Love is not enough

Love is not enough to prevent the metaphorical Devil and his demons from cunningly and imperceptibly creeping into your relationship, destroying it bit by bit, like the sugar that rots away a tooth over time.

Keep your guard up! Don’t delude yourself into thinking that flirtation or fantasy play behind a screen is harmless. He is a predator, searching for the microscopic cracks in your loving behavior, slithering his way into them, feasting on their weak walls like a hungry termite, and making space for the others to enter and contribute to his project, which is to destroy your relationship from the inside out.

Our stories

“There are the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell others. Some of them may even be true. But what are the stories which are storying their way through our daily lives and of which we are mostly if not wholly unaware?”
~James Hollis

The three stories:

1) The same old story that you assume is happening again. In reality or imagination, this is the all too familiar theme or pattern that seems to follow you like a stalker, recycling itself over and over, chapter after chapter, from cradle to grave. You whine and complain about its apparent return, playing its victim at times, but it is your Old Faithful, always reliable as an excuse or crutch when all else fails in your life.

2) The story of fulfillment and happy endings that you wish were happening. This is your version of the healing, heroic, romantic journey that you’ve dreamed about from childhood onward. The story evolves with the changing times and circumstances, but remains true to its original theme. You dream of it, hope for it, and search for it, but assume the low probability of its fruition.

3) The real story that is actually happening or unfolding throughout your life: A convoluted plot with characters and themes that appear, disappear, and sometimes reappear again, often without any apparent rhyme or reason. Creating one’s personal story from this bigger, more chaotic story, is a challenge without end, as the real world is in constant flux, without loyalty to what we’d like to believe about it.

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Butterflies and red flags

“When all you know is fight or flight, red flags and butterflies all feel the same.”
~ Cindy Cherie

The more you desire someone, the more you fear being ruined or destroyed by your vulnerabilities to them. Your early butterflies, slowly but insidiously, transforming into red flags. In the heat of your desire and need, your fear becomes exaggerated; and you make the decision to either fight the invisible enemies within, take flight from them, or do both. The irony being that either way, the fight or flight pushes away what you wanted or thought you needed, your fear being the real enemy.

Alternative version: Free verse

The object of desire is your greatest vulnerability; the path to your elusive joy or inevitable ruin: recycled and reimagined.

Early butterflies—slowly but insidiously—transform into the red flags of paranoia. The fear of loss and humiliation enclosing you like a vice grip.

In the heat of desire and neediness, you fight or take flight from the invisible enemies within: the delusions of demons who would steal your joy or facilitate your shame. And this will assuredly keep you separated from your object of desire; your fear and paranoia being the most crafty of enemies.

The enigma of fear

“…it is certain that the problem of fear is the meeting point of many important questions, an enigma whose complete solution would cast a flood of light upon psychic life.”
~ Sigmund Freud

The mind revises and sometimes denies our experiences of reality, deciding that we are better off not knowing some things, for the sake of self-preservation. When we attempt to know these things, fear—in one form or another—stops us dead in our tracks. There is no technique, therapy, or form of psychoanalysis that successfully outwits or penetrates this barrier of fear. The mind has its reasons for keeping secrets, guarding them as if our lives hang in the balance.

Love: Jungian style

“People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I’m reminded of the Jungian concept of men having a feminine aspect, referred to as the anima; and women having a masculine aspect, referred to as the animus. The theory being that “all” human beings are composed of both masculine and feminine essences, with one essence being the consciously dominant one in an individual, and the other being relatively unconscious, “appearing” as the qualities one desires or despises in others. In Jungian psychology, this is the basic mechanism of attraction: the recognition of the other half of ourselves in others, facilitated through projection and imagination. The illusion being that what you search for or recognize is outside of yourself, when it is really the opposite, less conscious side of your inner nature – the masculine or feminine – seeking consciousness through your interaction with others.

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