THE PERILS OF EROS (INFATUATION) LOVE

Before we get into this subject, let me put this out first. This is a delicate subject because who doesn’t want to experience the rush of being in love with someone. This article isn’t to negate the experience, but rather only to bring conscious awareness to what happens to us, when we fall in love. It’s our self-awareness that allows us to have healthy, balanced relationships instead of the tidal influx of hormones that often make us lose all sense of reality. That said . . .

Eros love is all the intoxicating feelings, the obsessing over another, the butterflies in our stomach, and the romantic fantasies we create about our lover, but is anything but genuine LOVE for another person. Genuine LOVE can only be extended to another person as a product of our own self-actualization, self-awareness, mindfulness, and presence. If we’re truly self-aware we don’t tend to fall “in love,” because one realizes that everything we feel is only a product of the script we choose to write and project onto life, thus determining how we experience every situation we’re in.  Eros love, by contrast, is unconscious, impulsive, biological, needy, self-aggrandizing, contrived, and as mentioned in the previous article in this series, actually destroys everything it comes in contact with . . . Stay with me. I’ll explain.

Why do I say this?

When we find something or someone that we believe we love, our perceived love for the object or the other person is often conflated with the idea of how it makes “us” feel, never once realizing that no one can make us feel anything. But because we believe the other person is the source of all these amazing feelings, as opposed to the concept we’ve created of them in our head, we become attached and very dependent on this person to keep supplying us with all the intoxicating feelings that go alone with this infatuation. Like a heroin junkie hooked up to an IV with their drug of choice, we’ve now tethered ourselves to this person we “can’t live without.” Literally at the biochemical level of our cells, we’re addicted! We cannot fathom what our life would be like without them any more than a junkie can imagine their life without their fix. We want them all to ourselves, we want them with us all the time, we want to possess them, we want to “belong” to them, and we want them to “belong” to us. The ultimate expression of this dependency is called “MARRIAGE.”

This yearning to secure the love we’re now importing from another person is wrought from a very deep fear and tremendous insecurity about being on our own and being alone in the world. This fear is why we tend to cling to anyone who shows us affection and glob onto any soul that can indefinitely provide us with feelings of self-worth and a false sense of security. But this clinging only impairs and postpones our ability to discover ourselves and love ourselves independent of someone’s constant validation, because beyond the bliss of infatuation, it only reinforces our dependency and arguably theirs. Thus why it’s called “Co-dependency.” Our sense of joy, happiness, self-worth, and sense of relevancy is completely circumstantial and dependent on how our lover feels about us at any given time. Our blissfully loving relationship has now become an exploitative and incestuous relationship, hiding our madness. We leech life from our lover to feel good about ourselves. This is very destructive to our individual growth and theirs. Let me provide an example:  

While out on a day hike, you stumble upon a meadow full of beautiful flowers. The intoxicating fragrance and beauty of the flowers compels you to consider them as a centerpiece on your table back home. Smelling the flowers and seeing their profound beauty, you fall in “LOVE” with these flowers!!! Having to have them as your own, you pick the flowers, take them home, and put them in a vase.  Within a week to ten days, they die.  

Why are the flowers dead? The most common response I receive when positing this question to those I counsel is, “because they were ripped out of the ground?” A logical response and, well, yes and no.

They’re dead because you “LOVED” them. If only you had let the flowers remain rooted, grounded, there in nature, and left them where you found them, in their true essence, they would’ve lived all summer long, sharing their beauty and fragrance with so many others who would have come across their path. But, because you “LOVED” them, you had to make them your own, and in doing so, destroyed them.

This is exactly what we do to our lovers and is exactly what love is to the vast majority of humanity. This is ALL learned behavior. We have been taught that if you find someone who makes you happy, “you put a ring on it.” You make it yours . . . your property, your possession, your commitment. Sounds harsh, right? No one ever seems to question the introduction, “Let me introduce you to “MY WIFE, MY boyfriend, MY Significant Other.” Every time we use colloquial phrases like these, it unconsciously reinforces the belief that “My” wife, belong to me, and “I” to her. The very act of referring to another person as “MY” anything, denotes possession, and yet, this is so engrained into our vernacular and our thinking, no one would ever think to question it.

Financially speaking, if you’re looking to save money, dog tags, stating “property of . . . [insert name]” is considerably less expensive than diamond rings, but will essentially serve the same purpose. Cue the audience laughter!

Now yes, I’m trying to be funny but in truth, it’s the language we use that so programmed into us, that reinforces these beliefs that two people in love ‘belong’ to one another.

In doing so, we reduce our lover down to a possession, an object, our drug of choice that we don’t want anyone taking from us, so we demand – though we ask politely – commitment from them as a prerequisite for even dating. It’s the adopted, socially accepted ‘rules of engagement,’ and subsequent expectations inherent to dating that lovers sacrifice their freedom as soon as possible.

Once committed we will never see the essence of our lover again, but rather see them as ‘something’ that ‘belongs’ to us. We will never know again if our lover is with us, begrudgingly adhering to a commitment they made, or if they’re with us by choice, as we have now removed their choice altogether by demanding their commitment. Commitment is sticking with a decision, long after the emotional component of that decision has eroded away. How does staying with someone, out of commitment, even though everything in our heart wants something to the contrary, honoring ourselves or our spouse (owner, master, ball and chain, or the adjective of your choice)? Simply put, it doesn’t.

Once married, our bond of love is now a legal binding contract, an enterprise, a corporation, (albeit, with tax advantages, but still not enough to compel me), a bondage. Our bond of love has now become bondage. And oh how messy divorce is, in dissolving that bond(age)!

Where true love exists, commitment and marriage is not only unnecessary, but also completely unwarranted. Love is not transactional and NEVER destroys one’s freedom, because love is not possessing someone or belonging to someone, it’s simply appreciating the beauty of another one’s spirit with no need to possess or belong to them. It bears no titles, make no demands, has no expectations, no mile markers, and wants for nothing.

Unfortunately, most of the world will never know love on this level because this ritual of marriage is how we feel relevant to someone. The idea of someone want to spend their entire life with us makes us feel pretty goddamn special. I know I did.

For most, love is framed in the idea of inclusion. In other words, we see something external to us that makes us happy and try to include it as part of our being, part of our day-to-day experiences. We now see the object of our affection as an extension of us. We develop an attachment, so strong, that we are tortured by the absence of this object (in this case, our lover).

LOVE SEEKS NOTHING. Love would never consider ‘possessing’ or ‘belonging’ to someone, because when we possess something, it can no longer been seen as something separate from us, nor can it exist in its natural state as an individual identity, because relationship again, are role playing. We only see a contextualized version of our lover through the lens of what they mean to us.

When we tether ourselves emotionally to someone else, we’re attaching our identity to something other than ourselves. We attach ourselves to and identify with another person to create favorable experiences for us. We try extracting LIFE out of someone else to keep ourselves going in a positive way, to create a sense of security for ourselves with a certain predictability and continuity to our lives. This is how we lose ourselves and is why we seek commitment from others, to make sure that this security is never taken from us.

If we are complete within ourselves, we’re free to give love effortlessly to everyone because there is nothing we seek from another person. There’s nothing we need from another person. We have become so complete within ourselves, that our existence, our joy, our relevance, self-worth, and happiness is no longer dependent upon anything or anybody. Only then will we be truly wonderful to everyone that comes in contact with us. Otherwise, we are selective about who we’re nice to and who we’re not nice to, because there is always an agenda hidden behind every interaction with others.

So, the way we pursue romantic relationships is not driven by the desire to love someone, it driven entirely by fear and the attempt to fill the void so many refuse to acknowledge and work on. So where did all this fear come from?

THE WOUNDED CHILD . . .

In early childhood we learn primarily through positive and negative reinforcement how to get want we want, which is primarily love, affection, and security.  Love, which is the essence of what we are, often becomes a foreign concept to us, because before we can apply any cognitive reasoning to our emotions, we learn very early on, that life is a series of exchanges and compromises. Love is something we receive (positive reinforcement) by pleasing others and something we’re deprived of if we don’t (negative reinforcement). So, love and acceptance becomes an exchange, something we hope to get from others by appeasing them . . . we learn love is conditional.

When parents berate or abuse their children, few realize that the child doesn’t stop loving them as parents. The child, whose sense of self-worth is defined by the acceptance or the lack thereof that they receive from their parents, stops loving themselves. This is devastating to the emotionally inexperienced child that is trying to navigate their way through childhood, manage complex emotions that are completely foreign to them, and figure out what the rules are in this thing called “LIFE.”  In yelling and chastising our children we undermine any sense of security they have in being themselves and erode away at their trust in others. Lacking the ability to love themselves, the child begins, what for most becomes an endless journey, to try and please others in an attempt to receive love and a sense of self-worth from others.

Realizing parents and others can be irrational and unpredictable, this is where the evolution of our ego and personality begins.

Our ego is an illusion, a mask, a persona that evolves over the course of a lifetime by comparing ourselves to everyone we’ve ever met.  We grow into this mask we wear over our consciousness, the essence of what we are. Though we generally think of “ego” as a bad thing, it’s not.  Our ego developed as a product of evolution. It’s a psychological coping mechanism designed to protect us in response to events that as a child scared us and threatened our security. It’s often what pushes us to develop our autonomy and independence.

Our personality is a sophisticated construct and extension of the ego unconsciously developed during our formative years as a child, not only through a series of ‘wins’ we experienced in having our needs met, but also as a way of avoiding and insulating ourselves from painful experiences. Our personality and ego are intimately intertwined.

The mind compartmentalizes and catalogs all of our childhood experiences for life as either pleasant or painful, and in doing so, it employs strategies to help us create a gap between the emotional aspect of our being (our vulnerable inner child) and those painful experiences that were overwhelming, intolerable, or traumatic.

These painful experiences are internalized by the child as “there’s something wrong with me,” but in not wanting to appear weak and vulnerable, we put on our brave face. This is our EGO!  We venture out into the world burying the pain, the beliefs, and insecurities we cling to beneath the veil of our persona or personality. These traumatic experiences and the reactions of the people involved in them, say nothing about us and who we are, though they are processed that way. These experiences leave an indelible mark on us in the form of an internal narrative we create about them, which is usually very judgmental and filled with limiting beliefs we have about ourselves.  Sub-consciously this creates unhealthy, negative patterns of behaviors that are reactive in nature and work against us as we grow into adulthood.

During our childhood feeling loved, seen, heard, understood, and accepted is paramount to our development. If we are deprived of this, “finding” love and acceptance outside ourselves (since we can’t find it within) becomes our highest aspiration in life.

This is where our endless search to find acceptance in the eyes of a lover begins, but again, this misguided pursuit is rooted in fear, NOT love. The search for love, happiness, joy and relevancy have all become external pursuits for the masses who sadly, are “Looking for Love in all the wrong places.”  Cue the music. Some will get that reference.

This is a pervasive societal problem where people conflate LOVE and romance, when in fact, romance is based in lust and is a marketing tactic we employ (though we never consciously think of it that way) that serves as a divisive prelude to sex. LUST is a product of the body, LOVE arises out of our consciousness. But, people aren’t even aware of their consciousness as separate from their biological drives, so conflating lust and love seems to go hand in hand, and just goes on and on and on – lust is mistaken for love.

Lust and romance really has nothing to do with actually loving another person. It’s simply an ego trip designed to protect our inner child that is seeking security!!!

MOVING PAST OUR PAIN AND FEAR . . . THE WAY OUT, IS IN.

With love as an external pursuit, it will always evade us. Though relationships may initially provide self-affirming feelings, in time all our old patterns, beliefs, fears, and insecurities resurface and rear their ugly head. We become suspicious, distrustful, insecure and afraid our lover may leave us.

If there is one constant in life, it’s that life is permanently impermanent. 
EVERYTHING is in transition, EVERYTHING changes, and yet, when it comes to the often-fleeting emotions associated with love and romance, we expect them to remain the same forever.

This is why most romantic relationships are actually a tragedy in the making and are doomed before they ever really have a chance. This is because our star-crossed lovers are approaching their relationship from the wrong premise – a foundation that doesn’t exist within either one of them.

When our love has an address, it’s not LOVE, it’s role playing. Though this is what society has adopted as “love,” it’s completely conditional and is nothing more than codependency dressed up as “romance.” It’s two people exploiting one another to create all the desirable feelings associated with being “in love” within them, though they can’t see it until the relationship ends.

True LOVE is not addressed to someone or something any more than the sun intends for all of its light to only reach the Earth and nowhere else.  In other words, LOVE is simply a radiating outward of the appreciation, honor, and respect we have for ourselves and share with others. It’s something we simply are, not some “thing” we find with anyone else. But lacking love for ourselves, we attempt to extract it from others.

For most of us, when we say the words “I Love You” we’re really saying, “I love the way you make me feel.” In other words, we’re simply acknowledging the quality of our own emotions in response to another person, and these feelings are not caused by the other person but rather the internal narrative we’ve created about them in relation to us.

At this point, our ego, which always needs validation, applies a story to these feelings; one that see us as “set apart,” unique, or special in the eyes of someone else.   And oh, how empowering that is!!! As lovers, just as when we were children, our two individuals appease one another (positive reinforcement) and indulge in one another, never realizing that the only relationship they’re ever having is the relationship they’re having with themselves, within themselves.

Again, ALL of these feelings we cannot help but indulge in, are the product of the internal narrative we’ve created within ourselves about our lover.  In other words, our lover is not creating any feelings within us. It is us, the storyteller in our head, that is creating all of our feelings, no one else.  Our thoughts create our beliefs – about ourselves, others, and every experience we are having. We weave these beliefs together into a story, a novella, an internal narrative we’re having within ourselves, and that story or narrative creates ALL the emotions we’re feeling in any given moment.

What we feel in any given moment is only a product of this internal dialogue we’re having within ourselves at any given time. In other words, no one can make us “feel” anything.  And yes, this means everyone is off the hook!  No one is responsible for the way we feel other than us. I know, I know, that’s not very comforting and means that ultimately, we have to take full accountability of what we’re feeling.

We have to realize that we create our own experiences through our perceptions and our experience of anything, at any time, is all a creation of our own doing and the result of the appraisal we have of ourselves in any give situation. As mentioned in my previous installment on this subject, “the degree to which we possess the ability to love and honor ourselves will determine the degree to which we need to believe others love us.” The quality of every external relationship we’re having is determined by the quality of the relationship we’re having with ourselves, within ourselves.

If we pay attention to the stories we create in our head, the narratives are always commensurate with and validate the beliefs we hold about ourselves.  What we see in our lives depends largely on what we’re looking for.  In other words, we create these stories and then look for “evidence” to support them.

We have a very empowering, self-aggrandizing narrative or storyline at the beginning of a relationship, and a very disheartening, diminutive, and self-deprecating storyline when one ends.  But in either scenario, it’s the internal dialogue we’re having with ourselves, that is creating our feelings.  NOT our lover!!!

This “Crazy lil’ Thing Called Love” is highly addictive, and like any other drug, when we indulge in it, we dangle ourselves precariously between bliss and annihilation, because the love and grandiose appraisal we have of ourselves is now shackled to someone that at any moment can walk out of our lives and unfortunately take our imported sense of self-worth with them.  We’ve unwittingly reduced our lover down to our “drug of choice” and will subsequently experience withdraw symptoms in their absence.

Robert Palmer, in the most apropos way, described this obsession in his song ADDICTED TO LOVE.  In the off chance you’re one of the few people on earth that are not familiar with the mega-hit, you can click here to watch the music video.  If you’re reading this article, something tells me the lyrical content will resonate with you.  
Click here:  https://youtu.be/XcATvu5f9vE

What so many call love, is a complicated interplay between a entire panacea of hormones, biochemistry, neural peptides, emotions, impressions and nuances we’ve been encoded with since early childhood, that all contribute to how we experience another person we are romantically involved with.

As alluded to in my previous article, for a lot of us, our concept of love and romance as adults was more than likely first conceptualized by Walt Disney at a very young age.

We learn about love – or at least the socially agreed upon version of love – by emulating those who modeled love for us, which was hopefully demonstrated by our parents or caregivers.  Regrettably, there are so many who have never had unconditional love modeled for them, so love is learned contextually through trial and error, listening to countless love songs, and by what we see portrayed on television and at the movies.  What most of us have come to think of as “love” is really lust, codependency, and if we’re being honest, “emotional bartering.”

Commit this to memory . . . LOVE SEEKS NOTHING!!!  It only wants for others what they want for themselves, whether it continues to include us or not.

Because all knowledge begins with self-knowledge, we must go within ourselves to find the way out.

. . . More to come

See:  “HOW TO MINDFULLY APPROACH ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS – “IT’S ALL JUST A STORY WE TELL OURSELVES.”

I would love to hear from you and hear your own personal thoughts on relationships in the comment section below. Let me know if the content of this article resonates with you, provides perspective, or helps you see things in a different way that empowers you to make different choices or see life and relationships through a different lens. I value your thoughts and feedback and look forward to hearing from you.

Love & Light to You in your continued Journey of Self-Discovery!

David