Doors and Revelations
Building Love and Intimacy by Honoring Individuality
“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”
“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that’s ok with them.”
The best of love exists within a kind of contradiction. It resides in two seemingly different worlds, namely constant change and complete solidity. It is a living, dynamic force, always ready to champion growth, to aim for wholeness and the expansion of our beloved's more complete experience of existence.
Simultaneously, the very same love remains a thing immovable, a refuge from the heaviness of life and the many attacks of this world. Love's energy remains fluid, a water coursing, sometimes wildly, to every landscape inside of us that still thirsts, even while it builds a permanent tower that is not easily destroyed.
A Poor Measurement and a Dose of Status Quo
Love often seems to fail us for a great many reasons. Though it is not love that fails, but we who fail to love well. Most of what we perceive as love's shortcomings are really our own tragic miscalculation of what love is.
I don't speak merely of the oft spoken idea that we rely too much on love's romantic promises and perhaps not enough on its fidelity, its responsibility, and its consistency. That is of course true, and a very real struggle. It is also worth teaching our children about from an early age. Still, many of us could do with a bit more romance, even as we endeavor to see love as it should be, a continual state of action toward the highest good of another being.
The miscalculation I speak of, though, is something that runs a bit deeper and holds a great potential to suffocate our relationship. Slowly, over time, we start to believe in something I discussed briefly in my first essay on this blog, the assumption that what we already know about someone we love, is all we really need to know, perhaps, all there is to know. This can be anyone, our spouse or significant other, our friend, a parent, our child or sibling. From this we conspire, unknowingly, against ourselves and against the bond we carry with others.
Where once the joy of curiosity, the joy of knowing the "otherness" of the one across from us, and the layered individuality they possess fueled our pursuit, instead we find the pursuit of comfort above all else. The volume of such early longings is turned down by the unspoken, slow-build conviction that the truest version of our beloved is the one that makes us most comfortable, the one we deem most useful to our version of life and our preferred edit of the story.
“What we come to pay homage to is often not love but codependency. We begin to see the other as an extension of our own psyche, a being whose nearness to us, whose life with us, is most valuable when that existence affirms our easiest sensibilities.”
Tripped Up On the Road to Comfort
There is no sin in desiring comfort in a relationship. If by comfort we mean peace, cooperation, intimacy. Too often though, the brand of comfort we seek has more to do with passivity and a growing apathy than with a peace born of greater connection. It is a primal fear that surfaces whenever we perceive change in the other, whenever we begin to fear they might outgrow us. And that, because of this growth, they might no longer need us.
We fear they will change so much that we'll be alienated, or that we'll lose the sacredness of all we've built together. We bite down, clench hard, close our fingers over the unseen tether that binds us one to another, and confirm by our actions, that we'd much prefer things to stay just as they are.
Don't misunderstand me. Some of these fears are inspired by legitimate concerns. Many of you have walked through loss, betrayal, and lies, or maybe lovers and friends who "moved on' from you when it became convenient or seemed advantageous. The significance and tragedy of these cannot be overstated. But our response to heartache and loss will influence the course of every relationship we have from here on out.
What we come to pay homage to is often not love but codependency. We begin to see the other as an extension of our own psyche, a being whose nearness to us, whose life with us, is most valuable when that existence affirms our easiest sensibilities and keeps the maximum level of routine chugging along. We turn a complex and beautiful living being into a projection of our own mind, a projection that serves us, but not the one we love, and certainly not the intimacy we make our claims to.
Too often we cease to understand our beloved as a unique individual, a mind, body and spirit apart from us which holds equal ability and right to expand, not into something other than they are, but into more of themselves. We lose sight of what this separateness can instigate and build in the togetherness of our bond. The deepest intimacies ever fashioned by two souls are found through the doorway of these same beings searching out and unveiling the wholly unique wonders of individuality, and not from the assumption that this individuality dissipates the longer we are together.
The Anatomy of Intimacy
Lasting intimacy is built by two individuals who accept the risks that accompany personal disclosure and revelation. It is two people uncloaking in one another's presence, for one another, in every area of their existence. And while we often continue to do so in the flesh, too many of us slowly forget how to do the same with our mind, our heart, and our spirit.
Why we make these choices to hide away from the work and the ecstasy of searching and knowing, stems from the oldest and deepest fears we carry as human beings. It comes from our fear of loss, the fear of being alone, of being left behind, of being neither seen nor heard, of being seen as not enough, the perilous fear of being lost in this world. These are nothing to scoff at. The worst of our nightmares are fed by the anxieties and losses we experience in our waking hours.
“A more damaging fiction about love you may not find, than claims to a form of love that bears no scars, a love that requires no great sacrifice.”
So, What Is It?
We've all lost things we cannot get back, people who either will not, cannot, or have not yet returned to us. We have felt the squeeze of relational tension, watched many of our hopes drift away like so much sand in the breeze. I've walked roads I wouldn't wish upon anyone. I've lost things, certain dreams, even more, certain people, whose now empty residence in me has yet to be filled up and closed over. If anyone ever promises you that love will protect you from such afflictions you can believe he or she is misguided, a liar, or a devil.
A more damaging fiction about love you may not find, than claims to a form of love that bears no scars, a love that requires no great sacrifice. What love does have the power to do is shield us in the midst of chaos and upheaval. It protects us from unnecessary suffering even while the inevitable pains of life still get through. It has the ability to speak truth into someone even after a hundred lies have taken hold. It affirms our truest identity, and thankfully, measures us with grace so that we can plant our feet on something solid instead of the ever-changing whims and opinions of the world and of our own troubled psyche.
Love reminds us to look for the unseen in others, even when so much has already been revealed. Love will show honor when dishonor and shame seem the most natural course of action. It will caress when others simply want to strike. And it can bring that visceral and elegant growth that is only ignited by one who knows us so well.
It Comes Down to Us
It isn't all dreadfully serious though, all grasping and clutching. At least it doesn't have to be. We can ease some of the pain of existence by choosing to live awake and fully present with others. We must not simply see, we must look, deliberately. Beyond all other claims we make about love, it is a choice. Love is a choice we walk out with each passing moment in our relationships. It carries upon its wings a great deal of power, and a great many things pure physical expression alone will never fully illuminate.
Love, though, if it is to be a force of healing, an energy given over to the encouragement and empowerment of others, will drive us to look in the mirror and decide whether we are willing to continually open that door within the one we love and allow them to do the same in us. We can't always know what the opening of this door will bring. We can be sure, however, that it will be a great deal more fascinating than whatever else we had going on, and certainly, a lot more fun.
I'd rather be guilty again and again of risking the heaviness of love's pain than find myself an old man who's forgotten much of his relationship because it disappeared into the oblivion of apathy. It's been said that love never fails. Yes, that's absolutely right, but only if we don't fail to put it to use.