the person, love them and for them to love us while at the same time having a huge lust for that person, wanting them so badly even years in a relationship of marriage. But to do that, we need a couple of elements onboard first.
And to get there, we will start with something unusual – the second law of thermodynamics.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
There is a quote by Leo Tolstoy at the beginning of Anna Karenina that states “All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” With this, Tolstoy meant that happiness, in form or another, can be achieved by a relatively determined and defined set of actions, behaviors, thoughts and skills.
While on the other hand, an unhappy family can be unhappy in a million different ways. All it takes is one single (crucial) thing to go wrong and everything crumbles down. Getting things wrong is easy, but getting them right is hard. Getting things right is simple, but not easy. Getting things right has a couple of ways, getting things wrong has a million.
And even when we get them right, we need to keep them right and that’s how we came to the second law of thermodynamics.
Ok, so first of all the second law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (which is a system where the energy of matter can’t enter or leave), the total entropy will never decrease and the process is irreversible. In plain English, that means that any isolated system which doesn’t receive new energy will slowly decay and perish.
And your relationship is the same thing. It is subjected to the second law of thermodynamics and if you don’t pump new energy into it, it will decay and die off. So if you think of your relationship as something sure and secure, think again because according to the laws of physics (yes, you read that correctly), it will die if you don’t input yourself over and over again.
And this is the first prerequisite for wanting and having the same person – realizing that you never have a sure thing but a constant process which requires constant energy input to survive and thrive. All of this is connected with the second prerequisite for wanting and having the same person and that is that you never actually have a person.
Do you really have a person?
There is an old relationship axiom which goes something like
“If you are ready to leave your relationship, it means that it’s a healthy relationship.”
This can be misunderstood in a million different ways so let’s break it down.
The quote from above says that you don’t consider a relationship as something stale, something which is a purpose for itself, but as a choice from two sides who want to accomplish more and do that through a relationship. You are not taking a relationship as something for granted which is there, but as we previously talked about, a constant process where a constant input of energy is required.
Because if you don’t input energy, the law will kick in and you “lose” the person. With this in mind, you actually never “have” another person. They are simply deciding to share a part of their lives with you and if you stop investing energy, they will simply leave.
When you have something, it means it is yours and yours only. You get to decide what you can and want to do with it, but in a relationship do you really have your girlfriend? Do you really tell her all the things she will do and she complies with all of it? Of course not – because you don’t own another human being. They are sharing themselves with you.
And this realization that you actually don’t have them will spark a desire from your side. Because you will need to take care of yourself for her and win her over and over again, you know, like on the first date. But do they really leave if you are not investing energy in your relationship?
And with this question, we come to the third prerequisite for wanting and having the same person and that is an interdependent relationship.
Interdependent relationship
There is an entire article written on this exact topic so I won’t go into details here. Instead, I will just summarize and get the relevant parts that we need here.
An interdependent relationship is a relationship where both sides are self-sufficient, love and respect themselves but decide to share their lives with someone else to create a synergistic effect which is bigger than the sum of their parts.
For you to want and have the same person, they need to be able to actually grasp the concepts I wrote above.
If your girlfriend can’t understand the concepts above, then you are probably not in an interdependent relationship, but in an independent or codependent relationship. If you are in any of those two, it will (and is) impossible to actually love and have a passion for the same person.
Independent relationships lack love for the other person for something like that, while codependent relationships lack self-love, self-respect and want for the other half. The only way to actually want and have the same person is to be in an interdependent relationship.
Practical advice
Okay, so now we talked about prerequisites for wanting and having the same person and you absolutely need these elements to successfully love the same person and at the same time have a passion for them.
Now it’s time to see how this works in practical, everyday life. And for that to work in everyday life, we will talk about communication and emotional connection and we will start with the latter.
Emotional connection
For you to have an emotional connection with your partner, you need to create meaningful moments. They don’t have to be something big, they can be something ridiculously small.
But they need to be big for you guys because you need to share emotions there. And it doesn’t have to be spoken or a therapy session, it can be a simple way of recognizing the emotional state of the other person and acting according to it.
An example is that if you see your girlfriend dropping dead tired on the couch, but she glances on the sink and sees the dirty dishes, her look get’s even worse. What you do at that moment is that you stand up, get to the sink and do the dishes. You don’t need to say anything, you just do them. And at the end, a simple smile or a look in her eyes is all it will take for an emotional moment to occur and for a connection between you to strengthen.
Simple, but not easy. So keep an eye on her emotional state and according to it, create moments like these.
Communication
There are certain things which need to be talked about and if you are a guy, you kind of hate this. You are not good at talking about relationships stuff and especially about feelings so you skip it all together.
I know – I am a guy as well and even though I don’t like it, I know it’s absolutely crucial for a successful relationship to be able to properly communicate with my girlfriend.
With communication, I mean even the deeper stuff and not only “how was your day” matters. The more you know your partner, the more you will understand how they operate. And there is one thing you will probably dislike, but nonetheless, it’s my favorite part of asking questions to my girlfriend and it puts me in the correct mindset is “Who approached you today?”
I do this with a curious tone because I am really interested in this. And usually, there is a tone of guys trying to talk to my girlfriend which makes me really be on my toes and keep up my game.
So on one hand, I know her deeply which creates the love feeling, while the other hand I learn about new options she receives almost daily which makes me step up my game and want her more. This last part works especially good for me, but maybe it won’t work for you. Test it out and see how it goes.
Conclusion
We covered the prerequisites needed to want and have the same person in a relationship and those were the second law of thermodynamics, not taking the relationship of the other person for granted because they can leave at any time and a stable interdependent relationship.
When that is in place, we work on emotional connection and communication to achieve want and have, love and passion for the same person.
If you need more information and data on this, I recommend you an amazing book on this topic by a champion in the relationship field called Esther Perel. The book is titled “Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence” and I highly suggest it. It kept Esther’s marriage going for 30 years and it can help you too.
