Looking for Love, Risking for Love

"Often we confuse perfect passion with perfect love. A perfect passion happens when we meet someone who appears to have everything we have wanted to find in a partner. I say “appears” because the intensity of our connection usually blinds us. We see what we want to see. In Soul Mates, Thomas Moore contends that the enchantment of romantic illusion has its place and that “the soul thrives on ephemeral fantasies.” While perfect passion provides us with its own particular pleasure and danger, for those of us seeking perfect love it can only ever be a preliminary stage in the process.

We can only move from perfect passion to perfect love when the illusions pass and we are able to use the energy and intensity generated by intense, overwhelming, erotic bonding to heighten self-discovery. Perfect passions usually end when we awaken from our enchantment and find only that we have been carried away from ourselves. It becomes perfect love when our passion gives us the courage to face reality, to embrace our true selves. Acknowledging this meaningful link between perfect passion and perfect love from the onset of a relationship can be the necessary inspiration that empowers us to choose love. When we love by intention and will, by showing care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, our love satisfies. Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact but is absent from their lives.

Yet when we commit to true love, we are committed to being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualized. This commitment to change is chosen. It happens by mutual agreement. Again and again in conversations the most common vision of true love I have heard shared was one that declared it to be “unconditional.” True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change.

The heartbeat of true love is the willingness to reflect on one’s actions, and to process and communicate this reflection with the loved one. As [John] Welwood (author of Love and Awakening: Discovering the Sacred Path of Intimate Relationship) puts it: “Two beings who have a soul connection want to engage in a full, free-ranging dialogue and commune with each other as deeply as possible.” Honesty and openness is always the foundation for insightful dialogue. Most of us have not been raised in homes where we have seen two deeply loving grown folk talking together. We do not see this on television or at the movies. And how can any of us communicate with men who have been told all their lives that they should not express what they feel. Men who want to love and do not know how must first come to voice, most learn to let their hearts speak – and then to speak the truth. Choosing to be fully honest, to reveal ourselves, is risky. The experience of true love gives us the courage to risk.
As long as we are afraid to risk we cannot know love. Hence the truism: “Love is letting go of fear.” Our hearts connect with lots of folks in a lifetime but most of us will go to our graves with no experience of true love. This is in no way tragic, as most of us run the other way when true love comes near. Since true love sheds light on those aspects of ourselves we may wish to deny or hide, enabling us to see ourselves clearly and without shame, it is not surprising that so many individuals who say they want to know love turn away when such love beckons."

bell hook, All About Love: New Visions

At one point, I thought I had found true love in my life. When I met the man in question, I was instantly attracted to him. Physically, he was the epitome of my late night fantasies. It actually took quite some time, over a year, before I acted on my feelings. But once he and I began a tentative friendship, I found that his personality held the other elements I thought I needed in a partner. Once we became intimate, I was ecstatic that he held things down in that department as well. I was ready to end my search because I believed this was the man I could eventually marry. Yet, I felt the closer I got to him, the more distant he became. I knew there were things about me that he didn’t really like, but he wasn’t the perfect person, just perfect for me. I hoped that I could be perfect for him. However this relationship was not meant to be. After repeated attempts to get a commitment from him, to no avail, our congenial situation became sour. I was extremely bitter, hurt and embarrassed by my “weak” feelings. I called him immature, selfish, and stupid. To me, he was throwing away a good thing and more importantly, his inability to commit to me fully was causing me pain I’d never felt before. Before him, I’d been in relationships that were serious, but for the most part I ended those situations. It came to be that I would end this one as well.

While we were never officially committed to each other, the final straw that would convince me to move on, I was very much obsessed with this man. Self-destructive behavior ensued, until a brutal wakeup call forced me to reevaluate my own future. The first action I took was to cease our intimate relationship, I put distance between our friendship and then I worked at focusing on my schoolwork, my future, myself. I would occasionally slip up and fall back into the routine, but by far the best realization I came to was to move this person from a romantic partner into a friends only category. Here, I was able to view him from a more distant place, and to view my reactions towards him. I began to see his inadequacies and insecurities. I began to realize his inability to change and his denial techniques for dealing with the truth. At the least, I began to realize that this was not the type of person I wanted for my lifemate.

This change did not happen overnight. There were times I had to physically remove myself from a phone, deliberately ignore some messages, or just go out and get really trashed in order to move on. I don’t recommend these ways of coping, but I know now that much of what I had to do also included rewriting the list of things I need in a partner. My number one priority has been to find someone who loves me just as I am. Not someone who praises certain parts of me, while putting down other parts. I realized that I need someone who is honest about their feelings towards themselves, so that they can be honest about their feelings towards me. I also realized that I needed to find someone whose life enriched my own in the same way that mine enriched theirs.

In talking with a guy I know, we often spend time reflecting on his current situation with a girl who is always half-stepping. He loves her, he tells me, he loves to make her smile and he wants to be the person she can rely on. However, she is just using him to make herself feel good and often disregards his own feelings when she makes decisions concerning them both. The number one problem is that she is in a committed relationship, with someone other than my friend and keeps him dangling with promises that she will soon end the current situation once it’s “safe”. Rather than move on and save his time and energy towards a more fulfilling scenario, my friend is caught up with this girl because she is “pretty, intelligent, funny.”

I empathize with him because I know what it is to care deeply for someone who claims to also care, but whose actions cause more pain than pleasure. I see so much of my past relationship with his current situation and as we talk, I only hope that he realizes that he deserves true love. For sure, the only way he can attain true love is to take care of himself and to sever his ties with this destructive “friendship.” He is handsome, witty, intelligent and a great guy, and I am certain that he can find someone who loves him as deeply as he hopes to love, but he has not yet found the space to love himself. Just as, for the many years I played “he loves me, he loves me not”, I did not love myself enough to break my bad habit. I hope that my friend finds, as I did, that the number one step towards a fulfilling relationship is a solid commitment evidenced by dependable behavior. Point blank: If the person will not make a commitment to be with you, regardless of your or their situation, you must move on. True loves involves a commitment to yourself as well as to the other person.