Have you ever fallen in love, like madly in love, pursued a relationship, and a few years later watched in bewilderment as it fell apart? Did you ever wonder why that happens? Yeah, me too. Several years ago. We’d been together for four years. We planned to get married. Then things went kaput.
I wondered to myself: What went wrong? How did we get to that place? Things had been so-o-o-o good, and then they weren’t. What happened?
My Experience of Falling In Love
I knew I was falling in love, and I was obsessed. I saw her, I knew her eyes, and as I looked at her, I was intensely attracted. My body ached to be with her. My imagination was beheld by her image. It was as if my mind were possessed and I could not turn it off. My heart was out of control. My captivation was complete.
I remember that I would think of her involuntarily — at the grocery store or gas station, in the middle of a client meeting, or as I pulled into the garage and prepared to greet my kids. I would see images of her and fantasize about time together — sometimes sexual fantasies, but usually, more mundane fantasies of dates, walking together on a trail or talking before a fire far into the night. I didn’t create these fantasies, they occurred. They erupted from within my soul spontaneously, and there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop them.
I’m told that women’s experiences can be very similar.
Indeed, this experience of being captivated by a new lover is widespread — in fact, nearly universal. It is how actual love usually begins. But what is actually going on?
The Psychology of Falling in Love
Psychologists such as C. G. Jung and Robert Johnson describe this experience as projection. Men project the image of their feminine side, called anima, and women project the image of their masculine side, called animus. Anima and animus are fantasy experiences of the soul. They are divine images of perfection that entice and excite us precisely because they are images of our unfinished selves. This projection contains an image, to be sure, but also a highly charged energy. As James Harvey Stout described it:
We are attracted to this image and energy (perhaps more so than to the person). In some cases, the energy is intoxicating; thus, we experience the phenomenon of “falling in love” — the emotional, sexually charged, fantasy-filled, head-over-heels, mythologized, quasi-spiritual, electrifying, larger-than-life, you-make-me-feel-alive-and-whole, idealized fascination toward someone. However, in truth, we are falling in love with our own anima/us; i.e., we are falling in love with ourselves. (https://trans4mind.com/jamesharveystout/anima.htm)
Robert Johnson described it this way:
“To fall in love is to project that particularly golden part of one’s shadow, the image of God — whether masculine or feminine — onto another person. Instantly, that person is the carrier of everything sublime and holy. One waxes eloquent in praise of the beloved and uses the language of divinity… Though no one notices at the time, in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved. One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person.” (pp62–3, Owning Your Shadow)
In other words, we are in love with an ideal that does not exist. We are blinded to the real person by the bright light of that projected and reflected image. As we fall in love, we idealize our partners in a way that they can never fulfill. We are intoxicated by the energy, and we think that means we are intoxicated with our partner. But he or she hasn’t actually been allowed in.
This is exactly what happened in my relationship — wow, did I “wax eloquent in the praise of the beloved!” But it is also why we had trouble. Falling in love, she seemed perfect, and I did to her as well. We even said that to each other. “How did I get so lucky?” “You are so perfect for me.” I’m a writer, a poet, a sailor, a gardener, and an outdoorsman. I cultivate inner awareness. I want a partner who will enjoy those things with me for a lifetime partner. I was sure I had that in her. We talked about sailing, we talked about deep subjects, and I wrote beautiful love poems inspired by her.
Just as the psychologists noted above said, however, I was projecting an image that she would live up to my dreams — that we would sail the world together, buy a home together in the forest on a lake that would be our retirement home, live and socialize together. I just kind of breezed over the fact that she preferred pretty things to outdoor things, laying in the sun to competitive sailing, and had important connections she wanted to maintain that are nowhere near the forest and lake I dreamed of living on. As Robert Johnson said, I missed the actual humanity of my beloved. When marriage plans started to get close, we both made critical decisions that broke down the projected fantasy.
The Inevitable Disillusionment
Given the divine energy involved in these relationships, it is inevitable that the illusion must fail. The other person is, after all, a human being, not a god. The intensity of the energy can be so strong that we think we know more about our partner than they do — this is also the projection operating. What we say we “know” about them is actually what we know about the projection — and that is quite a lot because it is our projection! I thought I knew that my partner was all about obtaining a home in the forest on a lake until she made a huge commitment to a townhome in a suburb just at the time we could have pooled our resources. As Billy Joel sang, “It was then I felt the stranger kick me right between the eyes.” This is not to throw shade on her — it was simply the painful experience of having the veil of my illusion removed.
When Robert Johnson speaks above about the insult to another person by falling in love with them, he is referring to this projected objectification. The problem with a powerful projected fantasy is that the fantasy fills in all the gaps in knowledge about that real person. The fantasy removes the beloved’s reality from consideration. The psyche fills in the story. But the unaware man will mistake this filled-in story for the reality of the woman.
Neither the lover nor the beloved like this experience in the long run. Why? Because in the long run, you have to move from fantasy to reality. No man and no woman will ever measure up to the idealized image. The human person always falls short. What happens to a lover when the beloved fails to live up to his projected ideal? Heartbreak. Pain. Maybe even anger or rage. The illusion has failed. We have been, in a word, disillusioned.
In my relationship, this disillusionment occurred as we got engaged. We thought we had it. We decided to get married, and what happened? Reality struck. Real-life decisions needed to be made. What are our next steps? Decisions did not align with the ideal fantasies. Spread out on the floor around us, were the shards and crumbs of broken images. The projections failed. We came face-to-face with the reality of who each other is.
The Art of Loving
While falling in love provided the energy of our relationship, it would need to be sustained by a very different force — lower voltage, longer-term, more connected to reality. The dream of perfection was no longer enough. I want to be loved for who I am, not as a fantasy of her projection. She wants the same. In order to love her, I need to withdraw my projection and come to terms with my disillusioned perception of her as a woman. And she must do the same.
According to Robert A. Johnson, one way to do that is by embracing paradox — the paradox that is love and power. “Power without love becomes brutal; love without power is insipid and weak”(p89, Owning Your Shadow). This paradox arises because the intense power of the falling-in-love projection weakens, and the lower voltage needed to plan a life together emerges. Truly successful sustenance of the relationship arises here. It is actually inner spiritual healing undertaken by both people.
Here we confront righteousness — our lover’s, as well as our own. It is the entrance test for the art of loving. If we do not realize what is going on, the intensity of our disappointment can lead to recriminations. The lovers may blame each other, claim that the other has changed, or try to manipulate or control the other in order to maintain allegiance to their own projected fantasy. The fantasy, after all, was so joyful. And who would want to leave that?
What’s needed is a transformation, not a claim of righteousness. Johnson is not talking about power over another person, as would be the case in chauvinism, for example. Rather, he is speaking of inner power and power with someone rather than power over them. It is a power in which you do not lose yourself in your own fantasy and where you stand up for your own needs within the context of the relationship.
Johnson continues about power and love:
“To give each its due and endure the paradoxical tension is the noblest of all tasks. It is only too easy to embrace one at the expense of the other, but this precludes the synthesis that is the only real answer. Failure invites a breaking apart — divorce, disunion, quarrel. A true paradox makes for a strong devotion and a mystical union powerful enough to endure the problems.” (p89, Owning Your Shadow).
Enduring this paradox is powerful because it is authentic to each individual and honors the dance that is the third body between them. Despite the intensity of your longing, this paradox requires you to stay in your own being. For many, that is the hardest lesson that comes from love.
Letting go of that projected image is difficult because it is what led us to fall in love in the first place. I loved that energy. I loved that rush. As my illusions were lifted, however, I had to face whether or not I could embrace this human being in her full paradox, and she must make the same assessment of me. Yet to do so, we must live in our own paradox — the shining ego and its dark shadow. We must accept both as realities of our soul and we must accept both as realities of the beloved’s soul.
But Is It Worth It?
I found myself in a difficult place. My beloved was not the person I thought she was — she was not that projected image. But then, who was she? If Robert Johnson is right that I had to embrace the paradox for the relationship to endure, and if I had blinded myself to who she really was, to whom am I making this commitment to live in paradox? What is the difference between a disappointment requiring the strength of handling a paradox, and a determination that no, this is not actually the person for whom I want to do that work? How do I determine, knowing that she is not the person I thought I loved, that we are still a match worth fighting for?
For me, it came down to two things: real-life plans and the capabilities required to live in that paradox. Standing in our truth, it turns out that our ambitions and values were very different. She wanted to live in the urban area, and I wanted to live in the forest. Her priority was grandchildren, and mine was writing. We had some overlap, but the art of loving, we agreed, meant we needed to be together and in the same place. In real-life plans, we had a fundamental incompatibility.
The other question was our discernment of one another’s ability to actually hold and live in the paradox. I determine in my mind that at this age, patterns are engrained, and even if she wanted to change, it would take years. As I understand it, she made a similar assessment of me. In essence, it was a decision that the other person didn’t have the capacity to handle the paradox Robert Johnson was talking about. We didn’t have faith in each other’s ability to handle that, perhaps because the wounds of the disillusionment process were too much. So, we went separate ways. We were not able to make the transition to paradox, but at least we got clear and made the decision necessary.
Conclusion
I hope that I have provided a real-world insight into my own situation and provided insight that can help others who go through this process of falling in love and try to turn it into the art of loving. They are so different. I achieved that transition once in a long marriage only to have it taken away by mental illness later in that same marriage. The relationship I described here, failed. I hope all of us we can do better. Good luck and good loving.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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