From our formative attachments to our great loves, relationship is the seedbed of our becoming, the laboratory of our self-invention and reinvention.
Maria Popova
I had a couple of hours on my hands last night. I didn’t go out. I intended to write. I’m finding I’m more productive in the mornings (like this morning). I don’t know if my brain is just too tired at night or jumbled with other thoughts…. Last night, I sat there. I texted some folks, I toggled back and forth between the blank “add new post” screen and the two or three tabs I had open with articles I intended to read. Mine is not a terribly original mind. Chances are, someone has said what I hope to say – only more eloquently, more succinctly, more poignantly, more forcefully. After reading an article on how Tinder changed the dating scene, I settled in to the piece Love, Pain, and Growth on Brain Pickings. Seriously, go read it. All of the quotes Popova uses are little gems. She opens with James Baldwin “Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility,” she quotes Thich Nhat Hanh “to love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” but her focus is on the writer and philosopher Edward Carpenter.
I have, at times, had to question the reality of what I felt in my last relationship. Whether or not those feelings were mutual. Was it love, was it infatuation, was it something else entirely. To some degree, prior to meeting my ex-fiancee, B, I had been trained by online dating to believe that if it requires work, especially in the beginning, it’s probably not working. This was what my ex-friend Jen said to me the day after B left. This was, I suspect, the advice Jen gave to B before B left. Jen is a smart woman. She reads a lot about brain science. She’s a researcher. I wouldn’t call her a woman of deep feeling though – and by that I mean to say she has walked away from most emotional things that are unpleasant and require work. She uses brain science and mindfulness to justify a dismissive lifestyle. She has experienced too much dysfunction and is quick to apply that philosophy (if it requires work…) to most relationships. I don’t think she would buy in to the concept of effective dependency. Neither of us hold the key to happiness… these were our basic battle lines. Stay vs. go. I have practiced mindfulness, I recognize the challenges of being overly reliant on another, I see the benefit in working on the self…. but I refuse to ignore/avoid the very human condition of pain and suffering, the very real challenges of two people becoming fused on multiple levels. From those concepts and experiences springs compassion. For centuries, some of our greatest thinkers have tried to tackle the dynamic of love and hate, tried to navigate the intersection of joy and pain. In the letters and cards B gave me, she knew and felt this all too well. Like me, she was working to understand these conflicting feelings, learning to love. Carpenter as quoted on Brain Pickings:
Love, if worth anything, seems to demand pain and strain in order to prove itself, and is not satisfied with an easy attainment. How indeed should one know the great heights except by the rocks and escarpments? And pain often in some strange way seems to be the measure of love — the measure by which we are assured that love is true and real; and so (which is one of the mysteries) it becomes transformed into a great joy.
[…]
Pain and suffering… have something surely to do with the inner realities of the affair, with the moulding or hammering or welding process whereby union is effected and, in some sense, a new being created. It seems as if when two naked souls approach, or come anywhere near contact with each other, the one inevitably burns or scorches the other. The intense chemistry of the psychic elements produces something like an actual flame. A fresh combination is entered into, profound transformations are effected, strange forces liberated, and a new personality perhaps created; and the accomplishment and evidence of the whole process is by no means only joy, but agony also, even as childbirth is.
Carpenter, as presented by Popova considers love in terms of various complex human relations emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual. All are necessary, and when one is in the lead, it must drag the others in to line with it. This according to Carpenter requires time:
For any big relationship plenty of time has to be allowed. Whichever side of the nature — mental, emotional, physical, and so forth — may have happened to take the lead, it must not and cannot monopolize the affair. It must drag the other sides in and give them their place. And this means time, and temporary bewilderment and confusion.
When I reflect back on my time with B, I felt as though (more often than not) we were firing on all cylinders. We were mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually compatible – and when we weren’t, we both felt the pain. Early in our relationship, typically after spending the weekend together, we both felt a pit in our stomach as one of us left to go home – a type of separation anxiety. We would actually feel sad and immediately miss the other person before they ever left. We sometimes argued the next day – we recognized the pattern – this type of connection was so strong, it scared the crap out of both of us. In dealing with the pain Carpenter suggests:
All one can reasonably do is to endure. It is no good making a fuss. In affairs of the heart what we call suffering corresponds to what we call labor or effort in affairs of the body. When you put your shoulder to the cart-wheel you feel the pain and pressure of the effort, but that assures you that you are exercising a force, that something is being done; so suffering of the heart assures you that something is being done in that other and less tangible world. To scold and scowl and blame your loved one is the stupidest thing you can do. And worse than stupid, it is useless. For it can only alienate. Probably that other one is suffering as well as you — possibly more than you, possibly a good deal less. What does it matter? The suffering is there and must be borne; the work, whatever it is, is being done; the transformation is being effected. Do you want your beloved to suffer instead of you, or simply because you are suffering? Or is it Pity you desire rather than Love.
Carpenter’s book is available on Amazon in e-edition for 99 cents. I just bought my copy – I think there’s a lot to learn from it. I believe there is an art to these things: love, suffering, pain, and growth. It is all unexpected. It all hits with the blunt force that transformation and sublimation require. I’ve told many people that I’ve dated that, for me, the only way to do it is with a full heart that is ready (not expecting) to be broken. If you’re scared and feel vulnerable, you’re probably doing it right. When it’s really good, it feels effortless and natural, which makes the work of it such a shock… a shotgun spray of doubt and disappointment. I’ll joke, if I let you in, try not to trash the place. When I question whether it was the real deal or not… reading people like Carpenter remind me that it was real – in all it’s messy splendor, terrifying joy, dizzying heights and crushing lows. I wouldn’t have it any other way.