The idea of trying to avoid love sounds paradoxical in the extreme: why do we take active measures to sabotage love? Enjoying …
the idea of trying to avoid love sounds paradoxical in the extreme why would anyone take steps to deny themselves an experience which seems so plainly positive and life-enhancing plenty of people are denied Love by external forces why would anyone take active measures to sabotage love if it lay before them the answer can only be found by looking back in time though we all crave love in theory our capacity to accept it in practice is critically dependent on the quality of our early emotional experiences to abbreviate sharply we can only willingly tolerate being loved if as children the process of loving and being loved felt sufficiently reliable safe and kind some of us were not so blessed some of us were styed in our search for love in ways we have not yet recovered from or indeed fully understood perhaps the person we wanted to love fell ill or grew depressed or at the height of our dependence on them they went away or had a new family or turned their attention to a younger sibling or perhaps our parental figure was constantly at the office or unavailable behind a locked study door they might have had a violent unpredictable temper or left us somehow feeling that we were just never good enough for them as a result to an extent we may not even have realized we became experts at Independence we came to associate safety with a high degree of self-protective isolation we might have become big readers or fascinated by the animal world or obsessed with music or computer games without quite knowing we had done so we learned never to trust a flesh and blood three-dimensional human again our experiences may not have affected the strength of our longing for love but they have heavily impacted our capacity to endure mutually satisfying relationships we may now as adults tell ourselves that we want closeness and surrender we will SOB sincerely when we lose love but we are continually taking steps to ensure we’ll never be at any sustained risk of finding it the true Terror for us is not that love should fail fa but that it should by some oversight on our part succeed for this would ask of us a level of defenselessness and exposure to another person and to a chance of happiness that has no precedent in our lives and poses immense ego shattering challenges to the armored way our personalities have been structured for the love scared among us we are constantly at work taking careful steps to ensure that any Rel relationship we’re in will flounder we pick partners with an element of buil-in obsolescence about them some reason why in the end a relationship with them isn’t going to be able to work out people who just happen to be living on another continent or who are married to someone else or are impossibly distant to us in age we Beg For Love from people who as we know in our unconscious are guaranteed not a one to be able to get give it to us we complain repeatedly that people we’re involved with don’t love us properly the real worry is that they might to ward off such an eventuality we keep finding flaws we’ll point out that this one’s often late that one doesn’t exercise enough that one doesn’t speak any foreign languages and this one isn’t sufficiently creative robustly determined to find any conceivable reason why alas no one quite suits our needs if we find ourselves in a relationship we will assiduously practice the Arts of what psychologists call distance management when the chance of reaching a truly happy State appears we’ll subtly discover ways to introduce a Chasm we’ll have an argument spoil a birthday ruin a holiday we’ll find we have to do a lot of work for an upcoming exam or presentation that our gang of friends needs us to be somewhere else that we forgot to return the credit card or tax bill that our appearance requires a lot of our attention or that we like to flirt with a stranger at a party who suddenly seems very attractive indeed in both tiny and large ways we’ll know just how to lower the mood Scupper a bond and Destroy trust perhaps not enough to end a relationship completely but certainly enough to worry our partner sufficiently as to our solidity that we can be privately sure things will never truly f lie friends May commiserate with us on our so-called bad luck psychologists will note our superlative skill at romantic sabotage with this to sound a bit like us compassion is required we should reflect back on our pasts and wander at the connection between our fractured bonds with parental figures and our disrupted adult attachments we aren’t like this because we’re Wicked we’ve just been very badly hurt once we understand how our skill at Independence was acquired we’ll be in a better position to see that it has in reality outlived its rationale we may still feel immensely apprehensive at the prospect of contentment but we may finally be able to admit that we are first and foremost acting out of fear rather than dismissing our partners we may stick closer to a much more Awkward truth that with temp tempted to draw away from them because we’re immensely scared that they might finally be in a position to make us very happy and that simply nothing so unutterably and boundlessly frightening has ever happened to us before …