Is cyber love possible?
PsychologyOnline.
I was very sceptical at first. Cyber psychology? No way, I thought! I warmed to the idea, however, and recommended that the institution involved make their investment.
What changed my mind were discoveries I made in research at the time. One finding I made that caused me to turn the corner was the fact that people were frequently (but not always) inclined to be more open and honest when engaging in anonymous dialogue with their computer screen than they were in a face-to-face encounter with a therapist. This was a salient and important fact in treating some conditions like alcoholism and addictions. “How many drinks have you had today?” asks the therapist. “Oh just the one, doctor,” says the client swaying in his seat breathing fumes that would slay a dragon.
I was reflecting earlier about the nature and type of relationships one makes on the internet. I’ve made some very interesting friendships here, some of which I have confidence, faith and trust in. I even have a couple of friendships that have extended into other dimensions like voice communication, but that’s all for now. I’m sure I will meet one or two of the people I talk to here one day. I’ve been struck by the honesty of most of the people I speak to here on my blog.
I believe that certain forms of cyber attachment are possible. Cyber infatuation is commonplace. So what of cyber love? Is that possible?
Before I attempt to answer that question I’m going to go off on one of those doodling excursions that I’m inclined to do from time to time. Unlike some areas I write about here I don’t profess any real depth of expertise in this subject, so the doodling will take the form of an exploration of ideas.
I’m not wholly convinced that people are more inclined to be honest, or expose their true self (whatever that is) when talking to a computer screen. People in cyberspace say and do things they would not do face-to-face. They lose their inhibitions. This is called the “disinhibition” effect.
Disinhibition can cause people to be more trusting, intimate, share secrets and personal truths far more quickly and readily than they might do in face-to-face encounters in their daily lives. They can also make spontaneous acts of generosity and kindness.
In our consideration of love, therefore, we might say that cyberspace is an accelerant of intimacy.
But disinhibition can run two ways, people can be harsh, critical, rude, aggressive, blaming, angry or even hateful and threatening as easily as they can be trusting and intimate on the net.
I’m something of a cyber-veteran. I’ve had access to the internet since its creation although this is my first personal web-site. In that time, I’ve observed a number of behaviours some of which I can explain in psychoanalytic language and some I can’t.
Cyber relationships can be high on transference. The nature of cyberspace means that in social encounters we can exercise fantasy and our imagination in a way we couldn’t in-person. We can ascribe all sorts of qualities to another that we would wish or hope to exist in a friend or loved one. Transference, however, is about the transfer of a normally powerful emotion from someone in one’s past onto another in the present. It is common for people to transfer feelings from their parents to their partners or to children. For instance, one could mistrust somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance; or be overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend or former lover.
Transference, like disinhibition, can be positive or negative.
That’s all conventional stuff.
Also I believe that we all carry some sort of image inside us of the idealised woman or the idealised man to whom we might be attracted.
The sources of this contra-sexual image are complex. They may come from infancy, childhood, our cultures, art and literature, media and the church…from everywhere in fact. Some of these images are archetypal, they’re embedded deep in our culture (and they might differ between cultures). I feel there is no doubt that experiences in infancy and childhood have a differentially powerful influence in how we construct these images. I also believe they are, to some extent, subconscious or perhaps, unconscious. They are what we might experience as the mysteries of interpersonal attraction.
As an aside, I do believe that children who suffer abuse might internalise idealised images of the perpetrators of abuse at an early age that later in life causes them to select abusive partners.
This, in itself, is an interesting subject for me and one about which I’ll write further, but having suffered emotional child abuse I’ve been more than curious to determine what effect infantile and childhood attachments have had on my adult relationships. I subjected myself to a whole battery of psychological tests to determine the extent of their effect. I’m delighted to say that I’ve moved on to an amazing degree, and that my test results indicate a low degree of correspondence between childhood attachments and adult relationships now, although this has not always been the case. I’ve made some very big mistakes in the choice of intimate partners in the past. I’m still learning my lessons.
Coming back to cyberspace relationships, I believe that it offers great scope for something that I’ll call projective idealisation. When we cannot see, hear, touch or smell the object of our attention, we can ascribe whatever qualities we like to them. They can become the man or woman of our dreams. Our computer screen is like a blank canvas on which we can project whatever qualities we seek and desire of another at will.
There is another aspect of cyberspace interaction that I’ve observed and I believe it can be intuitive, conscious or manipulative. I’ll call it “mirroring” here. Idealisation in love generally involves taking the best qualities of ourselves and projecting them on another. Mirroring involves the rapid absorption or assimilation of another’s personality then playing it back to them as one’s own. The mirror plays back a reflection of another’s feelings, interests and values. It can feel seductive and attractive. We might say, “This person and me are so alike,” or “How well this person understands me!” Frequently, it’s the cyber-tactic of the internet Lothario or Casanova. I doubt somehow if it’s a practice that one could get away with so easily in-person. For me, body language, gestures, inflection in speech and eye contact would give the other person away.
No doubt, cyberspace has pushed our social frontiers and changed our working habits, but I don’t feel yet it offers a sensory alternative to love, nor do I believe it will ever. I believe that cyberspace has opened all sorts of wonderful possibilities as a place for making friends and, possibly, even finding lovers, but in order to experience true intimacy with another, one sooner or later has to meet.
If we consider how we bond and interact in human relationships then the limitations of cyber relationships become evident. There’s sight, sound, touch, smell and taste (Yum! Get a grip, Geoffrey!)
None of these are easily possible in the cyber world, although the defenders of internet relationships might point to communication using webcams and the internet’s to transmit and receive voice messages.
These still lack the three-dimensional qualities of human interaction. Audio and video streaming are getting better but they lack all the subtle qualities including those of body language of in-person meetings.
Something that brings this home to me is my life in France. I speak some French but it’s not that fluent nor is it good enough to engage in more complex social relationships. Most of those I know here speak English too or else we manage to communicate more deeply by speaking in Franglish, a clumsy combination of our two languages that often makes me laugh. I find that the French speak very fast too. Often they say I do the same in English. I have sat in the middle of a crowded café surrounded by French people gabbling at enormous speed where I have been unable to understand a word being spoken. Nevertheless, I have understood much of what has been going on between people by their gestures, expressions, intonation and body language. My good French accent will sometimes get me into trouble too. People will talk fast at me and I struggle to understand the odd words. Frequently though I can fill in the gaps of what’s being spoken by their facial expression and tone of voice. The complexity of human communication has so much richness and subtleties beyond language, our main means of communication in cyberspace.
Touch, I believe is a very important human need, and one that we as adults in our often reclusive technological living worlds do not give sufficient attention. Infants deprived of touch can get depressed, ill and die without touch and physical comfort. How adults interact physically with their children becomes a cornerstone in their wellbeing and their development as fully-formed human beings. Being deprived of touch and tactile sensations as an adult can cause insecurity and anxiety. Don’t whatever you do, underestimate the power of touch. A hug, a kiss or simply a pat on the back or a handshake can do so much for another. So get kissing, hugging and touching now! (There I go again!)
Smell and taste are two very powerful, primal and even primitive ways we connect intimately with others. It is through touch, smell and taste that the infant bonds with its mother. They are the stuff of loving intimacy too: The sweet smell of hair, the touch of skin against one’s cheek, the scent of another’s body. Smell and taste draw us very close to another; they stir up strong emotions. They are essential and fundamental in loving intimacy.
So what else happens in potential cyber love relationships? I believe that because of the disinhibition effect that it is possible to attain a level of intimacy and trust very quickly. My question is therefore, then what? How does intimacy grow from there? I do not believe that love can grow from typed words alone.
The danger that lies in the speed of intimacy attainment is that disenchantment can set in equally quickly when intimacy has nowhere to go. You can’t go for a walk, share a meal, or hold another close in cyberspace. I believe that often unless a real life interaction takes place at some time then anxiety and disappointment will come to fill the space in which intimacy once existed. You can take steps and make moves along the way, exchanging photographs, speaking on the phone can help you on your way, but if love is the outcome you are seeking then sooner or later you will have to meet in-person.
Acknowledgements to John Suler PhD, Professor of Psychology at Rider University for his work on "The Psychology of Cyberspace"
Emotional rescue
I have a male friend who is habituated with MySpace, the free cyber-dating agency posing as a social network.
Every so often I look at the friend’s profiles listed on his home page there. My friend subsists in an unhappy marriage. Looking at his MySpace friends, there is a whole coterie of extraordinarily beautiful women. I read their profiles. Almost every one of them is a damaged suffering child crying out for help. Don’t get me wrong. Some of these women are immensely successful; some are stars of stage and screen or media entrepreneurs. But every one is troubled and hurting in some profound way.
My good friend is a wonderfully caring, loving and tender man. He is also a fairly clever man. He remains unhappy. In his own way, I believe that he feels he will find his own happiness by rescuing others and by giving.
It’s not working. He’s a rescuer.
The psychologist, Abraham Maslow, spoke of ‘deficiency love’. The goal of deficiency love is that somehow, some other person will compensate for something one is unable to find in oneself.
In the case of the rescuer and person in recovery, frequently the person in recovery will feel hope that the rescuer will bring about the recovery that they are unable to bring about for themselves. This is often the basis on which the rescuer and the sufferer will first engage in a relationship. It is a deeply flawed rationale since it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for someone to give you that which you cannot find in yourself.
I am sure that there may be many and complex reasons why the rescuer enters a relationship with a sufferer.
There is altruism, of course; simply the belief that they might make a positive difference to the life of another. I wonder though if the pathological need to rescue others might be based on another personal need, a need to bolster one’s sense of self-worth by feeling that one is motivated to do good to another.
In a way, perhaps, entering a relationship as a rescuer might be less demanding than entering a relationship on normal terms with another.
Another difficult aspect of the rescuer / sufferer interaction is that there is a sense that the rescuer enjoys some level of emotional or other superiority in their relationship with the sufferer. It is an unbalanced and unequal partnership. What at first might appear as a loving act of giving and kindness might be a narcissistic act of self-endorsement for a frail ego gained at another’s expense.
If one asks anyone who has successfully undergone recovery from say, an addiction or alcoholism, from an unhappy relationship, or from trauma or victimisation, I suspect they will all tell the same story. They will tell you, almost without exception, how ultimately their recovery came from within themselves, from their own commitment and determination to recover. They were motivated strongly to recover and they did. Others, generally those who are skilled, trained or experienced in helping others in recovery may have assisted or even facilitated the recovery, but ultimately that recovery came from themselves.
Last year, I suffered a serious and potentially fatal illness. I had some wonderful medical treatment. I’m not sure if I was cured exactly. My recovery came from a moment of realisation that in order to get better I needed to add my own strong will and determination to whatever treatment was provided to me. I needed to take responsibility for my own care. Thank goodness, I did, since I had been misdiagnosed as suffering from two conditions, both of which were potentially terminal. In the end, it was found that I had contracted a bacterial infection, that whilst it was life threatening, was curable with antibiotics. The turning point in recovery for me was the moment I decided that I was going to get better and the point when I found the self-belief in me to do so.
The rescuer and sufferer relationship is an entirely risky business.
Without an act of will, even courage or determination from the sufferer, the rescuer may be drawn into an unending process of failure. Worse still they might project an imagined state of recovery upon the sufferer in order to justify or support the idea of the relationship or their actions within it.
There is another shortcoming where the sufferer fails in recovery, and it’s one that I believe that Eric Berne identifies in his book, “Games people play”. The rescuer in engaging with the sufferer who fails to recover may take on a multiplicity of roles. They may even engage in collusion with the sufferer acting in a way that sustains the sufferer’s difficulties or problems (The rescuer buys the drugs or the drink. Berne calls this role “the dummy” or “the Patsy” )
What is more usual is that the rescuer may take on the role of critic or judge. By judging or criticising the sufferer, they free themselves from the idea of failure borne of a false premise that the rescue was in fact possible. This is a damaging place to be as the judge or the critic is one step away from being a persecutor.
So the first and most likely outcome between the rescuer and the sufferer is one of failure. The most damaging consequence for the sufferer is that the rescuer adopts an attitude towards them that reinforces or holds them in the difficulty. Criticisms and judgements do not facilitate recovery.
A second risk for the rescuer and the sufferer is that recovery may be so painful for both parties and tear the relationship apart. People coming out of difficult relationships, addiction or damaging life experiences are not at their best. A relationship that might work at another time may not work when someone is going through recovery.
A third risk is that the sufferer does actually recover and when they do the role of the rescuer no longer makes any sense and has no purpose. The people involved in the relationship may not easily be able to shift roles. The sufferer having recovered may also come to see the rescuer as simply a reminder of a painful and difficult past.
Probably, the greatest risk of all is that the relationship is built on a foundation of difficulty or illness rather than health or wellbeing.
Where recovery becomes the central focus of a relationship, the difficulty or illness itself may represent the foundation of the relationship, rather than an unpleasant time that the sufferer needs to leave behind in their life.
Ultimately, while others can play a role in assisting in recovery, the decision to recover and the pain that it often entails must be borne by the sufferer. Therefore, emotional rescue as the basis of a relationship will, I believe, fail more often than it will succeed. Personally I have never witnessed a relationship based on emotional rescue that has been successful in its outcome, or nurturing of its participants.
Acknowledgements:
Abraham H Maslow, Motivation and personality, 1954
Eric Berne, Games people play, 1964
Robert J Sternberg, Love is a story 1998
Tell me a story! Part 2 - Love stories
Most recently, I have been talking to other storywriters and to people who have spent much time in writing journals about painful or difficult experiences on-line as blogs to share with others. I have also talked to people who kept journals, or simply used writing as a means to express difficulties or come to terms with trauma.
Before that I had been considering the work of Robert Sternberg, who wrote the book, “Love is a story”.
Sternberg’s work interested me particularly as it was a dramatic departure from normal psychology methods. Traditional psychologists have tended to frame their questions, and establish empirical research that they tested for statistical validity, and used subsequently to formulate the premises of their arguments.
There are all sorts of problems with empirical research, a lot of which have to do with the propensity of the respondents to answer questions in terms of what they feel the right answers to be in accordance with social, cultural, religious, family and other personal norms, pressures and expectations.
I believe that Sternberg used an empirical approach, but it was not his starting point.
We are not born with knowledge of what love is, what it means, how to love and how to sustain love successfully.
We learn about it. At a very early age, we learn about it unconsciously from our experience of our parents, people with whom we come into contact, physical and tactile experience, and basic physical and social interaction with others. A little later we start to absorb other images from books, films, television, kindergarten, school and every other source of emotional and social experience.
Sternberg argues, and I have some affinity with his views, that, based on these early experiences, we assemble our views about love as forms of narrative systems, as stories, which we enact in our later lives. Thus compatibility becomes a matter of finding someone with a story that might live comfortably alongside our own.
In Sternberg’s work, for example, we have “garden” stories, where the emphasis is on planting, nurturing and growing. That’s a tender narrative, although it may be a little low on excitement for some.
We have a travel story where life is a journey, a never-ending movement of discovery. The destination is less important since the person gets their emotional sustenance from the journey itself. In terms of the twenty-five or so stories, that Sternberg cites, I find this one, possibly, one of the more attractive (for me).
There’s the war story where partners remain permanently in conflict, but nevertheless, to the astonishment of observers, stay in the relationship. Perhaps the war relationship is portrayed well in the play, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Where I might differ from Sternberg is that he argues the case that only experts like himself might interpret the stories that people have within them of which they are largely unconscious.
I’m not sure whether I believe that these stories are so unconscious, nor if they need the intercession of an expert to understand them.
I had another idea with which I experimented that yielded some interesting results. I wrote about it earlier here:
“It might be an interesting experiment for us all to go off and write our own versions of short love stories that attract or appeal to us in some very deep way. I like this idea. We could all invent our own love fables. We would need to take care to engage with our emotions and write the story we really want, not the story that conforms to all our cultural myths or social norms and ideals, or to the expectations of our partner, but something that would be truly meaningful to us in love.
It would be important for us to connect to the story with our feelings without any inventive embellishments or affectations. Perhaps we might try to write a short love story with a hopeful ending, a story of the positive possibilities of where love might take us.
But we should write a story, a piece of fiction. It might be set in modern or other times, but it would be important to express succinctly the feelings of the protagonists as they move through this story. No tricks only a story; one that takes no more than 20 or 30 minutes to narrate.
Perhaps when we have made our stories. We might sit down somewhere peaceful and calm with a glass of wine and share these stories with our loved ones. We may be amazed about what they might tell us both about each other!”
I did eventually get a few people to join in on that one. I also got a lot of resistance from people who said, “I can’t write stories”.
On the question of “can’t write”, I tried to assure people that it didn’t matter about literacy, grammar, and whether or not they had written before. I asked them to try and a couple more did.
With a select couple, I also asked them to write, a brief account of a past relationship that was most memorable to them in some way either through happiness or hurt.
What I noticed and observed:
1. I knew a couple in big difficulties. They didn’t communicate well. They both wrote love stories, ones that had the outcomes they were seeking, about love as they wanted to experience it. The process of writing a story liberated their communication. They were able to talk about what they liked, what they wanted, and what they hoped for. It was all there in the stories. I got greedy! I suggested that they then wrote another fictional story together. I didn’t care how, but one where they joined their plots together. The result almost brought tears to my eyes.
This was a very special experiment as what this pair had managed to do was, not only understand the stories they carried within them, but they had expressed how they would like to go on writing…living their lives together.
By doing something this simple, I had done more than I had ever managed to do in my brief time in marriage or relationship counselling!
2. People who are able to construct a narrative story over their life experiences seem to get more benefit than those who were only able to write past accounts in literal terms.
3. Almost everyone who wrote stories seemed to discover new aspects of, or re-experience, their emotional selves in some profound way. Their ability to communicate their feelings and understand what they were seeking in love changed in a positive way. Most felt that they were able to go on and “write their next chapter”.
4. The exercise of writing past accounts in literal terms yielded some, but less benefit in this context. (I have more to say about this.)
More soon….
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Part 5 - Love and sex
Sex and emotional health
I have talked a lot about healthy loving in adults where love is based on wants and desires rather than the dependency needs of childhood. I believe that sex is different in a way in that is far more of a basic human need, something we need to maintain our mental and emotional health.
Earlier this year, I wrote erotic fiction, not because of any voyeuristic tendencies but because my own sexuality had been shut down tight in a hurtful and destructive marriage. I pushed it down in a place so deep so that I could not be hurt or damaged further, so deep in fact, that it was hard for me to recover it. So writing this fiction was my own story-telling emotional and sexual therapy. I knew how to do that even if I was not fully conscious of what I was doing at the time. It was my way of recovering myself as a fully functioning being with all my bits working. I am glad to say that all those parts of me are back and alive and well. I published the work on an amateur writers’ website. Its popularity astonished me. To-date, the first five chapters of this long, sometimes humorous, tale have had more than 130,000 reads according to my web statistics and that is impressive, almost in the class of a best selling novel these days. But looking at what I wrote now, I am deeply dissatisfied with it. I feel it is shallow and lacks the loving sensitivity and passion that I am able to feel now. More of that later.
I’ll change the tone from my usual pedantry here and just let the two protagonists of my erotic story do the talking. They are new lovers, John and Rosie; ironically they are both qualified psychotherapists! The “I” in the tale is John speaking. Here is their discussion on sex and emotional health:
“Isn’t it amazing?” she said. “How healthy good sex makes us feel.
“I feel like I’m glowing with wellbeing this morning. I feel happy, healthy and complete. I haven’t had sex for years and last night I had the best sex of my entire life. It made me feel so good…like a whole person again.”
She paused for thought.
“You know, I’m sorry to sound like the shrink-wrap I am, but Freud had it absolutely right. Living in some void of sexual repression does us no good at all. It makes us sick. If it doesn’t drive us to do crazy things then it just makes us sick at heart. So what goes wrong?” she said.
“Rosie, I’m with you on that one. It’s what I believe too but all sorts of things go wrong,” I said.
“Either we live in aloneness like you, or else we get caught up in emotional double binds and twists and turns with our loved ones that just do us harm. We lose the plot, I suppose,” I added.
“Have you lost the plot?” she asked.
“Yes, me too,” I replied. “I’ve got caught up in that world where money and material stuff controls what I do both in and out of my marriage.
“And by the way, you weren’t the only one to have the best sex of their lives last night. I did too.”
I caught Rosie’s eye and returned her smile.
“Sex is a basic human need, as basic as food, drink and sleep,” I said. “Denying it makes people crazy. It not only causes social disease, but makes for a lot of perverted and crazy people out there too. Freud was right on the mark in my view.
“So you see we’re both a pair of shrink-wraps leading lives that are opposed to what we believe, and there lies the rub!” I added.
ENDS
That was a very light-hearted way of making the point, but denying and repressing our sexuality makes us sick, it makes for a sick world too. I have a lot of issues with Freud and Wilhelm Reich, his student, but I’m with them all the way here and a healthy loving sexuality makes for a healthy person and a healthy world. We do some repression necessarily to make civilisation possible, but we have taken it far too far in my view. Repression is a dangerous and damaging thing, it makes for perverts, rapists and murderers.
But I have something very much more important to say here now.
Sex and love
So that was all very sweet, or was it really? It’s mine, and I’ll own up to it here. My erotic fiction was pathetic. It had nothing or little to do with love. It had everything to do with a man (me) finding and facing his brokenness, of looking his big life’s mistakes, errors, pain and despair square in the face.
What the story is about is two people who try and use sex to mend that brokenness, to ease their pain. It does not work! After 140 pages of this stuff and about 55,000 words I stopped writing the story since I knew it had to end in tears and that my masturbating readers were just looking for more and more sexual titillation that I had given them in large measure already.
As the pain in the story increased chapter by chapter, so the readership decreased generally by decrements of fifty per cent. Had I gone on to tell the whole truth I may not have had a readership at all.
The love that Hollywood and our consumption-based society tries to sell us has little to do with love at all and everything to do with profit. Sorry, but this time I’m going to tell it how it really is, no holds barred, so if you’re looking for fantasy here, stop reading now. Some of you who carry on may find what I have written to be very difficult and painful. It is, I know, I have felt that pain too. If you feel that “Pretty Woman” is a great love story, then you had probably better stop here to avoid disillusionment, since as an account of love I find it about as satisfying as a gastronomic feast of warm blancmange and overcooked cabbage. It appeals to me that much!
Let’s look at sex and love then. First they are not synonymous. They are not one and the same thing and may have little to do with each other. I have every belief that sex within real love may be like heaven on earth. I do not know as I have not found it yet.
A friend once said to me recently and I’ll paraphrase her words, that sex only provides temporary relief from emotional pain, that people use it to escape their feelings and that sooner or later they would find emptiness.
I need to use another word here and that is perversion. The word pervert is not too popular in our culture today but it does mean “to misdirect” or “to lead astray”. Perversion in this context means an act of that leads a person away from a psychological goal or the pursuit of true fulfilment. To quote another eminent psychologist “we can say that a perversion leads you away from the true depths of your emotional pain - and from the psychological healing that could happen if you were to work therapeutically with that pain - by distracting you with something apparently pleasurable.”
As my friend perhaps knows, the connection between sex and perversions is often found in idealised romantic or erotic love. So I’ll talk more about love here to be clear about what I’m saying.
But let’s hear this lesson again:
- As long as you pursue sexuality out of a need to be loved – as a form of something you need or want – you will be disappointed. You will be led right behind illusions straight into perversion. You will find nothing but emptiness.
- I’ll say that again a different way. As long as you try to fill your inner, psychological and spiritual emptiness with another person through romantic, erotic love or sex – you will remain unconsciously broken and empty.
Back to the pain for a moment: Without facing and healing our past pain we cannot truly love. We may need and want to do all sorts of other stuff to avoid doing this and I’ll say more about that too. But to move towards love is to perhaps to treat yourself as one might need to treat others. True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.
This means that you need to take responsibility for yourself and the world around you. It also means that you don’t beat yourself up mercilessly for your past mistakes. Love also means finding responsibility and compassion.
To heal means that you have to see your life for what it truly is. It is being honest about your emotional pain and all the dreadful mistakes and errors that you have made in trying to hide from your despair. Then you have to listen to that despair with compassion and tenderness and let it tell you its own whole story. Only then will your heart be transformed. Only then can you move freely towards love. My friend already knows this wisdom, running from your despair into some dark corner of your unconscious to be seduced by sex and perversion will only result in even more emptiness, despair and pain.
I know someone is going to ask me sooner or later where my earlier piece on intimacy fits into all this. Perhaps it should have been a later piece as it talks about intimate behaviour within love but not love itself.
Now this gets worse, first I want to talk about what love is not, then I’ll go on to say what I feel it is.
I’ve already said that love is not an escape route from past pain, mistakes and despair. I cannot say that enough times so here it is again. It’s the stuff of the rebound and transitional relationship where people bounce from one person to the next acting out their fantasies and their toxic emotions. Sooner or later, this person will face drown in a sea of complete desperation and lifelessness when the burden of the past becomes too much to bear.
It’s not about finding some comforting sense of absolute belonging and acceptance; that’s what we give to babies. We all have to face feelings of mortality and human isolation sooner or later and there is no escape from them. As unpleasant as it may seem eroticism is based on infantile needs to be received, accepted and satisfied. When a person feels all of these needs have been met then he or she may feel that she is “in love”. But sooner or later this intensity will be broken when the need to deal with real world pressures and difficulties breaks into a relationship.
It’s not about material wealth and the sharing of objects. Material goods and structures have nothing to do with love.
It’s not about moulding yourself, your body, your dress or appearance to meet the expectations of another’s desire.
And it’s not about receiving anything, nothing at all.
Real love is an act of giving unconditionally. To offer true love, to will the good of another, is to accept one’s own vulnerability, weakness, insignificance and humility. Love is a responsible act of will and of choice. As I wrote in “the myth of falling in love” it is not something that one falls into! You might fall into the swimming pool, but not into love. You can fall into fatal attraction, and you can fall into desperate desire but you cannot fall into love. Love requires courage as in a way it’s a sacrifice of what our modern culture believes to be valuable. It means standing up for love, leaving the pack, not as a terrorist or subversive, but with something better than what others may see in their blindness.
Love is the expression of profound emotional qualities such as patience, forbearance, belief in the other, compassion, understanding and forgiveness.
The difference between romantic or erotic love and true love is the difference between receiving and giving. A lot of us do not give generously of our hearts at all nor do we give that selflessly either. Instead we are addressing a covert desire to avoid being abandoned. This apparent generosity is not love at all; it is emotional bribery.
The hardest part is about giving. True love is about giving and nothing less. It is about giving love rather than desperately searching to be loved. It’s the only attitude that can begin to carry you through the agony of human limitation and mortality. Love that is based on giving, not receiving, is true and lasting. It is never fleeting and can never fly off into despair and hate.
It is a pity that true love is feared by most of us, and is hardly ever taught to anyone, children or adults.
Acknowledgements: My grateful acknowledgements to the late French psychologist, Jacques Lacan, whose work and ideas inspired this piece.
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Part 4 - The Myth of Falling in Love
There is something that makes me feel deeply uncomfortable about the "falling in love" metaphor. It's not the "in love" part since that is wonderful, but the idea that one "fell" into it; that somehow it was like an involuntary act of slipping on a banana skin. It highlights the idea that one did not have a choice in love; it just happened, that somehow one is a victim of one's feelings and that we love whomever our "emotions" want us to love.
I would like to believe that to love is a conscious act of the psyche that involves both freedom and responsibility, where one moves into love through choice. The idea of "falling in love" denies both freedom and choice since people use it to deny that they have choice in who they love. This metaphor might also deny personal responsibility since it allows people to believe that the matter was out of their hands and beyond their control. I may have said in an earlier piece that I felt love was an act of will. Notions of will, intellect and feelings working separately are unattractive (to me) since they suggest that areas of one's being might be compartmentalised and operate separately. I am certain that this is not helpful: It might be like "I work with my intellect", "I love my partner with my feelings" and "my acts of assertion, achievement or success are achieved by my will". How saddening this is, to break up one's self in a way that allows one to express only a part of oneself in given contexts. This compartmentalisation is perhaps the product of post-industrial man, a new machine culture, where work, loving and social being, and success operate in separate personal domains. It is for this reason that I prefer the notion of consciousness where all of our faculties might operate together.
An inversion of the Descartian principle of "Cogito ergo sum" ("Je pense, donc je suis", "I think, therefore I am") that informs all western phenomenological philosophy provides a clue. It follows that if one has no consciousness, then one does not exist. That's blindingly obvious in a way. My wild extrapolation, therefore, might be that if I am not conscious, should I not know, understand or be aware of my feelings, then I cannot love. I believe that idea.
I know I might be theorising here to evade the revelation of what I find most difficult. I shall evade a little longer by doing humour. If one was to land on earth as an alien with a copy of the 'Oxford English Dictionary', then one might believe that love was some savage practice of sadomasochism, in which humans are "set on fire', "burnt", "their hearts scorched", "their souls devoured" and all by love.
It is here that I might embrace the falling metaphor, falling is painful and love is a human risk that carries with it the most awful prospect of pain. I know how much that hurts. There's a thought that keeps moving through me that comes up again and again. I am sure it was a quotation from somewhere, although I would not guarantee that my feelings had not rewritten it. It goes something like "Eros's arrow strikes beyond love's deepest wound". I am also sure that my interpretation might not be the one intended by the writer of this quote. But there is a sense for me that love's arrow in order to find a place in one's heart and one's truth must go beyond all the pain that one has felt before, that one recognizes, knows and embraces that pain, and nurtures one's being beyond it, not denying it, but not ignoring or trampling on it either. That would hurt…but if only it was that.
True love brings with it the most terrifying risks. There's trust…I remember another quote but I cannot attribute it. It is "In all trust lies the seed of betrayal". I tried to find that quote on the internet, I believe it may have come from one of my life's inspirations, James Hillman, but I came up with 'star trek'. This is how the 'star trek' quote went:
Picard, "With all trust comes the possibility of betrayal."
Data, "Then perhaps it is better not to trust."
I have not watched star trek that much, but I believe that 'Data' is a sort of humanised super-android, a computer in human form and that says it all for me.
It's a funny thing about trust but it's something that I have had going on inside me for more than fifteen years now. It is this feeling that love transcends trust, that love is more reliable, more accepting and more generous than trust. Trust is also there in language to mean the relationship that one might have with one's banker or accountant that I do not feel means that much.
But back to those fears, love may also signify so many doubts, so many risks, so much fear and apprehension. There is the fear of betrayal, loss, desertion, distrust and suspicion, rejection and worse. There are also the difficulties in moving towards love; that one might make the journey and find emptiness, that one travels faster than another and they cannot meet and embrace their feelings as they wish to, or that they are scared by the intensity or awareness of the other in fear even though they are reaching out to them. These are not everyday fears; they are the stuff of the death of love. I feel I may have understated them here since they frighten me beyond belief.
There's the journey of low self-esteem that love may heal also. I have been critical of that in the past too in that I believe that someone who does not love himself cannot possibly love another. I believe that to be true, although I have met a number of women whose wonderful flowers and potential have been crushed so badly by insensitive men in unconscious and harmful relationships; such that merely allowing them to be themselves allows them to love again. I have learned much humility of late.
But the fears and apprehensions of love should not be underestimated. In my view, they are the worse fears and apprehensions known to! humankind.
Later I'll go on and write of the joys of mature love and desire. But for now I'll quote from the work of Barbara Kofford, a wonderful and inspirational colleague in psychotherapy who is involved in running the women's center in Jacksonville, Tennessee:
"Love extends ourselves beyond our fear of being vulnerable to seek the good we each desire within ourselves and in the other. To have our love endure, there is a need to develop the strength and resources to survive times of famine. To love another is to relinquish the hope that the other will be our idealized beloved; therefore, mature love rises like a Phoenix from the ashes of lost illusions.
Mature love began for Cupid when he resolved his ambivalence about leaving his childhood home. Legend also tells us that when Venus tired of Cupid's immaturity, released him from his only-child status through the birth of his brother, Anteros, the god of reciprocal love. Therefore, love that lasts requires an acknowledgement that adult relationships are independent of those we have with parents, children, and friends. Mature love does not grow from a posture of dependency and physical appearances; it builds upon the growing autonomy of each so that one will survive the death of the other. To love another is to relinquish the intention to change the beloved. Mature love arises from the death of belief in one's own god-like powers as it flies towards the future on autonomous wings.
What can the story of Cupid and Psyche tell us about how to live "happily ever after"? Their story demonstrates that romantic love begins with idealized passions and physical attraction. And yet, it is only through the commitment of each lover to a process of integrating the internal awareness of love and soul individually that a mature union can emerge between them. It is mature love that provides children with a model by which to develop future relationships. Therefore, it is mature love that lives happily ever after in the generations yet to come."
Thoughts on Love and intimacy - Part 3 - The Rebound Relationship
After a divorce or separation from a long-term relationship many individuals try to make up for their emotional losses by rushing right into another relationship. This is because divorce feels like such a personal failure.
Although you may have had no control over the situation, you might still blame yourself for the course of the events and long to prove to yourself that you will not repeat this pattern. If your partner left you for someone else, or if they were demeaning or critical you might also desire the approval of the opposite sex to the extent that you become "blind" to logic.
Rebound relationships can also be the result of trying to make up for "lost time" spent mourning the previous relationship or an attempt to compete with the ex- by finding a new partner before he or she does.
No matter what, when a marriage or long-term relationship ends, you are likely to go through the five stages of grief: shock, denial, anger, sadness, and acceptance. There is no underestimating the enormous impact of these reactions.
Rebound relationships, which never last long, seem to occur as the result of two people projecting an idealistic notion onto each other. A delusion occurs as one person creates an understanding of the future of the relationship that differs from the new partner. Usually these issues are about commitment. However, both parties feel a great sense of temporary relief from being with each other. They may also be getting companionship, emotional support and attention that they feel that they can't get elsewhere.
Usually, both participants in a rebound relationship are completely blind to obvious evidence that the two of them are actually incompatible. The glue that holds the two of them together is along the lines of the phrase "Anything is better than being alone."
Some people embark on rebound relationships, as they can't release the past until they are put through the process of trying to build a new intimacy with someone else. Blocked or repressed emotions that were not expressed towards the ex partner may now be "acted out" on the new partner.
The new partner offers them a comfort and an emotional security that makes it easy to act out anger and other toxic emotions that could not, for reasons of emotional inaccessibility, be acted out on the former partner.
Emotional issues and needs that were not brought out during the divorce or separation will often rise to the surface and affect the new rebound relationship. As one or the other or both partners in the rebound relationship work out these issues, usually a process of emotional transformation occurs that frees the grief-stricken individual from the past.
As the person is healed, they have no more need for their rebound relationship. The partner in the rebound relationship can't grow, as it was only there to provide temporary emotional support and allay grief and pain. Rebound relationships don't have long term potential simply because the needy person will have embarked on a process of emotional recovery.
Relationship counselors recommend that a widowed or divorced individual should wait about a year before they begin looking for another committed relationship. This gives you the time to work through the shock, anger and despair that probably accompanied your loss.
Before embarking on another relationship, it is important for you to do some soul-searching and make sure that you are actually ready for another commitment. If you were the perpetrator in the separation, some serious self-examination might reveal that your real goal is to work on some other area of your life such as your creative side or career.
It can also prevent you from initiating a long-term pattern of going from one chaotic emotional situation to another in the future. Many people have a series of bad relationships, not because they are a perpetual victim or have bad luck, but because they have not taken the time out that they need to heal. In some cases, an individual can rebound several times on ONE relationship simply because they are looking for a substitute for their previous partner as opposed to a relationship that will work. One sure sign that you are about to enter a rebound relationship is if the new partner seems somehow "familiar" to you.
Another indicator that the relationship is rebound in its nature is if you see your new partner as somehow rescuing you from the last situation. You might think this because the new partner might be encouraging you to see him or her in this light so that they can feel powerful. Helping others or being an emotional "rescuer" is one way that emotionally injured individuals can boost their self-esteem.
Rather than look at a separation or divorce as a loss, you are well advised to look at the glass as half-full. This is the time to take stock of your life as well as an honest accounting for your responsibility in the debacle (no matter how much you think your partner is to blame). This will help free you from the kind of desperation that leads so many into a rebound relationship that also ends in disaster.
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Part 2 - What is intimacy?
Intimacy is many things and can exist on many levels: thoughts, knowledge, physical, emotional and sexual dimensions exist in intimacy. But here I am only concerned with close loving relationships between men and women.
In searching the internet, one might be tempted to believe that intimacy was exclusively about sexual intercourse. It is not although sex may be a fundamental (and wonderful) part of intimacy.
The work of creating intimacy is realising and expressing our inmost self in relationship with others, and supporting them in expressing their inmost self with us. Expressing our inmost self can mean revealing our feelings and needs, our dreams and hopes, our fears and joys and worries, our creative insights, our secrets and our pain . . . all the inner, personal aspects of ourselves. It does not matter at all, for the purpose of intimacy, whether we express "positive" aspects of ourselves such as joy, love, attraction and excitement, or "negative" experiences like fear, sadness, shame or anger. They all count. The important thing is that what we are expressing be personal and real. Dishonesty kills intimacy. Abstract, impersonal intellectual analysis (no matter how brilliant) kills intimacy, as does evasion, seeking to control another, judging and placating. Intimacy is the deep honest personal sharing between people.
Intimacy and honesty
I don't want to go overboard on honesty. There are forms of honesty that often simply reflect a personal preference like "I hate that sweater" or I don't like that dress" that are often best left unspoken. Opinions have little to do with the truth. There are types of honesty for some that are harsh, brutal, hurtful and inconsiderate. To be intimate requires a communicative sensitivity - a deep empathy with how the other feels and a desire to know and experience their world lovingly through their own frame of reference. It is to relish and cherish difference. It is not to enforce conformity to one's own tastes.
No judgments
Intimacy is a place without judgments. It is truly that place where acceptance without exception lives. It is a place of unconditional love. It is also a place where we have to know and love ourselves. Intimacy is not yielding ourselves up as a sacrifice, to engage the psychopath in acceptance, to cherish the abuser or wife-beater. There are other places where these people can get help. To love ourselves is a fundamental prerequisite to loving someone else. It is not about offering oneself up to another as a sacrifice or being a willing victim. There can be no judgments in intimacy as there are no right or wrong feelings.
Rejection, fear of desertion and the presentation of a false self
There are people, and I know I have been one of them, who resist intimacy for fear of being rejected or deserted. Many of us have been betrayed by someone we love or trust. Physical, mental, sexual and emotional abuse teaches us to build huge insurmountable walls of defence around ourselves. Sometimes the loss of another has simply been too painful to risk repeating the experience, to be that deeply hurt again. These are all hard lessons but, and it's a hell of a 'but', if we allow these experiences and feelings to block our capacity for intimacy, we exclude all of life's deep possibilities. We become isolated, non-functioning walled off and unfulfilled as people. We live in some stagnant backwater where it may be 'safe' (although I would question that as I believe we are more likely to signal our hurt and damage in some unconscious way and attract those people whom we wish to avoid.) but it is in a way a living death.
When we close out the pains of the past from our conscious minds, they inhabit our unconscious and influence our actions without our understanding why. Unlocking the unconscious to know and understand the cause of the difficulty is problematic. Perhaps therapy is the answer, perhaps it is not. I am inclined to believe that a lover or loving, understanding and patient friend or partner is more likely to provide the safe haven for the discovery and healing of past pain rather than the infrequent attentions of a therapist.
Fear of rejection and desertion are most often the bogeymen left behind from a difficult and painful childhood. More frequently than not the child will be conditioned to believe that their badness, abnormality or simply their individuality is the reason for their rejection. Only when the child has yielded or conformed for the sake of survival to the adult's view of them will they suffer the pain of rejection. Alice Miller, the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst, wrote 'The child is always innocent'. But society invariably takes the side of the adult and blames the child for what has been done to him or her. In turn the child betrayed by society has no choice but to repress the trauma and idealise the perpetrator. This repression leads to neurosis, psychosis and delinquency. The perpetuation of new crimes can only be prevented by the victims, seeing and being aware of what was done to them. A welter of discomforting feelings of rage, anger and unbearable pain often accompanies the discovery of childhood trauma. It is not a comfortable place to be.
It is no surprise that the abused will often go on to be an abuser.
Confronting this trauma feels to me (having done it) to be the easy part. The question is 'what then?' Only time, love and self-understanding holds the key. The adult will often feel powerless but these are the feelings of the damaged child. The adult is not powerless and only they hold the key to change through awareness and building love for themselves in themselves. Believe me, this is easier said than done. The abused child will often have been told that the reason for their abuse is that they are not worthy of love or are bad, abnormal or evil. This is the abuser's excuse. But I know the key for transformation lies in self-awareness and love.
Is this a diversion? A small diversion perhaps since I believe that in this dark place, the discovery of love and intimacy is true liberation. Intimacy and acceptance can provide the life-force of love - its re-generation and rebirth and an escape from the trauma of abuse.
Intimacy also requires individuality. There is another misconception about intimate relationships that says that intimacy means doing everything together, never arguing or disagreeing, always saying yes to each other. This belief leads to a suffocating, false "closeness" that is not intimacy at all but rather an unhealthy mess where nobody has any freedom or personal identity, where we present a false self. We are each unique, different, unlike anybody else. Intimacy - which is expressing our true self in relationship with others -requires that we honour and respect our differences. Being true to ourselves includes saying no to things we do not like, getting angry at those we love, expressing opinions or ideas that others may disagree with, and living our lives differently from the way other people choose to live theirs.
What makes this hard is that many of us have been brainwashed to believe that it's "unpleasant" or "impolite" to disagree, to say no, to get angry, or to do things our own way instead of the way somebody else expects us to. For many people, it' is frightening to stand alone and be a separate person. Conformity is more comfortable. But burying feelings of hurt, anger or dissatisfaction, and avoiding disagreements makes relationships dead and boring. Conformity does not bring people closer together. Without individuality, real contact and intimacy are impossible.
It follows that to be intimate with others we have to be intimate with ourselves. This means learning to be aware of our deepest feelings and needs, knowing and accepting ourselves as we really are, not as we wish we were or think we are supposed to be. It means knowing and acknowledging the truth about us. It means accepting and becoming comfortable with our separateness and individuality, choosing to be different and unique.
Being ourselves, and not a member of the pack, may seem a lonely place, and it is alone but rarely is it lonely. One aspect of intimacy is being unafraid to be with just oneself…. to know oneself. It's a prerequisite to being intimate with someone. It is only through being ourselves that we can experience the other and find the starting point of growth in love.
I always have an uncomfortable feeling when writing about individualism. In the 1980's and beyond, the individual became a political doctrine. One that was more often associated with selfishness, greed, social isolation, wealth and power. This has nothing to do with an individualism that calls for self-knowledge and self-determination in a social and personal context of intimacy, nothing at all.
Intimacy and vulnerability
How many times have you heard or thought 'I would like to be intimate but I feel so vulnerable'?
There is a feeling that if I reveal my feelings or myself to another they may be critical and derogatory and I will be hurt since I care for them and wish them to care for me. People in close relationships invariably hurt each other in the process of becoming intimate but if they are seeking intimacy then the hurt will rarely go untended. Intimacy and vulnerability do go hand in hand but if a person feels threatened by the criticism of another, they can quickly shift back to their own frame of reference and self-belief for support. This is why self-knowledge, self-belief and self-love (that is different to onanism) are cornerstones of intimacy; the stuff that enables one to reach out fearlessly to another, knowing one can always let go. Intimacy is the affirmation of another. Intimacy is not derogatory.
Guilt and blame
The guilt and blame games are played on such a wide scale that it is hard not to be drawn into them. The notion of 'He did it me' is everywhere. We all know the feelings. They go 'we are in this bad place because of all these bad things you did to me. I hold you to blame for my difficulty.' Maybe this is defensiveness, maybe it is fear. But it is fear of responsibility that causes blame and true growth in intimacy can only thrive where there is an acceptance of responsibility for love's growth without blame.
Blame and assertiveness do not co-exist. Blame distorts, harms and even destroys. It is self-destructive as well as destructive of others.
So I hear the cynics say 'Blame is a natural human response to threat or injustice, to wrongdoing or loss.' I am sure that is true too. It is all too easy. But what I would ask the proponents of blame is 'When did you last solve a personal problem with blame?' 'When did blame last improve your life?' 'When I blamed what did it help me to understand about me or the other?' 'Where has blame helped you to achieve the outcome you wanted?
Thoughts on love and intimacy - Part 1 - Introduction
A time ago I wrote an article for publication entitled "What is intimacy?" Like most of these things, it was borne of what was happening in my life at the time. The other day I dug it out to read. It was not half bad, I thought. Then I found myself thinking about what is and what is not possible in love. The question that nagged at me was given that it is not possible for two people to develop, grow and change synchronously in a monogamous relationship then how is it possible not to grow apart, to wake up one day and say I don't really like that person anymore, they are not the same person I thought they were?
Earlier this year I almost bled to death. I shall spare you the gory details but my heart almost gave out when it could not get the oxygen-carrying haemoglobin it needed. I had the most wonderful medical care (Thank you, blood donors!) and now I'm healthier and fitter than I have been for about 15 years or more. That sort of experience does cause a massive "paradigm shift", an entire revolution in one's worldview and personal values. But how do you encompass such a dramatic change in values within an intimate, loving personal relationship?
I was curious what others may have thought about this so I put the words "sustaining intimacy" and "sustaining loving relationships" into 'Google' and it returned so much rubbish that I wanted to reach for the bottle marked "despair".
It caused me to reflect on another random thought that was triggered by an everyday event. I had received a bill for something I had bought at a store. At the bottom of the bill, there were the letters "E&OE" in small print that I learned subsequently meant 'Errors and Omissions Excepted'. What a wonderful idea, I thought! Perhaps I might stamp letters on my forehead to signify how I would wish to feel about loving relationships. Why not 'A w/o E' meaning 'acceptance without exception'? What a great notion!
It was an important clue to me. I suspect finally, at the ripe old age I am now, I may at last be getting close to the answer. Love is certainly not about the narcissistic reflection of some idealised image of the other, or a contra-sexual playback of one's self-image. Perhaps it's not a state of mind at all, but an act, an act or activity of the soul, the psyche.
I found myself earlier trying to remember what C. S. Lewis had written about love, four kinds of love. There was "storge, eros, caritas/ philia, agape, and Love as I remember; Love being spiritual love or, in his case, the love of God. Oops! That's five kinds of love! I must have added one in there somewhere. Who cares anyway? But that's familial, erotic, friendship, altruistic and spiritual love. I'm not really sure that any such academic categorisation of love helps us in understanding what love is or how to do it anyway!
So what of love then? I'll skip around for a while longer but I do believe that love follows a progression like Maslow's hierarchy of needs where human development progresses from its subsistence level and its need for survival at the base of the triangle to self-actualisation at its apex. Similarly, I believe that love progresses through needs, wants and desire where needs correspond with a state of infantile dependency and desire to the self-actualisation of love in emotional maturity. But I'll finish here with a poem, which for me summarises the feelings of the ordinary man in a state of desire. It's called "Feeling Fucked Up" by Etheridge Knight.
Feeling Fucked Up
Lord she's gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs--
Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcom fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing
Etheridge Knight
Love - Why bother?
So are love and love relationships, the new blue light case of the age? There is a welter of statistical data that suggests that love and commitment are in a state of terminal decline if one looks at love through a lens of marital outcomes. Divorce rates have soared. In the USA, more than 50% of marriages end in divorce. In the UK, the numbers are very similar. A Rutgers University survey reported that a mere 38 per cent of Americans who are married describe themselves as actually being happy in that state. If one includes married and unmarried people in relationships, the numbers do not improve by the inclusion of committed cohabiters, they get worse.
I read a book recently by a woman called Laura Kipnis called "Against Love: A Polemic". Ms. Kipnis is a professor in media studies at an American university. She systematically destroyed any notion of love and marriage in that book although I did not feel it was so revealing, nor so clever. A real concern I had was that she did not even see the pressures on love: the idea that it may be blown up as the universal answer for everything, that people entering marriage may believe that love is all and the cure to all ills, that our problems about love and marriage might be the result of all the romantic images our culture pushes at us minute-by-minute, day-after-day. She also moots that adulterers are quasi-utopian rebels who might liberate us all! Really?
Kipnis offers nothing in place of love other than debasement. One comes away with a feeling that all she feels about is sex and that the world might be free and happy as a copulating tribe of monkeys. I would hate to point out to Ms Kipnis that Gibbon monkeys are monogamous.
In all of the anti-love and marriage material I read before writing this, Kipnis's book was the worst. It looks and sounds radical and even alludes to Karl Marx. I have some respect for Marx whose work is often trotted out like some simplistic utopian nonsense but I do believe he was a very great philosopher too. There is something in the core of Marx like a belief that the value of people means little or nothing without the respect of other human beings and that this is needed in order for people to attain their full expression. In many ways, I have much time for Marx, but then, unusually, my education required that I read his books also. Very few people have.
To use the words of Betty Friedan, Kipnis makes marriage look like a concentration camp. But I don't just want to shoot her down in flames either as she makes some very valid points.
She does describe a notion of people living together in marriage becoming rule-bound, of becoming drowned in a sea of petty dictatorship and household tyranny. I have seen it. I suspect we all have. There are rules for loading the dishwasher, not dropping socks on the floor, leaving the bathroom door open; the meaningless domestic drudgery and dross of day-to-day existence becomes everything. We enter marriage feeling love, passion and "till death us do part". So why the problems and what changes?
Ms Kipnis should have an inkling; after all she is a widely published author and a professor of media studies. Love is not merely an emotion that exists inside us. How we love is an integral part of our belief systems, of our consciousness, and of our culture that forms part of consciousness. Our beliefs are upheld by our families, our friends, the media, art and literature, politicians, churches and corporations as well as our experience. Some of these institutions may be failing us.
There are strong vested business interests in love, marital and sexual difficulties too, like the pornography trade, Viagra, therapy, alcohol and drugs industries. The pornography trade worldwide is massive! It is said to generate revenues of more than US $60 billion annually and makes up 12% of all internet content. How sad is that?
In the UK, the Office of National Statistics cites couples' high expectations as the reason for an upswing in divorce. But are high expectations really such a bad thing? Personally I would encourage them. I believe that we ought to expect more and better from many areas of our lives. In some ways, marriage might be used as a vehicle, a power-based strategy for enforcing compliance within a society riddled with infinite petty rules, meaningless and violent politics and the seemingly hateful piety of many religions. It might be these social and political dimensions of marriage that are stultifying, emotionally deadening and harmful.
I do believe there is hope for deep loving monogamous relationships. I have thought a lot about whether I really believe lasting, enduring, satisfying love relationships are possible. I have thought deeply about people I have known whom I know have emotionally successful relationships. I have read some academic research too about what factors tend to be present in relationships that endure and succeed. I have some of my own feelings and beliefs too that come mainly from experiencing past pain, difficulties and reflecting on my past relationships. I know I now have the capacity for what I believe to be a better sort of love. But I am flawed and fallible and very far from perfect but I have learned many lessons too.
Here I will talk about consciousness to mean the individual psyche. I do believe there is another dimension of consciousness of which we are all a part, a kind of collective psyche or social consciousness. I have touched on the notion of collective consciousness before and I believe it to be the ultimate expression of the connectedness of humankind and its relation to its world. In common with Marx, I believe that people both make, form part of and are influenced and made by this social dimension of consciousness.
Also I believe that individual consciousness is accessible to us all and that by bringing our individual consciousness into focus we might choose to change or enhance our lives. This self-understanding is not something that many practice; many people I meet are almost totally unconscious. Their world is one where things happen to them, they are not responsible, and life is "just like that". They have no control over their existence since they have done little or nothing to understand anything of what they feel, how they behave or how they perceive or understand.
But my real point here is that for us to feel satisfied in love we first have to understand the view of love we carry around in ourselves. We all have views, feelings and our own set of metaphors (implicit subjective stories) about love. Until we understand what they are, we are unable to be satisfied with love as we need to understand what we are seeking and what will make us happy. It's an obvious truism, but the surprise for me is always the number of people who are simply unable to articulate their beliefs about love.
To be aware and be able to be a fully functioning loving person requires that we face up to past pain. I have written this once before in my blog entitled "love and sex" but it's so important I am going to repeat it here: "Without facing and healing our past pain we cannot truly love. We may need and want to do all sorts of other stuff to avoid doing this... But to move towards love is to perhaps to treat yourself as one might need to treat others. True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.
This means that you need to take responsibility for yourself and the world around you. It also means that you don't beat yourself up mercilessly for your past mistakes. Love also means finding responsibility and compassion.
To heal means that you have to see your life for what it truly is. It is being honest about your emotional pain and all the dreadful mistakes and errors that you have made in trying to hide from your despair. Then you have to listen to that despair with compassion and tenderness and let it tell you its own whole story. Only then will your heart be transformed. Only then can you move freely towards love…Running from your despair into some dark corner of your unconscious to be seduced by sex and perversion will only result in even more emptiness, despair and pain."
Going on to another of the points I seem to have made inadvertently already by the inclusion of this quote: To have enduring, satisfying love, means one takes responsibility for oneself, for your loved one and in every other aspect of your life. Doing blame, passing the buck or evading the issue will not cut it. If you don't do responsibility, you cannot do love. It's as simple as that.
I just want to re-emphasise a point here too. It's the one about listening to your past pain with tenderness and compassion. This is so important. I have seen many people fail to face past difficulty and pain simply because their approach was to engage in emotional self-flagellation. If you beat yourself up, it hurts and sooner or later you will give up on looking at the truth of your pain, because it simply hurts too much.
I wanted to mention doing love relationship endings too. Hopefully most people know of the importance of doing loving endings. There is something about a loss in love that feels the same as any bereavement. As with any bereavement, it's important to do mourning. Mourning a loss is our way of coming to terms with it. It's fine to weep and cry. If one avoids that mourning it just adds to the baggage of past pain and that means that one will need to come back to that sadness later in order to love another. If one doesn't do the mourning, it will come back to bite us in our next relationship as unresolved feelings belonging to the past move from our unconscious into the present and cloud our feelings and affect our behaviour towards our new loved one. Anyone who has been on the end of the totally inexplicable behaviour of someone else in a close relationship will know what this feels like. Do not take it personally; it's probably not about you at all. Talk gently to your partner about it, then maybe he or she will be able to bring it back into consciousness and deal with their feelings about their past difficulty. Do not give up either, no matter how irrational the other person becomes (and people operating from unresolved feelings in the unconscious can be very irrational); be loving and support them in understanding their feelings.
One more thing, it is likely and possible that the person operating with unconscious unresolved difficulty will project those feelings on you and say that you are the cause of the difficulty. It may be hurtful too but if you have a good self-concept and good self-esteem you will recognise this projection when it happens. You will perceive easily that the problem does not belong to you but to someone else in your lover's past. It can be anyone, even a parent and need not be threatening if it is handled well. If the person has a lot of unresolved past difficulties and little consciousness of their feelings it may not bode well for the future of your relationship.
Another factor which I am sure affects the survival of love relationships is the longevity of physical and sexual relations. Touch and tactile senses are very important. I believe that hugs and cuddles are an essential part of healthy living too! It saddens me that we recognise a child's needs for physical affection, for hugs and cuddles then "grow up" and do not recognise that these needs remain in us as adults. So many people feel that hugging and cuddling belongs to the world of the child. It's not true, everyone loves a hug and a cuddle so get hugging and cuddling right now!
On sex, there are so many ways to keep its excitement alive. Sexual desire will wane if sex with another becomes the same old boring routine time after time. The passion of romance will not support sexual relations forever. But be inventive about times, places and methods…different ways of doing sexual arousal too, different types of foreplay. Now I'm getting really excited. Where's that cat?
Some lovely late friends of mine, two German Jewish people had the most amazing sex life for the whole of their lives as far as I knew. Certainly they were still going strong well into their seventies and they had first met in WW II. They were so funny; they had so many special qualities including a completely unabashed openness so I would often get to hear about their latest (sexual) adventures! They were both very successful in the media business, in film and television and used often to fly across the Atlantic to the USA. Apparently if it was a night flight and the cabin lights were dimmed, they would cover themselves with the blankets and touch each other's intimate parts. I don't think that's all they did as they loved the expenses paid trips in business class where they were be able to "be naughty, quietly and slowly, of course." I was feeling a little sad earlier today at my own lost love and these lovely people came to mind. They taught me so many lessons, many of which I write about here. They knew something about facing past pain too. They had tons of past pain. The Nazis had slaughtered many of their family and they both had fled to the UK before the outbreak of WW II. The dreadful irony was that they were both imprisoned as Germans in a British concentration camp on the Isle of Man. It was where they met. They felt no bitterness, no hate at all, but I do remember drinking champagne with them on more than one occasion to celebrate the odd accomplishment of Simon Wiesenthal in bringing Nazis to account.
This is getting very long again so I'm going to string a whole lot of qualities together that I believe are essential to have in a lasting loving relationship: Trust, caring, intimacy, companionate love, respect, humour and some healthy excitement from time-to-time!
I've never been sure about the trust word and have always felt that love assumes its meaning and much more, but trust is essential. Distrust is damaging and corrosive of love.
On caring, intimacy and companionate love, I've talked about all those before. Caring carries with it the more profound emotions of forbearance, forgiveness and understanding. They are wonderful to experience and all may grow in time unlike the shallowness of romantic illusions that fall away over time. Companionate love is the endearing quality of deep friendship that I find both attractive and desirable in my own love relationships.
Excitement is new and I have added humour to my list that I believe to be more important. Research has shown that excitement experienced jointly with one's loved one can enhance intimacy. I believe we all need some, fun, excitement and humour to keep our relationships alive. There is nothing as refreshing as the ability to laugh and in particular, laugh at oneself. I do it all the time!
There's another new word here and that is respect. Respect is one of the most necessary components in any healthy relationship, whether it is a friendship, love or marriage. Respect is not given; it's earned as is trust. To respect also means that we have to behave in a manner that is respectful. To do trust also means that we have to be trustworthy.
There is one very last point I want to make and that is crucial to be able to learn to resolve relationship conflicts constructively, Many people, especially men, do walking away from conflict and that does not work either. We need to learn about how not to escalate conflict and keep right away from hurling insults at partners too. Both are damaging and harmful. It is naïve to believe that crises, conflicts, differences and anger will not arise in love relationships from time-to-time. The important thing is to create a safe haven for the expression of those feelings and work quickly and constructively…lovingly to resolve differences and difficulties.
That's the end of what I see and believe to be important. Notice that physical or sexual attraction does not appear anywhere here. Obviously those forms of attraction might play a part in our choice of mate but it is not something I see as being of prototypical importance in love.
I am going to finish now, but first I want to say that these are my criteria for what I need in a loving, enduring, satisfying relationship. I also believe they may be generalisable and very healthy. But I recognise it may present others with something of a problem. It makes mate selection very difficult but at least I have said explicitly what my beliefs and wants in love are. I understand my own feelings in love completely. I wish my mate to feel that what is most important to me in love is also important to her.