I have tried to keep away from these pages for my sanity, and because of other priorities, but may occasionally dip back in as now:
My (nearly ex-)wife ponders how long she can hold a man to her, to get beyond the seduction stage to something more lasting and manage to maintain it? I ponder this general question.
Unlike the moth that she likens herself to, drawn to and forever burnt by the light, coming at relationships from the right perspective helps for a start.
It is easy to confuse love with the need to be loved. Before we are able to love, we must already be loved – by ourselves. Before someone else can love you fully it requires that you consider yourself worthy of such love.
True love is more than just a warm feeling in the chest. When it comes to romantic love it is more than just desire, but also a commitment to want to really know another human being, to want to care about them for the sake of the joy we experience when we are caring – not merely for the sake of manipulating them into caring for us.
Romantic relationships never turn out right for people who have not learned to love. Without a commitment to love, once the free fall of falling in love is over, the differences between us can be seen as deficiencies and our knowledge of them used to hurt one another rather than to love (I, too, have certainly been guilty of this).
It is ironic that complementary differences between us, that can form the very basis of a strong love-bond, can become the points of contention between lovers, impair communication and form the basis of hate.
Even if a couple were to separate to find other lovers, they will still need to first learn to love if they are not simply to repeat the pattern. It is so easy to forget love, and treat it as if it weren’t important to love consistently despite adversity. Shakespeare had it in his 116th sonnet:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is a star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever love’d.
For a truly successful relationship based on love, lovers need to be prepared to go beyond the initial superficial “attraction” and genuinely learn to appreciate the differences in one another and, through this knowledge, feed and help their relationship grow in a unique way.
In the film My Dinner with Andre, Andre says to his friend:
“Of course there’s a problem, because the closer you come, I think, to another human being, the more completely mysterious and unreachable that person becomes. I mean, you have to reach out……….
Have an affair and up to a certain point you can really feel that you are on firm ground. You know, the sexual conquest to be made. There are different questions. Does she enjoy her ears being nibbled? How intensely can you talk about Schopenhauser, (or) some elegant French restaurant? Whatever nonsense it is. It’s all, I think, to give you the semblance that there’s firm earth. Well, have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years. That’s completely unpredictable. Then you’ve cut off all your ties to the land and you’re sailing into the unknown, into the uncharted seas.”
A real relationship, based on love, is like sailing into uncharted seas. It is mysterious and unique - but you have to work at it.
(With acknowledgement to Blase Harris, M.D)
