Pretty flowers, eyebrows low. Mouth in the shape of the letter 'O'. It's time to talk about love here on the Heartstar-program. I've recently read three books psychoanalytical books about love, from order from best to worst they are Love and Will by Rollo May, The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck and Rediscovering Love by Willard Gaylin. Now one thing that they all have in common is that they all differentiate certain aspects of love and then explain what makes them different, where they come from and which ones you should prefer. They all make the distinction to separate love and lust for example, and responsible love vs narcissistic love. They then try get to the heart, pun intended, of where the actual force of love is developed from, if there is some underlying agendas or psycho-dynamic structure that facilitates these strong yet personal feelings. What they all land on is that love is way too mystical for our understanding, but we can get fairly developed fractions of it by studying the structures of mythologies (May), religion (Peck) and fiction (Gaylin). Now, that's fine and dandy, complex, interesting and probably true, but there is one aspect of love that these psychologists could have used to ground their thinking. It's what the pick up artists have been trying to hack for ages, what makes a person actually deserving of someones love? Besides the generally applicable theories of the feeling of fusion and duty, what makes the actual individual make that leap of faith? That's our stepping stone for today.
First there was lust
What makes people want to bang might not be the most complex question in the world, but it might be the most popular one. I do not want to get too down and dirty with this question and I do not want to go public with my sexual preferences but I do have something to say here about the first impact of passion. I actually think that your own capability of letting your internal sexual fantasy run loose in a public place plays a huge role. Mind that I said internal, not external. It's part about letting yourself go of the burden of realism, that everything should be calculated and real. It's also part of not being too judgmental on peoples appearances and in an overly cynically way nitpicking flaws in the other person, at the very least not in the spirit of protecting your own ego. As the wise sage once said, it's painful to let yourself be seduced.
I'll set a scene for you that might properly project what I mean. When I am at the most flirtatious place on earth, a dance club talking or dancing to people, I can be there in a realistic or idealistic mode. In the realistic mode you are being frank with it, you are just people sweating and rubbing yourself over each other, there is no glamour, we are all pathetic and there is absolutely no magical atmosphere to be had. At all. A realistic night ends with a realistic overpriced meal at Burger King while waiting on the bus. If you instead let yourself get captured by the moment, by your own capability of romanticizing then you have a completely different night. The people you dance with are spirits, not acne problems. You are in the mindscape of feelings, intuition. The sight of an cute lady charms you, not because your realistic view of her symmetrical face but because her in combination of your fantasy hypnotize your very being into being completely in fusion with her. Something like that.
Overly idealistic love
It's easy to be a cynic nowadays. I'm one a lot, and when I feel that I want to be swept away by romance I get instantly struck by self-aware shame. I know there is a huge problem with that overly romanticized depiction of what falling in love should feel like that you get spoon feed by Hollywood every day, but I think that going to much to the other side brings up a slew of other problems that are not easily reparable. Like this one: It's not obvious that it's a bad thing to be overly realistic. In certain minds, like mine, that is something that is guiding you to the truth. If you actually see the sterile, harsh truth of every the human conduction or, which is more likely, you believe that you see the sterile, objective truth. More so then other people at least. Then a lot of human activity would probably seem pretty pathetic and pointless. You filter everything into categorizes of nothing-activities and something-activities, and people as nothing-people and something-people. And you have high realistic requirements for being one with the something-people, as in people who are not deluded. Which is everyone because non deluded people are non existent and believing that they are not is deluded in it's own right.
It might be the case that you need the idealization to actually create love, for yourself and other. Your life is so unfulfilling, generally, that you have to fill it up yourself to reach these luscious peaks. But doesn't that mean that love actually do not exist? That you have too fool yourself that it does, almost like a self-inflicted psychosis. Then it doesn't have to do with deserving anything at all, it just have to do with who makes up their best love story. What erases this dichotomy in my understanding is the notion that fantasy is a personal stream and that love goes two ways. Now lust does not have to be that kind of personal two way stream, you can just shoot your fantasy stream at that person, maybe with the help of some alcohol, and make him perfect in your own image just like God. But love have to be that two way stream, it's reciprocal. What fantasy does is bringing enough meaning to sustain the relationship. It's not just fooling yourself, you are voluntary letting your fantasy paint the potential depth and meaning your relationship have together with the other persons fantasy stream. This should not be silent or secret, this should be communicated if it's actually felt. And if it's actually felt then you are working with something that is to your understanding true or at least very very mythical. This is why the psychoanalysts were diagnosing fiction so much.
Pan for love
You need both though, of course. You always need booth. If you are swaying far too much into fantasy land then you are falling in love with yourself essentially and if you are too orderly then you never reach the actual potential that love is capable of being. You might not even reach love. Now, this was all very general even though I promised that I would not be. So finally I will start to run the list of what I think deserves love. Love in the meaning of romantic love, not parental love or friendly love, but in an actual love love relationship. I hope that it can be a mirror to yourself on how you can reflect on your own.
The question could also be framed: What does my fantasy stream contain and what kind of person would fulfill it? When I then look at my fantasy stream I can see that it's a very ill-defined mess. A fantasy should not be chiseled in stone, but it should not be chaos either. I see that I have to start from the ground up. I first have to be peace with that a lot of my fantasy revolves around that I search for hints that people like me. That it's the very thing that get's me of. That's to big of a problem to get into now, so we will just note it and leave it on the side. Kindness is a word that instantly pops into my head. Kindness deserves love, most particular if it's kindness for kindness sake. That you just want the world to be better because you think the world deserves it. Bravery to be your true self also deserves love. This is something I have been bad at facilitating. In my cynicism I often take for granted that people lie for themselves. Which they do, but not as much or at that degree that I find myself believing in. But these two are just so general, I want to get even personal. I love when people grab me by the arm. I love when people come up with the most twisted jokes, knows that you should not say it out loud, but then say it anyway. I love when people let me be frail with them. I love when people are frail with me. I love when people do not want to miss anything that happens on the TV. I love when people create painfully. I love when people are tormented by questions. That might be it for now. That is how much I dare to ask myself the question before I start to lie. These are part of the idealizations that a loving me would see in people, that he could fusion with. That he would, if he dared, fusion with.
This post has left me rather empty though. I don't know if introspection by your kitchen table is the best way of understanding your own love. But it's what I could do now. Romance is of course a experience based art. It seems like I'm still at the picking tools-stage of it. You have to start somewhere. Or what do your book say Peter Gabriel?
https://open.spotify.com/track/4Yx6qmmQtBenkDIJL1PPcf?si=MCWtEIhZSb25fmTRY5aQAg