Up until today, relationships have been dysfunctional. So many relationship experts talk about insecure human attachment styles and relationship dynamics like the classic codependent and narcissistic relationship. But they talk about these things as if they are the rarity. They aren’t the rarity. Insecure attachments and narcissistic, codependent dynamics are in fact the past and current human condition. They are the way we do relationships. And all of that is about to change.
“[…] To love something is to take it as part of yourself. Love is inclusive. It is the energetic movement towards oneness. When you love something, you energetically pull it towards you and include it as you. If you have grown up with a self centered parent (and I’ll warn you, the parents who say they are selfless and consistently remind you about everything they are doing for you are the most self centered), because they aren’t really concerned with your needs, you inevitably have to fight for your own self-hood as well. You cannot conceptualize of a way to merge; you can only conceptualize of being swallowed by something else. In love, you take the other person’s best interests as part of your best interests and they take your best interests as part of their best interests and closeness is the primary priority in both of your life. This creates the only true safety in relationship. You cannot hurt something that you take as part of yourself without hurting yourself. But not being able to conceptualize of this true form of love, we avoid merging. We build relationships around power struggle. We can only see the potential of us taking the other person’s best interests as our own and prioritizing their needs and desires and them being happy about it, while our needs and desires are unimportant to them. We can only see one-way relationship. We can only see one-way relationship because that is all there was between us and our parents. Because of this, we actually prevent love. We fight to keep ourselves separate but in relationship. We cannot risk the trust of giving ourselves to the other person and them giving themselves to us, so we can never experience the feeling of symbiotic love. We are trapped in Ego and society supports it. It is not love to stay committed to and connected to someone regardless of what they do or don’t do to you. It isn’t love to expect someone to stay connected to you regardless of what you do or don’t do to them.
The actual definition of love is to take something as part of yourself. To do this out of your own free will is not to lose yourself. To do this is to take their best interests as part of your own best interests. It is to commit to the other person. It is to end the war between selves. When we do this, we can see the third option in a needs conflict. We can see the exact decision we need to make for our mutual best interests. This gives rise to trust and security in the relationship. This brings an end to both loneliness and abuse. We are in the process of learning how to love. And the first step is to let go of our faulty definition of love.”
how is it you came to find me
did you wake up to snow in May
and imagine the wrong side
blue planet landed on your door step
biting your tulips
browning your lawn
what if I’m upside down, you wondered
typing in your keyboard with heavy sighs
even encyclopedias were written by minds that wandered
ringing doorbells, just to hear the sound
to welcome in a kind of explanation
put a finger on a strange speculation
I am always terrified that nobody is feeling the way I am at any specific moment. There are weeks I am so exhausted to my core no matter how long I spend hiding inside of my bedroom; the weeks where I feel my body telling me to do something, anything, to stop feeling like this and I answer myself, “maybe tomorrow it will be better” and I can’t help but feel like I am pushing the truth. The problem with having an illness that nobody can see is that when somebody asked what hurts, you want to ask if they know how to bandage a beating heart. I used to be in love with somebody who would brush my hair for me when things got really bad, and he would come sit with me on the bathroom floor while “You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are” by Keaton Henson would be playing and for a few minutes I would be safe and there would be nothing in the world except the feeling that maybe this is what making progress feels like; that each knot pulled from my head means that finally I won’t be coming undone. But this isn’t the movies, this isn’t a book; you don’t magically get fixed because somebody is holding you together. Their arms will get tired. They won’t understand why it seems like nothing they do makes any difference. It is not their fault, and it is not your own either, but what is messy once will be messy again. I think about love so much I’m worried that one day it will consume me entirely, and that there is something so inherently unloveable about me that I can’t seem to scrub off no matter how many times I shower in a day. There are days where the dirt seems to live under your skin and you can stand under the hot water for hours but pieces of people that used to be a part of your life get stuck under your fingernails and you carry them with you wherever you go. Each time somebody gets close to me, I wonder what the tipping point for them will be. If they will be frustrated with me when I need the directions explained over and over again, because the thought of being lost is so much more than just not knowing with way to turn. If they will get angry when I can’t find it in me to take the few steps forward; because I have tried crossing oceans that look like puddles for some people and it seems that all they see is that both of our feet get wet. I wonder why people fall out of love, and if it’s always because there is that breaking point, that one extra knot you needed pulled from your hair that they just could not reach anymore. I see people kissing on the street corner and I wonder if she remembers what his favourite movie is, or who she aspired to be when she was young, or if he listens to each song that he gets sent, from beginning right until the very end. In the end, I think everything comes down to love. Because I see it in each businessman that empties his wallet into a barista’s tip jar, in each mother that’s ever sat through their daughters excruciatingly long ballet recitals, in each father that’s ever edited his sons essays and wrapped an arm around their shoulders as they sit beside each other, in each child that kisses each other messily on their cheeks, in the newly weds that just married their best friends and can’t stop feeling the weight on their ring finger, in the 90 year olds that still hold hands while they walk through the grocery stores, in the college girls who apply each other’s lipsticks in the bars and tell everybody in the washroom that they look beautiful, and in myself, when I brushed my own hair this morning, and told myself that maybe tomorrow will be easier than this."
