" Why don't you have the time to call me anymore?" "What are you so busy doing all the time?" "I can't believe you forgot my birthday!" I heard my friend speak these lines as she spent her days weeping, dejected, getting out of a long, yet broken relationship. Now my friend, I'll call her Alex, is a feeler. She is almost mentally wired to take all her decisions based on how she feels about the situation. Alex spent weeks thinking, caught up in the battle between her head asking her to let go and her heart asking her to cling on to the deep love that was there once, and fearing the break-up would lead to an ego death and emotional deficit in her life. I sat with her through a lot of this, wondering the strange unexpected courses that love can take, and how difficult it is to fall out of it.
After much deliberation, I feel I have had an epiphany, I'm going to formulate it into a theory.
It's because love is the most intense emotion we feel, and because we have so much at stake, that it is so closely related to fear. We fear those whom we love because they are the ones who can hurt us the most, and when they do, it's not such a big leap from that realized fear to hate. So it is no irony any more that Alex now hates the one she loved so dearly once, probably as fiercely as she loved him!
I feel romantic love, and I mean the true romantic love here, is no more or less crazy than parental love. Just as our parents continue to love us the same way they did when they first held us and looked into our tiny half-open eyes, even if we eventually grow up to become crappy adults; this love keeps us from breaking out of the once blissful but eventually crappy relationship. Just like Alex, we are caught up in the never-ending head-heart battle, till we reach the ultimate emotional breaking point.
But are we deceiving ourselves? For self-deception is also deception.
