So I’ve been off the forum for quite a while. In that time I’ve fallen deeply in love in a way that I did not really intend. Before I left the forum for a bit, I changed my name from Arthur to Josef. This was because I started to become increasingly scared of the prospect of my partner finding my contributions on this forum and then judging me for it or it resulting in conflicts. There was a lot here to investigate that I kind of just shoved under the rug. But it was bad in the long run because it increased my fear (acting out a fear strengthens it). Eventually I stopped posting on the forum completely.
Anyway, back to love. Over the past few months I’ve fallen deeply in love in a way that I have slowly surrendered my autonomy. My existence has become slowly and slowly geared towards maintaining my relationship. That being said, a few weeks ago I began to realize what I have been doing to myself and started seriously looking into reversing the damage.
There are a couple of themes/insights that have arisen from the various investigations
I am scared of her
Why? Well actually, I am afraid of her disapproval. This leads to various negative effects in the relationship like me wanting to always (and only) show positive emotions. To be happy around her in order to win her approval.
Why do I need her approval? To validate “me” and “my” existence. I kind of see that I do this with everyone, not just my partner. I think we all use other people as mirrors, or reflections to affirm that we exist and are important. The scariest thing is to not be acknowledged. To not be someone.
I am afraid of standing on my own two feet and need someone to “latch” onto. It doesn’t have to be a partner. It could be a friend group too.
All relationship issues arise from being unable to maintain the distinction between two entities. Possession, jealousy, wanting to change the other person, they all stem from invalidating the other person’s existence as an entity distinct from yourself. In trying to control the other person, you give up your own autonomy because your reactions become tethered to the other person’s reactions. That’s essentially what a relationship is. In actuality there is no such thing as a relationship. There cannot be.
“I” am willing to go through any amount of worrying, pining, yearning in order to get those sweet feelings of love. A smile here, a gesture of affection. Sex. Emotional support. I haven’t been able to resolve this one completely. It’s a kind of addiction in a way. In a metaphor, love (at least, my brand of it currently) is like eating shit 6 days of the week so that you can eat your favourite (junk food, calorie filled) meal on the 7th day. Whereas feeling felicitous and innocuous is like eating healthy and organic everyday.
My goal is to get to the attitude of being a “big happy kid that just wishes the best for her”. But really I’m just trying to get back to feeling good.
1 - Have an EE or PCE around/with her. Then I got the experience of what actual intimacy would be like, and was able to see that nothing would be lacking.
2 - When having an EE or PCE not around her, to think about or reflect on her then. Even in the very midst of relationship troubles, the salient and clear thought for me was “Oh it’s simply that she’s someone that I like to have fun with!”
That experiential perspective proved very valuable to keep with me!!
I think that is brilliant advice @claudiu, it is the experience that there is something even better than love that gives the confidence to try something different.
I do remember my PCEs and seeing that in that place I am able to relate to the other in a way that is so superior to love. In fact it is like having your cake and eating it too! Because in the PCE it is clear that I am able to actually care for the other, to be actually benevolent and yet at the same time I can have amazing fun with them too. So it is really like all the benefits of love with none of the drawbacks, it is simply a superior way of relating.
And even in an EE there is this magical and wonderful aspect that begins to pop up that makes relating to the other marked by an intimacy which is far better than love, and this can actually be experienced and then aimed for as a goal, with the confidence that it is possible because I have walked around in it!
What I also noticed the past few days, and I initially made the dog love post as a bit of a joke… is that I did have a re-run of falling in love!
This little creature had me experiencing all the effects of love that I know from past relationships. It was very interesting to observe, it is mostly gone now I noticed yesterday.
But what I was able to see very clearly, from previous experience of love. Was almost like a split, there was the fun, delightful, wonderful experience of having this creature in my life and there was this energy of love/nurture that was clearly making me feel bad. It was actually preventing the wonderful things from being experienced cleanly. It was this heavy energy polluting what is otherwise a wonderful experience.
I think that once it clicks that without love I can have ALL of the wonderful things like fun, delight, caring etc WITHOUT the sorrow and conflict, then the choice is simple.
Although I do appreciate it is way less socially complex to minimise love towards a dog vs a human with whom one is in a relationship with.
I like putting it that actual intimacy is “what love aspires to but never reaches”. I’ve talked about love with my partner before and when I put it this way she really perked up at that description and seemed intrigued!
Right and it’s wonderful to actually see this in operation, as in the fact that love is rooted in sorrow. Love requires separation in order to exist and therefore it can never achieve what it aspires to. So instead it can get out of the way and allow that something better. This is what clicked for me the past couple of days with Poncho. It’s kinda funny writing all these realisations around a dog but I guess this is what came up!
I could see that this energy of love, was at core the energy of sorrow, this is where it draws its energy from. Nurture cannot be disentangled from ‘loss/tragedy’, it comes automatically with a flavour of it, of the potential loss of that thing which you treasure so much, this is heart-wrenching and responsible for sorrow that can be so deep as to be a bottomless pit (as Peter mentioned) and not to mention the malice that is inevitably the result of this love, either at whoever threatens the object of my love or if the object of love takes the love away from me.
I have always found the topic of love so fascinating, and love seems to be one of the greatest challenges (and possible dead-ends, depending on how it is approached) for an actualist. Because it is the eternal seducer as Richard mentions. It promises so much and yet delivers so little, but it is entrenched so deeply in all cultures that it manages to get away without being exposed. I think this is why I have always chimed in so much whenever a topic around relationships and love came up, because I know first hand how much better life is when love is minimised, and I know what a destructive force it has been in my life. The past few days experiencing love was a perfect reminder of this. Or maybe I just haven’t found ‘true love’ ey?
Totally relatable @Josef …my whole relationship with my wife I have done the same things you mention here.
One of the things I noticed I do is I obsess over her tiny reactions to everything, reading too much in to every facial expression, glance, body language or tone of voice.
When my wife went away for a week recently I got to EE’s and felicitous experiences so much easier. It made me realise how many triggers seem to revolve around my wife and need for affection and that everything is ok. Plus the fear of the consequences of things going wrong like losing the family unit. Always such a catastrophic thinking at play.
@claudiu I rarely seem to have EE’s when in the presence of my wife. I had one the first day she came back from her week off and it was such a better experience. Next time I have one I will try and reflect on point 2.
At the moment when I think of her…she feels like such a drag. She triggers me negatively. It never used to be like this between us.
@Kub933 thanks for articulating this, it is interesting to see that this operates for the love of my children so intensely. It feels greater than any love I have had for a partner. The feel of love for a partner and my children feels different but the negatives for both such as sorrow are pretty much the same. Though love for a partner comes with other negatives like jealousy, possessiveness and feelings of inadequacy…could probably think of more if I tried harder.
Reminds me of this article I read in the National Geographic years ago about a tribe in Cameroon who see love as some form of demonic possession/witchcraft interference and anybody who feels/falls in love so deeply are outcasted by the tribe. Imagine if such practice had become the universal culture normal lol. Instead of films like ‘Love Actually’ you would have ‘Outcast Actually’ or ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ could be ‘Eat, Pray, Find Optimal Partner for the good of the tribe’.
@claudiu
What helped me out with this topic is:
1 - Have an EE or PCE around/with her. Then I got the experience of what actual intimacy would be like, and was able to see that nothing would be lacking.
2 - When having an EE or PCE not around her, to think about or reflect on her then. Even in the very midst of relationship troubles, the salient and clear thought for me was “Oh it’s simply that she’s someone that I like to have fun with!”
That experiential perspective proved very valuable to keep with me!!
This is useful advice. Actually I realized how committed I am to worrying. And that keeps me locked into the future. I used to be able to feel good easily, but now it seems out of reach. I am sure this is the reason. But now I am in a tug of war of sorts. Part of me wants to feel good now but the other cannot let go of the worrying. Letting go of worrying feels like I will let go of control of the relationship.
@Kub933
And even in an EE there is this magical and wonderful aspect that begins to pop up that makes relating to the other marked by an intimacy which is far better than love, and this can actually be experienced and then aimed for as a goal, with the confidence that it is possible because I have walked around in it!
I have experienced some of this early on, where I was just having fun, kind of on my own. I seek to experience it again.
@Kub933
I could see that this energy of love, was at core the energy of sorrow, this is where it draws its energy from. Nurture cannot be disentangled from ‘loss/tragedy’, it comes automatically with a flavour of it, of the potential loss of that thing which you treasure so much, this is heart-wrenching and responsible for sorrow that can be so deep as to be a bottomless pit (as Peter mentioned) and not to mention the malice that is inevitably the result of this love, either at whoever threatens the object of my love or if the object of love takes the love away from me.
This is spot on. It is so “dirty” in a way, that malice, possession, resentment are all maintained for the sake of love.
@son_of_bob
Totally relatable @Josef …my whole relationship with my wife I have done the same things you mention here.
One of the things I noticed I do is I obsess over her tiny reactions to everything, reading too much in to every facial expression, glance, body language or tone of voice.
When my wife went away for a week recently I got to EE’s and felicitous experiences so much easier. It made me realise how many triggers seem to revolve around my wife and need for affection and that everything is ok. Plus the fear of the consequences of things going wrong like losing the family unit. Always such a catastrophic thinking at play.
Indeed, it is agonizing and painful. It seems to me that to end the worrying is in essence to end the relationship itself. By that I don’t mean ending the actual relationship, but ending the concept of it in my mind. I can see that a lot of what this “relationship” comprises is my imagination (beautiful/painful memories of the past, worries about the future). If I gave all this up, then what remains is only the time we spend together and the fun we have during it. What else is left?
Back again after a month. I started to realize that I am trying to make love, which is essentially the good feelings (validation, attention, attraction) that I get from her/the relationship the centerpiece of my life. Essentially, I’ve been trying to build a life around it. I’ve also partially realized that this is totally unreliable, and I leave myself so vulnerable to being hurt. I say partially because there is still a part of me which is like, “well maybe if you found the right conditions, the right partner, the right attitude”, love could deliver and I actually could make this dream of “living for love”, come true.
But it’s like an addiction. So what makes sense to me right now is that I need to have an enjoyable life myself if I am to curb this addiction to love in any way. That I need other sources of dopamine/good feelings so that I am not dependent on only one. This will make me stronger in the relationship. As for feeling good, I am still trying to feel good without much success. It seems I lost the ability to do so consistently many months ago and I haven’t been able to recover it. It’s like, I want to, but I don’t really want to. And maybe I don’t want to look hard at why. Hard to explain this impasse. Would appreciate advice as always.
This is basically the approach I’ve been taking for myself for the last year with good results. It’s been very gradual but I’m now getting to the point of independently liking my life regardless of external love happening.
I think that for me and likely for many people, the reaching for love is because of the underlying not liking life very much. So it does (and for me, has) take courage to face that situation and do something about it.
Finally I am starting to make some progress in this area. I realized that being emotionally dependent on someone like this is quite pathetic, and the rewards from it are not even worth it anyway. A much better way to relate to someone is like a good friend, rather than be obsessively involved with them.
Since then I have begun to re-develop my own life. I’m meeting new people and doing new things. All that energy wasted on worrying and maintaining our relationship is starting to become focused on my own life and pursuits. It’s a slow process, but I feel like I have awoken from a long slumber. My resentment for life is also starting to recede.
This leads me to considering what a relationship is really about. My answer right now is that it is two people coming together to enjoy their energy. Enjoying their lives, but together. One has preferences, but no emotional demands from another. This leads to the second point that one is free to go their own way if one so pleases.
A thought occurred to me just now that I thought I’d put down. I’ve been racking my brain on why I cannot feel good anymore. Is it because I don’t want to? Is it because I am expecting it to happen rather than doing it myself? Is it that I am lacking intent? All these are true to a certain extent, but I also see that when I attempt to feel good now, a mountain of relationship worries stand before me and I just give up. If I do try, it is just spiraling within that same area.
What I recalled during my successes with the method is that actualism is not about solving your real-world problems. Richard says something like “leave your self in the real world, where it belongs and step into the actual world”. I realize I have not been doing this. I want to still be “me”, just a better version. This results in a split, with me wanting to stop worrying but not REALLY wanting to stop. I want to continue being “me”.
But right now I’ve managed to feel good (not good feelings), it’s because I’ve “given up” being the worrier. There’s a difference between giving up your worries (or fighting to) vs. to stop being the worrier. This feels like release.
Ooh I like that! To stop being the worrier. That’s a brilliant way of putting it, it’s something I could never hone in on properly! Because to try to stop worrying is usually some attempt to suppress, to pretend like I don’t care etc
To stop being the worrier is all about stepping out of that whole bubble of worry vs security and to go for the 3rd alternative instead.
Some things have been coming up for me. Basically, my partner has become very busy recently and I am feeling abandoned/neglected. Here’s what I’ve learned
I simply cannot accept that this person now has things in their life that are more important than me. Various subtle controlling behaviors then come up, such as going out of my way to maintain our bond. My happiness becomes increasingly tied to the current perceived romantic intimacy of our relationship, and I lose my stability. As Peter says in his journal, I become obsessed with what she’s doing when we’re not together and wondering what she’s thinking when we are.
I am now experimenting with something different. If I am to have peace and happiness, I must accept people as they are. I must let go of controlling them. Then I wonder what the relationship would become if I started letting go of the lopsided effort I give to this relationship? I’ve begun to consider a third alternative, a no-emotional-strings attached alternative. We enjoy our time together, and then go about our lives. That being said, I am not obligated to stay in this situation (though I find I cannot leave because of the emotional bonds). The time we spend together is wonderful, I just wish we’d spend much more of it together.
@Kub933 On slack long ago you said something like, as long as I am driven to seek ego/sexual gratification from another, I am giving them the power to decide how I feel.
This is resonating quite a bit.
Ideas and comments are appreciated on how to get out of this quandary.
What I get from reading your post is something I always observed in myself when I was in Love. One of the things that I eventually got completely sick of both in myself and encouraging it in the other.
Basically it is that in order to set up the loving bond, I must on some level cripple myself. The more I enjoy the loving feelings with the object of my love, the more I am personally handicapped.
Then from that vantage point to even consider being happy without the loving bond brings up images of abandoning them, abandoning what we have together etc.
It seems to me that on some level you have crippled yourself so that this loving bond could be set up. Which is all great as long as love is flowing but then whenever the partner is busy etc there is now this void left.
The problem is as above, that to consider standing on your own 2 feet again can seem like some sort of betrayal or even worse like you are loosing them completely. Then the other problem is that from this vantage point what is often classed as the 3rd alternative is actually some slightly distanced variation of the normal way of relating.
I don’t know maybe it’s just me but this looks like under-selling of what it would actually be like. It is looking at an ‘actualist relationship’ as a concept which opposes a loving relationship instead of discovering what it would actually be like to live.
I would replace that description with something along the lines of :
I’ve begun to consider a third alternative, one where forever swigging from the good to the bad is replaced with mutual delight, playfulness, intimacy and freedom. Where instead of Love that is forever fickle there is an intimacy which provides a stable baseline from which we interact.
With love, there is also what I call “the trap of love”…there is a delusional feeling that aah maybe this time around with this new lover, things will all work out perfectly…but it never does because it can never…because to love is to suffer one way or the other lol
Seeing through this “trap of love” clearly, I am now much more easily able to choose to not go down that route…and abandon it for good
It’s not unlike a rat that gets baited with food n gets caught in a rat trap
I’ve begun to consider a third alternative, one where forever swigging from the good to the bad is replaced with mutual delight, playfulness, intimacy and freedom. Where instead of Love that is forever fickle there is an intimacy which provides a stable baseline from which we interact.
Where is this intimacy coming from then? Is it my own feeling good that creates this intimacy?
The intimacy is from there being a relative lack of anything ‘in between’ you and your partner! The felicitous feelings are great for this indeed. But it’s not that they ‘generate’ the intimacy, it’s that the intimacy comes as a result of the relative absence of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ feelings. In a PCE there is the ultimate intimacy – no separation at all. Outside of a PCE it’s a knowing imitation, getting as close to that as you can.
Yeah like Claudiu said it’s there because there is less in the way, this is also why intimacy is something stable and love isn’t. Because intimacy is the direct experience of the other and as such it is not actually generated at all (whereas love is) it is what’s already there when the other stuff is peeled back.
Unless in a PCE the intimacy is an imitative one via the felicitous/innocuous feelings but this is still much more stable than love because it is not dependant on beliefs for its existence and does not rely on the whim of the other. It is there as long as you can maintain felicity/innocuity.
This is why in my experience having intimacy as the basis of an association leads to a situation where very long periods of time can pass without any conflict at all. It provides a stability that love cannot.
The other thing that comes to mind is that intimacy can be harder to live because I need to get off my backside and do something. As in I need to commit to feeling good, when something is blatantly in the way I must explore it rather than shoving it aside and glossing over with love. It cannot be faked in the way that love can, there has to be sincerity. It becomes a bit of a challenge, something to aim for. But the benefits of prolonged intimacy are worth it, it is something superior. Big challenge big reward
