“Help me to not be “in love”,” I said as I told my therapist why I had come to see her. Her response was surprising and wise. She told me that being “in love” was probably the most unloving thing that a person could do. It places the centre of your life outside of yourself and gives the other too much power over your happiness and life satisfaction.
Later in treatment I had a dream which confirmed her wisdom. This was the dream:
I am approaching a large house which has a big front porch on two sides. The house reminds me of the comfortable and warm homes of the Mid-west (where I lived as a boy). As I reach the door I realize that this is a doctor’s office. I’m welcomed at the door by a beautiful, young nurse. She has long, dark hair, bright blue eyes and a beautiful smile. She is wearing a crisp, white uniform which seems to emphasize her figure. She smiles at me and tells me to follow her. She turns and goes deeper into the house. As she turns the light highlights her form and casts a radiance around her hair. I think to myself, “I would follow you anywhere!”
I jokingly told my therapist that this was the woman I’d been looking for in my life. She knew that I’d been considering leaving my job and moving to another city to be nearer to the woman with whom I wanted her to help me not be in love. Once before I had done something similar. I had let my falling in love disrupt and eventually end a fine relationship I had been in. Her response to my dream was to tell me that the dream had given me exactly the right prescription. I should “follow her anywhere” but not in the external world. The woman in my dream was leading me deeper into my self and into a place of healing. In my therapist’s opinion this dream figure represented my feeling function that I had tended to ignore in my self and put onto women in the external world. I had thought that if only I could make a connection with that real woman my life would be rich and complete. That had proven to be a fateful fantasy in the past and one that I didn’t want to repeat.
I spent the next several months working on following the internal woman and learning to love and appreciate the richness of my inner life. I wrote a lot, spent a great deal of time working on my dreams, paid careful attention to my self, and, most importantly, stopped thinking that being in love was the answer.
In my practice I’ve often seen other men go through a similar process. They become enchanted with either their imagined reality of the woman or with their pursuit of her. She becomes, in their imagination, the source of all meaning and happiness in their life. This is the legacy of romantic love which has been foisted upon us by nearly every love song we’ve ever heard. (“Now that I’ve met you my life has just begun.”) Of course no human being could ever possibly sustain such a burden. The fruits of that failure are seen in the endless varieties of relationship unhappiness. We are often devoted to goods and gods that cannot sustain.
Yet I still long to be “in love.” I still want to be central to another and want them to be central in my life. But I don’t want this at the price of losing my self. This is the great dilemma of being in a loving relationship. We want the mutuality, belonging and attachment that comes from being in love. It is this which bridges our isolation. And we want to maintain our autonomy and our ability to act out of our own sense of self. We want to maintain our individuality.
This dilemma is often split in relationships. The woman specializes in achieving the mutuality and attachment, working to take care of the relationship needs. (“I want to feel loved before we have sex.”) The man specializes in autonomy and action. (“I need sexual affirmation to know that I’m appreciated for all that I do.”) The truth is that each of us, male and female, have both sets of needs. They are needs that sometimes conflict and we each have to figure out how to manage that conflict.
Part of the problem in solving that dilemma is that we look to the Other for confirmation of our self. We want the Other to support and affirm us. We define “intimacy” as meaning that the Other will accept us unconditionally. The difficulty often is that in order to do that the Other must deny their own needs, feelings and reactions. They must deny their individuality in order to maintain the emotional connection. And, of course, when the shoe is on the other foot…..
What we are looking for is no risk intimacy. We expect that we will be accepted and validated no matter what. This expectation actually makes the relationship a prison. The Other is expected to “be there” for you at the cost of giving up their self. When on the receiving end of this it feels wonderful! My deepest failings are accepted. Reverse the roles and you begin to feel the captivity.
The way out of this trap is through the ability to self-validate. This means that you have the courage to say what is true for you without needing confirmation or even acceptance from the Other. I learned by following my “inner woman”, my own feeling function, what was true for me. There were times when I didn’t particularly like what I was learning but it reflected who I was.
There was a point in my relationship when my then partner wanted me to promise her I would never be attracted to another woman. I knew that would not be true. I could promise never to act on that attraction. I could promise to work to understand the basis in my self for that attraction. I could not promise it would never happen. I knew what she wanted to hear. I knew about her insecurity. For a long time I tried to prove to her that she had no reason to feel insecure. I carried the illusion that I could help her with her insecurity. This time I knew that my integrity was on the line. I could tell her what she wanted to hear and try to hold onto her. Or I could tell her the truth and risk that her anxiety would increase so much that she couldn’t stay in the relationship. I had to tell the truth if I wanted her to be in a relationship with the me that I was.
This brings me to a second aspect of the way out of the trap: self-nurturing. In order to be in a healthy relationship you must be willing to accept “no” for an answer. You must be willing to allow the Other their own reactions, needs and feelings without having your own level of anxiety escalate as a result. In order to moderate your own anxiety you must be able to self-sooth. Ultimately this means you must be able to live successfully on your own.
The inability to live successfully alone is a problem that many men face. The vast majority of men who divorce are in another relationship within a year. They simply cannot stand their own company. (What a gift they give to their new partner!) They focus their energies on finding and providing for another woman in order to avoid following the lonely inner journey to Self. These men are never really “in love”, although they may think so, they are simply “out of fear”.
This doesn’t mean that they are doing the wrong thing in getting into another relationship. It just means that they cannot avoid their fears by doing so. At some point, when their integrity is on the line, they will have to face those fears. At that point they may continue to look for the “perfect” partner or they may start to use being in a relationship to grow as a human being.
Hugh and Gail Prather write in Notes to Each Other:
Did I pick the right person? This question inverts the starting and ending points. We do not pick our perfect match because we ourselves are not perfect. The universe hands us a flawless diamond–in the rough. Only if we are willing to polish off every part of ourselves that cannot join do we end up with a soul mate.
The polishing process is what intimacy theorist David Schnarch calls differentiation. He writes, “Differentiation is the process by which we become more uniquely ourselves by maintaining ourselves in relationship with those we love.” Differentiation occurs through your ability to maintain your sense of self when you are in an emotionally important relationship. It involves an ability to maintain the balance between the two primary forces in a relationship: the drive for emotional connection and the drive for individuality.
One of the chief forces which works against differentiation is the need for confirmation/validation from the Other. It is as if this Other-validation reflects back to us who we are, confirms to us that we are. This reflected sense of self doesn’t always mean acceptance by the Other. A reflected sense of self can be equally achieved through the Other with whom you fight or disagree.
As soon as a reflected sense of self is operating the differentiation process gets stuck. We are then fused with the Other and spend our energy trying to get them to reflect back to us what we want to see. All possibilities of real intimacy have vanished.
SO, how does one maintain a sense of self? I’m certain that there are many answers to that question. Self-validation and self-soothing are part of the answer. But before that it is necessary to have a sense of self. For me gaining that sense involved following my inner woman where ever she would lead me. It involved an ever increasing awareness of my own feelings and the courage to affirm them as a marker point on my own journey. It involved learning that my feelings are not static, they are not things. They are simply giving me information about what is going on for me at the moment. Most of all it involved spending time with my self and avoiding the biggest male trap of all: staying busy doing things.
The ancient dictum is still valid:
“Know thyself and to thine own self be true.”
