Falling In Love Is Bad
— From The Wise Old Sage Commentaries
The Big Picture
Do you remember the first time you fell in love? They say that we never forget our first love. Why? Because it was sweet and felt so good? Or was it a desire to have some special person want you? Somehow this person showed up, and you responded without thinking about it. Maybe you felt an immediate attraction, and soon it felt like you had known each other forever. In this idealized space, you experienced no downside because you magically met or exceeded each other’s expectations. You belonged together. You were soul mates. You were excited to see each other again and wanted to spend all your time together. Finally, there was someone who loved you and needed you, and you returned the favor. The birds sang, the sun shone, and the future was bright. Everything was perfect, and you seemed to merge into one person. You finally felt complete. Then, one day, the honeymoon was over.
Co-Dependent Love is where we find partners that need us more than we need them—and then we need them more.
This was not Radiant Self-Unifying Love, but a lesser variant called personality love. In personality love, we lose a part of ourselves to feel more safe, secure, and important to our partner. These compromises, which we ignore in the honeymoon period, eventually cause massive irritation, polarization, and confusion when we discover that our partner is not what we expected or was promised. By the time we discover this, many have made choices that cannot easily be undone. We also do not want to give up, so we ignore how bad it is. When we do break up, it initially seems like we lost a part of ourselves being with them. It takes time to recover because we changed our way of seeing the world when we were in love.
There are three ways to fall in love: 1) with beauty on the Instinctive level, 2) with defensive differences on the Intellectual level, and 3) with aspiration similarities on the Idealized level. Falling in love means we see only one side of the opportunity and do not consider the likely problems. For example, when we choose partners based on their outer appearance on the Instinctive level, it is constrained by what is familiar to us and deals with the inner beauty (or lack of it) in a partner. On the Intellectual level, our need for security drives us to choose creative and defensive opposites expressions that guarantee fighting and power struggles as our differences about truth become revealed.
On the Idealized level, we are attracted to someone similar enough to appreciate. Still, we are often initially unaware of our partner’s shadow side, so we become slowly enmeshed with the partner by denying our repulsions.
It is ironic that Co-Dependence enforces control (through mandates over each other) except in The Seduction Process of Falling in Love.
Our personality is the part of us that needs to be seen and needs attention, acknowledgment and acceptance to survive as a social being. Without engagement, we feel isolated, separate and do not know how to get seen, leading to depression. When we fall in love, we lose a part of our personality self because we adopt social norms such as conditioning, defenses and pretenses. Without realizing it, we look at potential partners as extensions of our desire. In this situation, our ways of perceiving the world through our sensations, feelings, emotions and thoughts are either under-expressed, over-expressed or undefined. This creates co-dependent opportunities for us to shape our imbalances as gifts to our partners, and initially, this feels true. Having strengths that our partner wants while they have strengths that we admire leads to a compromised state of counterbalance between two conflicted individuals. Therefore, falling in love seems so comforting and straightforward.
Personality Love is always a tradeoff between Fears and Desires that keep both partners entangled in exchanges that no one can complete.
The problem with falling in love is that we try to be one complete person rather than acknowledging that we are two growing individuals. The desire to merge is a part of us. It eventually sets in motion a need to be independent when we feel overwhelmed. We learn through co-dependence how to complete ourselves and initiate autonomous aliveness. The co-dependent structures that initially work to keep us together (conditioning, defenses and pretenses) eventually break down and generate even more conflict between us. The more we have defined ourselves in terms of each other, and our needs diverge, the more the pressure becomes unequal between staying or leaving. This is why we have come to see relationships and love as personality need fulfillment mechanisms that allow us to keep a scorecard so we can measure the benefits vs. the costs. In relationships where we fall in love, there is no foundation of creative abundance, compassion and grace in a relationship to a partner.Â
Imagine that we could choose to be in love rather than ’falling’ in love. Our optimum goal is to select partners with the authentic creative capacity to see and meet us. How can we say that we were doing that? First, we determine if we can see them as they are. We check to see if we love their creative being to the point that their behavior cannot change our choice. Many seek partners of convenience, but creative individuals seek partners who will bring out our and their best. We look for people who are creatively aligned to us, which comes down to determining our partner’s intent, content and context. However, unless we can affirm our own conscious capacities internally, it is challenging to evaluate anyone else. Our growth is related to our ability to choose creative, aligned partners. This is our goal.
Co-dependent Relationships are unexamined, unknown bargain-basement exchanges based on loneliness, enforced separation & unrequited desire. .
If you are ready to acknowledge that relationships haven’t worked the way you wanted them to and are willing to try a new relationship path, we would like to share the Higher Alignment perspective with you. Let me guide you through the three levels of personality love (Unconscious Entanglements, Status Quo Contracts, and Partners in Progress) and how they lead us into the Intuitive, creative level of Radiant Self-Unifying Love. During this process, you will learn the reasons to re-examine our attractions, so we draw more conscious partners. We will also support you in building your understanding of creative differences and similarities, so you can choose partners without life-changing relationship baggage.
