When we don't have enough Real Love, the emptiness is intolerably painful, and in order to fill our emptiness, we use money, anger, control, sex, alcohol, food, drugs, violence, and the conditional "love" of others, all of which are variations on only four general themes: praise, power, pleasure, and safety. When we pursue these things as substitutes for Real Love, they all become forms of Imitation Love.

Many of us spend our entire lives devoted to the pursuit of Imitation Love. Because the effects of Imitation Love are always temporary, however, we have to work very hard to maintain an adequate supply, and eventually we discover that no amount can ever make us happy.

We tend to establish relationships with people—and fall in love with them—based on their ability to give us Imitation Love. When a man falls in love with a woman because she is beautiful, for example, he is actually declaring that he loves how she makes him feel with her beauty, not how he unconditionally cares about her happiness.

When two people are in love, the exchange of Imitation Love is abundant and feels more satisfying than anything the couple has known before. It's only natural that both of them usually develop the expectation that the other person will continue to make them happy for the rest of their lives. In fact, most people get married for that very reason—to guarantee that they will have a partner who will make them happy for a lifetime.

After a time, however—perhaps months, maybe years—the satisfying effects of Imitation Love always wear off, and the subsequent disappointment is overwhelming. Each partner naturally concludes that the other partner is the cause of his or her unhappiness. They both feel let down and betrayed by the other, and an enormous sense of blaming then poisons the relationship. Neither partner understands that the real cause of unhappiness in the relationship is not the other person, but the fact that both of them came to the relationship without sufficient Real Love, thereby lacking the one ingredient most essential to genuine happiness and healthy relationships.