To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. ― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
. . .
Have you ever drowned in love? You know that feeling, when love sparks, biochemistry changes, and suddenly all you want is to be with your beloved. Their embrace becomes more precious than food. No good book can compare. Friends feel boring. Hobbies forgotten.
When I’m drowning in love, it feels like dying of thirst and then gulping from a firehose. I can’t get the cool water in fast enough. My face messy and wet; I choke as I drink up as much as I can.
It is unsustainable.
If I stay at that geyser too long, I’ll drown. I’ll lose myself completely in love.
Brain researcher Helen Fisher puts the dynamics of early romantic love plainly, calling it an obsession or an addiction:
Romantic love is an obsession. It possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You can’t stop thinking about another human being…Romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly. — Dr. Helen Fisher, Why We Love
Fisher’s views on romantic love are hard-won, formed after scanning thousands of brains over the course of three decades. In scan after scan, she observed the activation of the same brain regions that light up when we ingest pleasure-inducing drugs like cocaine or ecstasy in the brains of individuals who described themselves as being in love.
As the famed ancient love poem, Song of Songs proclaims, “Love is fierce as death, Passion is mighty as hell; Its darts are darts of fire, A blazing flame.”
The poet Rumi likewise laments:
Love came,
and became like blood in my body.
It rushed through my veins and
encircled my heart.
Everywhere I looked,
I saw one thing.
Love’s name written
on my limbs,
on my left palm,
on my forehead,
on the back of my neck,
on my right big toe…
Oh, my friend,
all that you see of me
is just a shell,
and the rest belongs to love
The very feeling we crave when we are falling wildly in love is to lose ourselves in the other. Our bodies yearn for union. Our hearts thirst for closeness. Fighting the instinct is like trying to hold back the sea.
“Fighting the instinct is like trying to hold back the sea.”
Though it can feel near impossible, according to sex and relationship therapist Dr. David Schnarch, we would be wise to try to exert at least some control over the tidal wave of romantic love. In his works Passionate Marriage and Constructing the Sexual Crucible, he argues that human beings enter the world with two basic, conflicting needs. On the one hand, we are born with our own unique set of talents and passions, blessings that become curses if we don’t put them to good use. On the other hand, we are born craving safety, expecting to find it in the arms of a beloved. Balancing these two conflicting needs becomes the primary task of our life.
If it is the chemical cocktail documented by Dr. Fisher that inspires us to crave the melting Rumi and Song of Songs describe, what motivates Schnarch’s second need — the need to live out our purpose?
Psychologist and scholar Viktor Frankl found his answer to this question in his long and painful struggle to stay alive in Auschwitz. In his seminal work Man‘s Search for Meaning, he says:
“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”
Living our purpose is the thing that makes us unique and non-replaceable.
We crave it in equal measure to our cravings for love. Such determination is equally present in women as in men, which might explain the phenomenon of widespread depression described by Betty Friedan in her groundbreaking work The Feminine Mystique. Nothing in life replaces our need to complete the task we were born to do, not even an overwhelming love.
As Dr. Schnarch explains, those individuals who find themselves so deeply subsumed in romantic relationship that they lose all desire to live their purpose will eventually find themselves in a relationship crisis. What we would colloquially call a “mid-life crisis” he might call a “mid-life remembering,” the soul awakening from is slumber, being called back again to its unique mission.
“What we would call a “mid-life crisis” he might call a “mid-life remembering,” the soul awakening from is slumber, being called back again to its unique mission.”
How do we ride the ecstatic waves of romantic love, bottling up their goodness so that they might nourish us for a lifetime, in such a way that we do not forget or abandon ourselves?
Rather than centering our own wounds or needs, the key to laying a solid relationship foundation that can last a lifetime, is to become our lover’s biggest fan. Rather than saying, “Never leave me!” say instead, “The world is so much better with you in it.” Rather than saying, “Be like me.” Say, “I am happiest when you are most you.”
The most generous statement we can make to our lover is to say, I hold your tender heart, as you fly free in the world. I am here to be your home.” Such a model for relationship runs counter to the tropes of traditional marriage, which in their essence, are rituals of acquisition.
We must learn a new way.
Marriage in the 21st century is in crisis. Never has there been a time when more people have had this much access to equal rights and freedoms. Though there is still much work to be done, for the first time in human history, there is mainstream consensus that all humans, regardless of race, religion or gender, have equal worth and equal rights to pursue their dreams.
It is time we align our relationship expectations to this ethos of individualism. Failure to do so is the reason that the majority of marriages end in divorce because only the dead can ignore their passions.
For too long, too many have chosen death in order to maintain stability in relationship, so prized is the safety we find in the arms of our beloved.
But it need not be this way.
The choice in love need not be between self and other, between passion and security. Though so many of us fear change, especially real change in the inner lives of our beloved, it is unwise to pit ourselves against it.
In love as in science, as Heraclitus taught, “change is the only constant.”
To bet against change is to put our relationships on rocky footing, as the divorce rate proves. Resilient relationships are those in which lovers vow to chose one another, again and again everyday, saying, “I awaken anew this day, ready to be who I am born to be. In this new day, I choose you as my love. As your partner, I am here to help you to live your purpose. The world is better with you in it, mine most of all.”
Let your love be she with whom you sore about the world. Love her in her thriving, not when she is caged. Be the one to whom she comes home, when she is sated from her striving. Let her do the same for you. Leave ownership to the world of things. Let love be the stuff of wind and fire, of passion, breath and air.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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Photo credit: Crystal Shaw on Unsplash