it's an odd feature of love that some of our most romantic moments can include the following scenarios being with a lover who lives a whole continent away from us and can never move to be closer an infatuation with a lover who is married to somebody else and has no will ever to leave them a romance with someone dying of a disease that will kill them within a matter of months a crush on someone at the library who we never talked to yet think of obsessively even when it turns out they have a partn
er oh the last days of holiday romance before we have to take a grueling 12-hour flight back what unites all these situations is an external obstacle to love which paradoxically serves to make our desire more intense we might suppose that our love would be strong in spite of the challenges but the situation is weirder than this our love is strong precisely because a proper relationship is not possible in the real world because love is fated to be in some way unrequited or incomplete people stuck
in these unrequited situations can garner a lot of sympathy and seem like the natural friends of true love but they tend to be no such things they are timid visitors to the land of love who have carefully chosen situations which will prevent them from ever taking up or permanent residence they are self saboteurs who would rather be in control of a sad situation than half out of control of happy one they have carefully made sure that there is no chance either to disappoint or to be disappointed
it is the external obstacle that gives them the security to surrender themselves totally to feelings that they would keep well at if miraculously the obstacle were to be removed to feel a lot for someone who is available is an emotionally highly flamable requirement the possibilities for getting hurt are enormous we might learn to trust a lover over many years and then promptly find that they decided to leave us or died in the night we couldn't survive our defenses mask to gelatinous and insecur
e in interior we would have given them the keys to our self-confidence and direction and would struggle after so long to know how to carry on not all of us have the psychological histories that make us robust enough to dare to enter situations where mutual trust is a risk that we can dare to endure day to day we may have been let down too badly as children perhaps a parent left or humiliated us and we are at some level therefore profoundly determined never again to surrender in the true sense to
another person you don't put it that way to ourselves of course we're most likely not even aware of the pattern were involved in we just feel very in love whenever someone happens to reside very far away while we report that a person who has an apartment round the corner is truly very boring and not that sexy it sounds for a time before you can start to see the pattern probably visible the true challenge of relationships is not to fall in love with someone who may never want to see us again it
is to accept the far more interesting and truly heroic challenge of falling in love with someone who isn't dying isn't stationed in the Arctic or married to somebody else someone who'd have no objection to seeing us pretty much all the time impossible situations feel so romantic not because we have found a soulmate but because the absence of risk has loosened our hearts but we should with time more fairly learn to dare to turn our amorous attentions to that deeply dangerous threatening but ultim
ately rewarding character the person we know the person who likes us a lot and a person who's available all the time now that would be truly romantic to learn more about love try our book on how to find love which explains why we have the types we do
Comments