A few of my comments on the “Chemical Cocktail” of being in love….
I posted this in response to another blog where the author was writing about being infatuated with another person and actually liking the other person, and near the end of the entry asked, “Do you like your partner?Seems like a rhetorical question…why else would I be with him/her if I didn’t like them? However, it’s often not as easy to answer as you think.”
http://amyfabulous.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/chemical-cocktail/
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Why else would I be with another person if I didn’t like the other person?
Because of how the other person makes me feel. I’m with the other person because I like how the other person makes me feel about myself when I’m around her or him.
That’s the first stage of love … how another makes me feel and feel about myself (not the same thing, but closely related). It’s not even really about the other person at this point for most of us. It can’t be, because most of us aren’t really able to actually see other people; we’re blind; our sight is already significantly hampered, even underdeveloped. And that’s without the added blinding effects of being infatuated with someone.
We see the world not as it is, but as we are; and most of us, like it or not, are children. Very few of us are educated on what it means to actually be an adult, and so we end up being emotionally and psychologically children in adult bodies. What Fromm refers to as being only partially born. We are very reactive, very easily moved and swayed and intoxicated. And so when we see others, we’re not really seeing them for who they are, we’re seeing their faint outlines. And when we’re “in love” we’re seeing them for who we would want them to be; we’re seeing them with some pretty heavy duty infatuation goggles on, we’re seeing them through a haze of bio-chemical intoxication mixed with a curtain of fantasy, projection, assumptions, wishful thinking, even desperation and self-medication. And so we tend to readily and easily credit the other person with being all sorts of things that they’re likely not, and that we have no business crediting the person with being in the first place.
Plus, there’s that whole “Chris Rock” aspect to it as well …
“Relationships: easy to get into, hard to maintain. Why are they so hard to maintain? Because it’s hard to keep up the lie. ‘Cause you can’t get nobody being you. You got to lie to get somebody. You can’t get nobody looking like you look, acting like you act, sounding like you sound. When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them. You’re meeting their representative.”
So we’re not really seeing the other, in part because we’re love-tipsy out of our mind, but also in part because the other person is feeding into that tipsiness because he or she probably isn’t exactly being candid and realistic about who they actually are–they’re playing into the unreality of the situation and the fantasy by misleading us (innocently or deliberately) by being on their best and most charming behavior and putting their best foot forward (and who can keep up that pretense forever? It’s a short-term strategy meant to hook another and win their affection and loyalty; it’s a sales pitch. And once a person is sold, there’s no need to keep delivering and continue being that charming and loveable anymore. One can start to backslide a bit into a more normal level and display of their self — belches and crude behaviors and temper tantrums and whining and grumpiness and pettiness and resentment and thoughtlessness and all of it.
It takes a fair amount of perspective (a.k.a. maturity) and a little functional self-control and self-awareness not to be so reactive and so easily hoodwinked and swayed by every impulse of attraction we have toward another person.
The point is to not just feel something about someone and let our higher faculties get hijacked and derailed by our more base or primitive ones. Rather, the point is to integrate the two and add a little thought and discernment to the process, that way we don’t get ourselves bogged down with people who, if we were sane, sober, and coherent, we might want little even nothing to do with.
And so all of this is about improving our vision, our inner sight, growing up, gaining a little functional perspective….
“Real Connection” – Rumi
Sometimes I forget completely
what companionship is.
Unconscious and insane,
I spill sad energy everywhere.
My story gets told
in various ways:
a romance, a dirty joke,
a war,
a vacancy.
What is a real connection between people?
When the same knowledge
opens a door between them.
When the same inner sight exists
in you as in another,
you are drawn to be companions.
It takes a lot of inner growth and self-development to be more than just a reactive wad of bio-chemicals waiting to be set off by a meeting with some other person. It takes a lot of alone time and reading time and thinking time and life experience and real courage to develop some actual depth and personhood to oneself, to develop some tangible inner world. Because without depth, there’s really nothing left but the surface exchanges and surface meeting surface and all of the infatuation and connected with that. And when we’re at that very basic level or stage of the inner game, liking the person doesn’t really matter in comparison to liking how the person makes us feel about ourselves.
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