I propose that from this moment forth, the term “true love” and all its derivatives (true, truest love) be used to describe the feelings we experience when we fall in love. During this initial romantic phase, we are bathing in ecstasy. We feel that we and our partners were destined to be together. We’re soul-mates. We’ll always be together, adoring each other, complementing each other, supporting each other’s dreams. Our hearts will always ache when we’re parted and burst when we reunite. We’ll always have passionate love-making that fuses our souls and refuses description. We just can’t do enough for each other and are willing to bend to the breaking point to bring happiness to the eyes of our partners. The world is beautiful again and we are sure we are going to live happily ever after.
Why call this true love? Is it really true? I embrace the term for two simple reasons. First, it has been around a very long time, leaping from the lips of the earliest poets, troubadours and balladeers. So to honor that tradition, I say, “Let’s go with it.” The second reason is that it feels true while it is unfolding. In fact, it feels like the ultimate truth, the truth that makes life worth living and brings everything into perspective. Its power is oceanic and not to be denied. So even if, later, we look back with a wholly different perspective, I say, “Let’s honor the moment of it. It’s pretty incredible.”
So, then, if that’s true love, what is “real love”? For me, real love is the term we should use henceforth and forever more to describe the enduring and ever-growing bond between us when falling is love has passed and we have stood up and been walking together in love for some time. We have come to know each other. We have bumped up against each other’s limitations. We have felt our way through a period of disillusionment and frustration. We have begun to accept that we are not perfect, either of us as individuals. We are not the perfect re-assembling of Aristophanes’ sundered prototypic humans, as recounted by Plato. We have discovered that we are both burdened by injuries from early in life, injuries that drive us to do sometimes hurt ourselves and each other, to sometimes make less than optimal decisions, to sometimes just fail to consider each other. With all this, we choose to be together (see my poems, The Choice, from Love Over 60 at www.loveover60.com ) and embrace our “misses”, our imperfections and inadvertent elbowing and stepping on each other’s feet—we embrace all of these as part of reality. We learn to feel what is a childhood wound and what is real in the present so that we are less likely to project, making our partner into mom or dad, big sis or big brother. We come to relinquish the quest for conventionally conceived absolute happiness or perfection in anything and begin to suspect that real perfection is just what we are experiencing—our many-faceted humanity…as the old saying goes: “warts and all.”
We gradually learn to embrace our partner not in spite of his/her wounds but simply, with them. This means that we can love the scar even though our hearts break at the scarring. This means that when our partner does project something onto us, we can stand in our own truth and help them feel what is theirs, rather than reacting, escalating and compounding the fracture. This also means that we accept the reality that no one can meet all of our needs, nor is it his/her responsibility to do so, but that the joy of a love relationship is that we do fulfill a lot of each other’s needs. Included in this is an understanding that the powerful urge to have it all actually arises from early in our infancy when, indeed, we should have pretty much had it all, given how vulnerable and dependent we were. But that time is over. We may grieve it periodically for years to come, but we know that our partner is not responsible for that deprivation and cannot heal it all for us any more than we can heal it all for him/her. Having said that, we also learn that presence, compassion, patience and curiosity about our partner’s world goes a long way toward creating the safety he/she needs to feel that old hurt, not to mention to develop in the present into the person he/she is really capable of becoming.
Perhaps above all, we come to cherish each other’s companionship in its small and large expressions, in its passion and in its tranquility. We come to savor the moment, described in the beautiful children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, when we have so loved and been loved by our partner that our fur is rubbed off; we may appear used and worn to the outside world, but to each other we are, at long last, real.
C 2011 Bob Kamm
No comments:
Post a Comment