The Purpose of Love
June is traditionally the month of weddings, perhaps in direct response to the earlier months of Spring, when our minds "lightly turn to thoughts of love". Shakespeare's wonderful comedy A MidSummer Night's Dream tells of young lovers lost in the enchanting wilderness of their hearts at this time of year, as they pair off, separate, and re-pair themselves in a deepening appreciation of the lessons of love.
But what are these lessons of love, essentially? --to lose our rational minds, in order that we might recover our emotional selves in an encounter with the significant other. In this way a self-absorbed, self-serving narcissism is punctured and deflated by the presence of another very human being: our lover, and our Beloved.
The purpose of such a relationship is much like that of the sound box of a guitar-- to amplify our thought processes and to vibrate in response to our emotional state, in order that we might better learn about ourselves. Its best use is as a mirror to reflect so that we may more clearly know and attend the development of self-esteem and the inner processes of recovery-- recovery from addiction and recovery of the Self, or soul.
Our time is spent each day in relationship and alone by turns, shifting back and forth much like the tides of the sea, from left to right in the map given above. In a sense it doesn't matter whether we are with someone else or alone; what really matters is whether we feel an obligation or a commitment, and this is entirely a matter of self-esteem-- the extent to which we organize our experiences in terms of a consciously responsible, personal identity.
Obligation is an attitude in which we believe something or someone other than ourselves is of more importance than ourselves. When we feel obligated, we simply cannot imagine living without that necessary person or thing, and so-- in an act of addiction-- we constantly return to the hostage condition from which we had escaped, from being lonely back into being hostage, because we still feel obligated.
In this way the depth of our soul's purpose has become preempted by our more shallow egocentric preferences in terms of an external locus of control. The healing opportunity that we missed was to be inspired rather than distracted, to look within ourselves, towards an internal locus of control, for that which we had sought outside ourselves. As St. Francis of Assisi had said: "what you are looking for is what is looking."
The steps up from here are necessarily inner ones that point to a growing comprehension of the Self. We begin with an isolation that cuts away every item of life irrelevant to our recovery; this word isolation contains sol, an ancient term for the radiant anthropomorphized sun from which we have our word soul. Self-discipline is the next step, a word often taken as a pejorative in these somewhat self-indulgent times, but terribly misunderstood when it is. Self-discipline simply means becoming a disciple to one's Self, believing in Its authority, and willingly following Its bidding, on faith.
Solitude is then the neutral experience of simply being alone with one's Self. It is no longer the negative sense of inadequate loneliness that we had felt earlier, nor is it yet the positive sense of competent self-reliance towards which we are moving.
The exhilarating sense of independence (not-dependent) can then rise out of this solitude, as we begin to accumulate experiences that nourish a growing trust in our ability to take care for ourselves: competent self-reliance as the proper foundation of a true autonomy. However, it is important to note the ever-present danger of seduction, into which self-esteem collapses as we are attracted towards and drawn back down into a hostage situation.
Autonomous people have integrity-- that is, the experience of being an integrated integer, with accurate boundaries that have been explored and filled full with the personal authenticity that is discovered during recovery. Autonomous people can afford to connect with other equally autonomous people, whenever they choose, people whose boundaries are also fleshed out, sensitive, and vital; these boundaries are not barriers, but venues for connection.
Far from the low-level relationship set up by obligation, this kind of relationship depends upon a commitment to the integrity of one's own Selfhood. We agree to give ourselves only the best sort of relationship, knowing this is what we deserve, with others who are capable of real intimacy. The freedom given by commitment stands always in stark contrast to the traps of addiction.
Of course, where self-esteem may be built through recovery it may also erode, in a relationship that threatens to slip back towards increasing co-dependency and enmeshment. This slower disintegration is more subtle, and the stages of dependency are less easily recognized, than the quicker seductions; for the person loved, who would provide reflections of our integrity, is drifting with us into the terminal folie-a-deux of a mutually hostage situation.
This fact must remind us not to make another-- any other-- the authority of our own self-esteem, nor must we allow another's opinions to decide our own. They will reflect it, but they do not create it. Recovery is an inner work that we will find always mirrored in our relationships, but it does not dwell there-- it takes place only within ourselves.
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This article previously appeared in The Listener: volume two, issue two (Summer 1997) and in The Observer Quarterly: volume one, issue one (Fall 1997).