We live in a culture that is skeptical and talks cynically about love relationships as if it can be compartmentalized into a neat and unchanging … static life.
Best-selling books with titles like, “Getting the Love You Want,” mirror a fast-food culture where love and relationships are commodities that can be ordered, gotten, or kept.
We use the word, love, to describe a host of experiences that delight, enthrall, satiate, soothe and stimulate our senses. Robert Johnson (Fisher King & The Handless Maiden) wrote, “Our superior function has given us science and the highest standard of living the world has ever known … but at the cost of impoverishing the feeling function.”
We talk as if love relationships are play-things to be put aside when we tire of them or it becomes challenging and inconvenient for us. We window-shop for love relationships on dating sites and foolishly mistake love for sex.
In our fast food culture, we expect instant gratification. We balk at making difficult decisions, terrified to expose our soft-under-belly of vulnerability; chained to cold fears of rejection; ruminating on memories of past betrayals and disappointments.
In love relationships we play it safe, never really daring to throw the dice, in case the score is too high for our comfort or because of what others might think about us or the one we chose.
But then one new day, we wake up to find our desperate pleas for love have been answered by a Benevolent force. We tremble and shake in unspeakable terror standing on the cliff, afraid to take that leap into … a love Relationship. Afraid to do what it takes to be with the beloved who we say we cannot be without.
Relationships, like aging and death are not for the squeamish.
Our definition of love relationships has shifted it’s shape in the twenty-first century. Our love relationships may require periods of spaciousness, solitude, emotional or physical distance. They may demand acceptance of the aberrations, a baring of warts and all kinds of foul-smelling fragments.
It takes courage to reclaim disowned feelings, modify our behaviors that wound and clobber. It takes determination and courage to revision our own life and take back the projections so easily screened onto someone else’s life—“she has too many issues,” “he cannot do emotions,” or the classic cop out—I’m not “in love with him/her anymore.”
Those of you who have read my blogs have read this before: Love is a paradox, a labyrinth … a complexity where we may meet the beast … inside of us.
There’s nothing glamorous about resurrecting love relationships. There is nothing glamorous about starting over, fixing the cracks, battling the intense urge to run.
There is nothing as painful than repairing a heart that has been broken. There’s nothing easy about reassembling those parts of ourselves that we have hidden away for so many years. Re-pair, healing and forgiveness so often takes time.
Perhaps … we can leave behind the notion of work and repair in our relationships.
Perhaps … we can leave behind the idea of work and repair, and replace it with a stillness that comes from loyalty, passion and commitment to nurturing the sacred space-between us.
Robert Frost wrote, “the best way out is always through …”
And, as we prepare to engage our energies for the long haul, as we clear away the thorns that obstruct our path, our hands will bleed, maybe they will bleed a lot and we may thirst for something sweeter, cooler, younger, and easier.
Our impatience will be tested. We will become discouraged and disheartened.
And yet, when we stop looking for the Epiphany we may feel that with each new day, each new awakening, with each new stumble … we are moving a little closer.
In the 13th Century Rumi knew that “both light and shadow are the dance of Love [relationships].
We are relational beings.
The plethora of new apps on the market are driven by our need to connect with one another. To talk, to tell our stories, to listen and to be heard.
In our often over-whelmed, over-committed lives, apps and social networking sites offer a substitute for the soft eyes and tender touch of a lover.
Iphones and operating systems simulate a reality that may still lead us through love’s twists and turn, where we must take the final turn in the path and discover that it is our Self we meet, naked without the gimmicks or t.v. personality smiles, without the heavy jacket of excuses we have worn for so many years.
In the kind of love relationship that is made and re-made, where we embrace all our human foibles.
And so we celebrate our deep human longing to be seen and accepted, unconditionally just the way we are.
Blessings on your relational journey.
Paula
