Another platonic dialogue with my compadre in gloom, the ironically named AOK.
What, we asked, causes a romantic relationship to dissolve so suddenly into nothing, or less than nothing? It begins so beautifully, suddenly or gradually, but growing and deepening and overflowing until it seems that it will overwhelm all else in your life, all the mundane, practical regular stuff you go through life trying to get hold of for yourself. Like it will reach the sky and nothing will ever lay you low again. It seems strong, stronger than death, stronger than life itself. Love, love is of a different order of experience than anything else that befalls us in our lives, and yet it is also fragile, transient, full of illusions, animal spirits, hidden depths... and hidden shallows also.
When it begins, you think almost literally the world of each other. Everything you've been seeking, everything you secretly or avowedly want from life - when you fall in love, truly in love, you see it allin the other person, or rather convince yourself that you do. For this is of necessity a projection. Sure you fall in love with this person and not another because there are things in them, about them, in their movements and the way they think and the way you move as one, that you love. But you also fall in love with them because you collide with them, like atoms in a vacuum, those proverbial gnats in the cathedral. If you had never collided, you would never have become one. And there are almost seven billion other people with whom you never collide. It's not a pretty thought but it is out there.
But once you have this person, you set busily about projecting onto them all of your needs, your ideals, you make plans for the future, start spending less time with your friends, who, often, are happy for you anyway. Because you are happy. Not contented, but possessed, intoxicated with this person and what they (to you) are and represent. But... you do not love them, nor they you, as you truly are (if there is such a thing) with all your fuckups and hangups and your flaws and all the ways in which you fall short of the ideals you have projected onto each other.
Then one day - it can be after two months, two years, or twenty years - you each begin to realise that this person is not the person you thought they were, or wanted them to be. Or one of you realises this while the other wanders on in a dream world, scarce imagining that the cliff-path is beginning to weaken beneath their feet. And that curious sensation, when things begin to fall apart and its like the person who thought the world of you and only wanted to be with you, suddenly becomes cold and turns the other cheek to your protestations of love, is not what it looks like, which is them falling out of love with you. Rather, it is them beginning to see you as you truly are, rather than wearing the mask of all they believed you to be. The projection, like some phantom, moves on, leaving just you, unmasked, suddenly no longer appealing, with all your flaws and none of the phantom's grace.
For most connections between people, this is the end. But in another sense, it ought rather to be the beginning. For here is where the real work, the slow, unglamorous, compromise-ridden work of trying to know another person, and accept them for who they are, and challenge your own cherished illusions, must begin. And it is this that must be undergone if a relationship is to last. No one can fill the boots of their lover's projections forever. You are pitted against a phantasm, a superman, a myth, a deity. And you cannot prevail. And so your lover will move on, and keep searching, until she catches a glimpse of her ideal in the eyes of some other man, and some other, and some other.
We are always looking for the best fish in the best of all possible seas. And it is this idea, that there is always more, this perennial dissatisfaction with what is in favour of what could be - that drives us apart, drives us, perhaps, forward, but in such great pain, a little less ready to trust and to sacrifice. We humans are not built to attain satisfaction (what an irony that Mick Jagger of all people should have stumbled upon this foundational truth) for he who makes peace with his life ceases to strive for better and, in a Darwinian sense, begins to fall behind.
And so we all will be forever striving, forever fighting, forever competing and coming together and falling apart and faring forward. But as individuals, we will never know peace. The closest we come is when in love, when we are love we are most vulnerable, or through a Buddhist negation of the self, offering ourselves up to the current of events, learning to accept what is. This is not the happiness of intoxication referred to above. Indeed, it can often come, like Job's renunciation of self, only through great suffering or persecution, and through the letting-go of the beautiful illusions which seemed to fill us with such joy.
Is this beginning to gnaw at you like it is me? How do we live with this mutability and cruel fate, without ceasing to connect with others, and retreating into our shells, reminding ourselves that All Things Must Pass, including this our love? How do we grow through the first stage, of projection, when we are children in love, seeing the universe reflected in the eyes of the other, and then survive the destruction of this ideal, without throwing our toys out of the pram and flitting on to someone else, sadder but not ultimately wiser? How do we learn to forgive someone for not being the Archetype we had projected upon them? And does that first heat, the honeymoon, and all the epiphanic filth and adventure, all that musk and pheromones, count for nothing?
It seems to us, as men, that within us, our whole lives through, there is the Kid. And the kid wants what he wants, and now. His demands are unceasing, and he will not listen to the ego's reasons why-not. He has been nourished since becoming aware on a diet of Disney movies and myths, that out there somewhere is the One. A female protector (no doubt also a mother imago) who is beautiful, and understands, someone who will get it. The Kid is the one who built the projection, And the Kid wants to be united with her, and believes that once she is found, she will be his (yours? ours?) for good.
And then there is the Dick, who lives between your legs, and in your deep subconscious, way way below the belt, and demands his own dark satisfaction, with his libido and his pride. And when you fall hard for a girl, the Kid and the Dick, who are on first-name terms with one another, gang up on your conscious mind, your pseudo-rational faculty. And they tell you This Is Her. And your ego tries vainly to point to all the times they were wrong, and remind them of how much love burns, when it goes wrong. But the Kid and the Dick won't listen.
They will not learn, do not want to learn. They just want satisfaction. But human beings are not built for satisfaction. And when the poor partner onto whom they have projected their fantasy departs, the two of them recoil back on you in horror and pain, and you collapse into a heap. they demand you get her back, and sometimes you try, with disastrous consequences. Or you retreat into your shell, and do notcome out again. Your conscious mind tries to pick up the pieces and tells itself it's learned a lesson, and that life isn't that easy. But the other two, of course, have not learned. And if you ever get another chance, another shot at happiness, they will be waiting.
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