When will we accept we are like quarks? Part 5: Love need not be crystallized

Once we’ve accepted that identity need not be definitive and individuals need not be singular, it follows that love need not be crystallized. 

This may seem obvious… and yet looking around, it seems that it isn’t quite so easy to apply to our current mores. 

Reading articles and talking around me, women today still are expecting to meet Mr. Right, Mr. Perfect, and/or her very own Prince Charming.  When (if) she does, he’s just right and great… often until the first complication (be it a difference, a misunderstanding, or frustration).  Her reflex?  Jump into the sea of interrogation:  is this really love?  Is he really the one for me?  Is he the man of my dreams?  Where is this relationship heading and do I like where it’s going?  Am I making too many concessions?  Am I losing myself?

These are healthy questions and illustrate that women of today feel entitled to their own demands, to keep control over their lives, and that they’ve at last come into their own:  they are no longer the ones by default to bow with docility to the man’s prerogative.    Women today are primed to avoid making a mistake that will lead to divorce but, just in case, they are also making all the preparations to be financially autonomous to always keep their options open. 

Let me be clear:  this moral, mental, and financial autonomy is crucial progress in the fight for equality and is to be maintained and supported.

However, the comments I hear don’t always breathe empowerment; at times they mask disappointment, resignation, or vulnerability.  Every individual and each of their cases are different, of course, but I see these types of start-and-go romances as serial “shooting star relationships” in which both individuals of the would-be couple begin by correlating their projected identities (who they wish to be and how they want to be perceived) then face disappointment when one or the other discovers that the person doesn’t necessarily or currently incarnate that promise in the day to day.  The most obvious example is the slew of on-line dating services and the promises they make for finding “your other half” or “someone just like you”.  But I have seen this in traditional 100% real-life relationships just as much as relationships beginning virtually on the web.   It isn’t a question of technology; it’s a question of expectations.

What is the expectation?  To meet “my soul-mate” with whom everything is easy, effortless, and pleasant.  An individual who can fulfill “my” every desire:  passion, adventure, friendship, partnership, a good parent for my children, perhaps a good “wife”, be close but give me some distance at just the right time without me needing to say it, with the right mix of challenge, support, empathy, coaching, respect, and playfulness.  The other is also someone presentable, who can carry good status, perhaps good financial prospects, and oftentimes capable of reflecting positively on ourselves and become new proof of our own success in life.  Above all, we expect love to be effortless… and that effortlessness is the ultimate proof of love.  Anything that requires work or effort means we’re forcing the hand of love and that it isn’t the “real” thing… and we throw in the towel.

I am convinced that much of today’s trouble in love comes down to these expectations.

For a long time, neither love nor, for that matter, family or success, was really determined by the individual.  Today, our expectation is to be “happy in love”, a love that matches a romance novel.  …While we’re also looking for the man or woman who will be our “wife” and a good “partner”.  These three roles can certainly be conjugated… but the expectation of perfect three is often a reservoir of frustration and disappointment because it comes down to fragmented perfection and performance in each role, which is never sustainable for a single person.  Worse, not only are our expectations severe, but when we don’t succeed, we suffer the disappointment… or even guilt… of failure.  For me, in addition to the ills of our performance society, the trouble begins with a certain amount of confusion about love. 

First, confusion about the role we expect love to play in our lives:  we seem to believe that the other will somehow authenticate or confirm the identity we are building for ourselves.  I call this the “confirmation maze”. 

Let me explain:  since the post-modernist breakdown of the institutions that used to edify Western societies (patriarchy, marriage, top-down hierarchy, authoritarian government, authoritarian God, etc.), women’s emancipation has opened the floodgates of choice.  Suddenly, we’re wonderfully facing the vertigo of boundless individual responsibility for what we make of ourselves and who we become.  We have the “liberty” of making ourselves who we want to be… but also the “dread” of losing ourselves.  As a result, in looking around, I have the impression that many romances fall into this “confirmation maze” in which the “catch” somehow confirms to us (as well as to others) the attractiveness of the projected identity we have constructed. 

This may seem to make sense in terms of societal status in which people attempt to marry up into a higher station in life, etc., but it doesn’t sit well with our other expectations of passion or romance… and it can actually prevent us from living love for its real merit:  an opportunity to build ourselves as individuals, and build a more humane world, as I express here below.

Second, we can also note some confusion over the Spacing of Love. 

Women seem to expect Mr. Right to fit into our space without taking too much of it (for fear of losing ourselves, our autonomy, or of making too many concessions).  This type of demand is currently applauded as proof of remaining “whole” in France and representative of a woman respectfully in charge of her life through-out much of the Western world. 

But it’s also a guardedness that inhibits much of the exchange a relationship requires to not be sterile or short-lived.   

A real relationship is built by exchanges that infuse it with life, a chemical reaction that leaves neither member of the couple unchanged.  It also creates and fosters a third entity (1+1=3) that represents the 2 beings together.  In this sense, both individuals can continue to grow, their individual growths nourishing, in turn, their common relationship and project. 

However, this synergetic growth system cannot happen as long as either part of the couple holds back.  And, here, I believe, is a real key to the problem:  we all have learned to share, to give… and believe we’re contributing our fair share… when, in fact, the lack is in the receiving.  Not material gifts, but in receiving immaterial exchanges in the realm of ideas, points of view, ways of living, habits, etc.  Kind of like the type of “sharing” we see on social networks where we each spend all our time showing and telling, feeling very creative and magnanimous… without ever realizing that we’re in a soliloquy, spinning in a solipsism and comfort zone in which we are barricading out our vulnerabilities, reinforcing our projected identities… trying desperately to preserve ourselves within the world… and making us incapable and/or unwilling to receive.

Yet with no receptivity, the contact, the interaction, the relationship… the love… can’t really be or become.   

In our 21^st century, we need a return for receptivity with which we stop seeing others as an infringement on our freedom / growth and begin realizing that it’s our interaction with them and their “alterité” that will enable us to grow.  Our individuality will be fortified by exchanging and building with them.  It stands to reason that instead of seeking someone just like us (our “other half” our “soul mate”, our “mirror image”), we could revel in our differences and all that the loved one can bring to us, learn from us, help us learn about ourselves, and all we could build together. 

This, I must warn, has to be symmetrical, from BOTH parts of the couple.  We have all seen couples where clearly one has been eaten up by the other.  That’s not the point here.  The man must clearly be emancipated to open up to his vulnerabilities and be socially liberated so as to be receptive.   For the same reasons, we should also avoid a role reversal in which the woman simply becomes the dominant partner.  Forget about trying to make someone the “wife”, someone the “bitch”, and let’s work towards a respectful balance capable of love and growth. 

We can improve the Spacing of Love if we resolve our confusion over the Timing of Love. 

We expect Mr. Right to come along and somehow presume he will stay forever “right”.  But if we learn to accept that life is dynamic and by definition motion, movement, change, it seems irrelevant to expect someone met at time T to always be an inert “perfect”.  We can’t expect (nor should we desire) the other to stand still, like a still-life, and not evolve.  We, ourselves, constantly (hopefully) growing will grow out of synch with the still-life who made that former “perfect” match…  Furthermore, we won’t remain “right” for the other either …  At least not unless we each embrace the positive power of the Dynamics of 3 (1+1=3 mentioned earlier : 2 evolving individuals plus a growing relationship). 

This dynamic is promising because it means that within a couple, each can meet and re-meet the other, evolving person repeatedly.  Evolution of each individual implies constant renewal.  Let’s discover what it’s like to live by the side of someone who has now changed careers, now been promoted, now become a parent, now started a new hobby… plus this discovery takes on greater relief through our own evolving perspectives that are also constantly changing according to our own ups and downs and growth spurts.  

Our Performance Society pretends like long monogamous relationships are proof of lacking dynamism, good only for the unambitious (I’m not referring to those with serial extramarital affairs).  They’re represented as a synonym of boredom, concessions, a sign of having “settled”.  That may be true of all those who are locked in by their still-life identities that miss out on the actual Dynamics of 3 (or more, if there are children) living, evolving beings who are prepared to discover and rediscover each other.  Songs talk of love like a cocaine rush, authentic only until all the mystery is gone – “I know him so well”.  But that seems a little old-fashioned today in the 21^st century in which we, at every level of society, have access to so many ideas, social networks, possibilities, radical career changes, more than one “life” to live.  The expected timing of love should therefore shift from being a question of “right” right now to a quarkish spherical timing of “in phase” to be regularly re-actualized and reactivated, reinvented. 

These 3 degrees of confusion lead to a major unintended consequence:  The general misuse/misconception/poor practice of love, underestimation of the need for love in our world, leading to a world lacking love, walled behind its vulnerabilities and defense mechanisms, losing touch with its humanity.

And when we lose touch with our humanity… we also lose out on our gains in collective intelligence as a species… and progress for future generations.

Rendez-vous next week for a new bite from the apple.  In the meantime, share your comments based on your own knowledge and consciousness!