New Love is Confusing
I have so many conversations with people who don’t understand why love is such hard work. And I tend to agree while being without having any real answers on how to make it easy, though I suspect it’s relationships that take the work, love is more a state of being. I hear complaints about partners and loss of hope for happiness as we repeat ourselves in unsatisfying situations.
If the ultimate aim and potential of romantic love are to know ourselves and expand our lives, to heal where we came from and to create where we want to go, we need partners in crime. Why is it that some people have a huge effect on us while millions of others don’t? Some we love, some that turn us over, some we find peace with, others bore or torment us. What changes? Many of us have a Very Bad Ex who at first was perfection personified, then put us through endless suffering, as we did them. While we might think finding that soulmate is what we’ve long been waiting for, they come with a health warning. It’s my experience that these relationships have the potential to be our greatest healers over time if we see them as a gift of growth rather than a mortgage partner. Which is a shame when we could do with some easy romantic love around the place? Where are the rose bearers when you need them? Actually, they’re everywhere but we’re not interested, our hearts are heat-seeking missiles for the particular partner or teacher who has the capacity to wake us up to the truth of ourselves. I wonder if in a lifetime there are half a dozen of these lined up to teach us valuable lessons?
Who doesn’t love being in love and a crush is always fun? There’s a madness period when we first fall in love that’s called limerence, first coined by Dorothy Tennov. When mutuality is met it’s a delightful period of life, nothing unusual about that. Limerence is a less easy aspect of this, a shimmering pretty word with sinister undertones. The foolishness of limerent love is characterised by an initial feeling of elation and intense emotional activation that can change to a craving obsession when love is unfulfilled. All of a sudden the object of our desire takes space in the luxury penthouse of our minds, previous interests fall away alongside concentration spans and jumpiness shows up for cocktails and the view over the riviera of love. We’re happier in their gaze and unhappier when it falters. Finally, we have a place for all our assumptions and projections and god knows what else from our unconscious soup. It all comes into play, little triggers going off like bangers without the benefits of firework sparkles. Some of the features of a limerent period are a strong need for reciprocation of intense feelings, with exaggeration of moods from ecstatic to melancholic in nanoseconds. We may feel insecurity and shyness in the presence of the idealised person. With an aching in the heart and a daydreaming desire for exclusive attention, frequent intrusive thoughts about the love interest can assail us for rapture and ruin. The crushing heartache of limerence is when it turns unhealthy when mutuality isn’t assured, the rumination of the unrelenting thoughts, the lack of fulfilment of desire, the situationship of it all, the shame of obsession. Occasionally offset by sparkling moments when the limerent object pulls us close.
Realising this is a gift to heal old wounds doesn’t feel like much of a consolation in comparison to the presence of the limerent object. Limerence sucks when it’s mistaken for love. Sound familiar? If there’s a saving grace it’s that we’re not alone, so many of us have been there at some time, those of us who didn’t have the constancy of healthy relationship models we needed when we were younger. I’m warier of those intense feelings now, wanting to be impulsive, my open heart all in, while someone else is just trying to work out if they want to meet me for a coffee. The pushy ego masquerading as a love-heart wanting what it wants, the erotic body desiring to get close and the mind doing its many-opininioned thing, creating imaginary perfect futures.
What I’m curious about now is how we can use the skills of being an adult in relationships. Can we ask for clarity in relationships without feeling demanding or needy, to ask if someone is interested so we don’t waste our valuable time and attention? To understand where our early life experiences are contributing to avoidant or anxious behaviour. It can feel like a big step, but hey let’s cut to the chase of honesty of our desires and realism of our flaws. Otherwise, our overactive imagination is taking us up an aisle to nowhere but disappointment.
Psychotherapist David Richo talks about the 5 A’s of healthy relationships: Affection, Attention, Acceptance and Appreciation, with these four in place we can have the fifth of Allowing the object of our desire to leave our presence without feeling like catastrophe beckons. Even better can we find ourselves in a place in our lives where the five A’s are present from multiple sources so we’re not so dependent on one mere human to contribute to our sense of being loved and free; support and happiness being present whether the love object is here or not. That sounds like enlightenment to me. Other than that, we’re dependent on the magic limerent object to fulfil all our projections and assumptions. Alongside the unicorns and knights in shining armour, they’re unreliable sources of love.
It always comes back to doing the work - of unravelling ourselves and our conditioned responses to others, owning it and keeping our hearts open, to love anyway. Love will have many opportunities to confuse us, let it be so. For on the other side is the truth of our vulnerability and capacity for compassion and connection. I avoided vulnerability for so long. I'm still not great at it, it’s a tender place and there’s risk and attendant shame that I really should be more sorted by now. Anyone else? This piece from David Schnarch in A Passionate Marriage moves me to tears
“I don’t expect you to agree with me; you weren’t put on the face of the earth to validate and reinforce me. But I want you to love me—and you can’t really do that if you don’t know me. I don’t want your rejection—but I must face that possibility if I’m ever to feel accepted or secure with you. It’s time to show myself to you and confront my separateness and mortality. One day when we are no longer together on this earth, I want to know you knew me”
How is it that we trust someone with our dirty little secret of how tender our hearts are and without obligation, let them know us that way? And in a sense of mutuality, to love the flawed humans we see in front of us, in all their beauty and fears. We’ll only get a chance to do that for so few people in our lives; to recognise the privilege in that is a gift. So few people will have a loving limerent effect on us. I’m coming to realise that just means they’re important on our path, even when we don’t know why, we live life going forwards and make sense of it backwards. Demanding someone loves us, imposing our desires, possessiveness or urgency is futile. Recognising them as heralds of growth is key. Then love has a chance to arise naturally beyond the lure of limerence.
Image by Veronica Blanco