The Five Thieves of Love

Make sure to check your pockets after they bump into you.

If you’ve ever been pickpocketed, you’ll know something interesting about the experience. You don’t feel your wallet being stolen. If you did, the thief would be terrible at his job.

The truly gifted ones simply bump into you, apologize politely, smile as though they’re the victim, and disappear into the crowd while you’re still checking to see if you spilled your coffee.

By the time you realize your wallet is gone they’re on a beach in Tahiti drinking a Mai Tai. Sunburned. Hungover. And sporting three new tattoos.

Relationships work in much the same way. Most people imagine love ends with fireworks. A shocking confession. A dramatic affair. Someone throwing a lamp across the living room while yelling, “I never loved you anyway!”

Hollywood has convinced us that relationships explode. In reality most of them leak. Slowly. Quietly. Almost politely. One disappointment. One careless sentence. One unresolved hurt. One more evening spent staring at separate screens instead of each other. Until one day two people wake up beside someone they still genuinely love and wonder, “What happened to us?”

That’s the wrong question. The better question is: “What has been quietly stolen while we weren’t paying attention?”

Every Great Love Has Enemies

One of the great myths about relationships is that extraordinary love protects itself. It doesn’t. Left unattended, even magnificent relationships begin drifting toward mediocrity. Not because either person is evil. Not because they married the wrong person. But because every relationship has enemies. Invisible ones. Patient ones. The kind that don’t kick the front door down. They simply wander in through the back while you’re busy arguing about whose turn it was to buy toilet paper.

Over many years of working with couples—and spending an embarrassing amount of time thinking about extraordinary relationships—I kept noticing the same five patterns appearing again and again. Different couples. Different personalities. Different histories. Same thieves.

Eventually I stopped thinking of them as random relationship problems. I started thinking of them as an organized crime syndicate. And I gave them a name.

The Five Thieves of Love™.

1. Blaming
2. Resentment
3. Ego Wounding
4. Verbal Abuse
5. Apathy

Each one specializes in stealing something specific. Each one has learned to disguise itself as something other than what it is. And each one, left unchecked, can work for years inside a relationship that still looks, from the outside, perfectly fine.

Meet the Crew

Every successful heist has specialists. Someone creates the distraction. Someone opens the safe. Someone drives the getaway car. Love’s thieves are no different.

The first thief is Blaming. Blaming disguises itself as honesty. It walks into the room saying, “I’m just telling the truth.” But truth spoken without humility has an unfortunate habit of sounding remarkably like an accusation. Blaming rarely inspires change. It inspires defenseness.

The second thief is Resentment. Resentment keeps receipts. Every forgotten anniversary. Every unanswered text. Every disappointment. Every unmet need. It’s the only accountant in the world hoping the numbers get worse.

The third thief is Ego Wounding. This one usually arrives long before the relationship does. It learned its craft in childhood. It whispers things like, “You’re not good enough.” “You’re too much.” “Real men don’t cry.” “Good women don’t ask for that.” Then it quietly waits for marriage to provide fresh opportunities to reopen very old wounds.

The fourth thief is Verbal Abuse. Sometimes it shouts. More often it smiles. Sarcasm. Mockery. Eye rolls. “Relax—I was just kidding.” It’s amazing how many cruel things apparently become harmless if they’re followed by the phrase, “Can’t you take a joke?”

Finally comes Apathy. The most dangerous thief of them all. Because unlike the others, apathy doesn’t steal love. It steals the desire to protect it. And once nobody cares enough to fight for the relationship anymore the other thieves have already finished the job.

Organized Crime

The truly dangerous thing about these thieves isn’t that they exist. It’s that they work together. Resentment hires Blaming to make its case. Ego Wounding hands Verbal Abuse a microphone. Apathy waits patiently in the getaway car until everyone else has finished emptying the house.

By the time couples notice something precious has disappeared they’re usually arguing about the bump instead of looking for the missing wallet. That’s why I don’t think these are simply five relationship problems. They’re five relationship thieves. There’s a difference. Problems ask to be solved. Thieves must be caught. Because they’ll rarely stop on their own.

Check Your Pockets

If someone bumps into you on a crowded sidewalk in Rome, New York City, or Paris, it’s probably wise to check your pockets afterward. Relationships deserve the same kind of attention. Not paranoid attention. Not suspicious attention. Loving attention.

The Wallet Chain

Fortunately, every pickpocket has one natural enemy. The wallet chain. When I began thinking about The Five Thieves of Love, I eventually realized relationships have a type of wallet chain, too. The wallet chain is a set of habits that make love much harder to steal.

Accountability instead of blame.
Curiosity instead of resentment.
Admiration instead of ego wounding.
Repair instead of verbal abuse.
Emotional courage instead of apathy.

Together, I call that cherishing. Cherishing is the quiet decision to never allow the person you love to become ordinary. It doesn’t require pretending they’re perfect. If you’ve been married longer than about thirty-seven minutes, you’ll already have enough evidence to reject that theory.

Cherishing simply means continuing to see the extraordinary human being underneath ordinary human imperfections. It means remembering that the person standing in front of you is infinitely more interesting than the irritating habit you’re currently focused on. It means refusing to let familiarity become blindness.

Extraordinary Love Is Protected

One of the reasons I believe extraordinary relationships seem so rare is that most people spend enormous energy trying to create love and almost none learning how to protect it. That’s a little like spending years building your dream home and never bothering to lock the front door.

Love deserves better than that. It deserves vigilance. Not fearful vigilance, but joyful vigilance. The kind that says, “This relationship is one of the greatest treasures of my life, and I refuse to let ordinary carelessness quietly rob us of something extraordinary.” That’s a very different posture. It isn’t anxious. It’s grateful.

A Magnificent Marriage

The purpose of The Five Thieves of Love™ isn’t to make you afraid. Quite the opposite. It’s to help you recognize that most relationships don’t fail because two people stop loving one another. They fail because neither person notices the tiny thefts until years later when something precious has already gone missing. The beautiful news is that what can be stolen can often be protected. And what has been neglected can often be cherished again.

Every remarkable marriage I’ve ever admired wasn’t remarkable because the thieves never showed up. It was remarkable because someone noticed the bump.
Someone checked their pockets. Someone reached for their partner instead of their pride. Someone chose curiosity instead of certainty. Repair instead of punishment. Admiration instead of criticism. Hope instead of resignation.

That’s why I created The Five Thieves of Love. Not because I believe extraordinary love is fragile. But because I believe extraordinary love is precious. And precious things are worth protecting.After all, The thieves may still be wandering through the crowd. But there’s no rule that says they have to leave with your wallet. Or your marriage.

Song Recommendation:
— Escape (The Piña Colada Song), Rupert Holmes, 1979

This page is from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.

The Five Thieves of Love™ is a trademark of Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.