Valentine's Day is coming.

Love

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”

James Baldwin

            Valentine’s day is coming up. Or, for some of us, Un-Valentines day, as it may be. I won’t presume to tell people how to conduct their relationships since I am a member of the Un’s. What I will say is this—love has taught me some very hard, but necessary lessons. Falling in love is easy but staying in love is not. At least that has been my experience. The Jungians would say that it’s a matter of projection—when we fall in love, we project our idealized person onto the living human being. We dress them up, so to speak, in all the illusions we have about our perfect other. We enter relationships based upon our reflected image—and that’s okay. Who would want to eliminate that hot, passionate period from their experience? Not I, for sure.


            At some point, however, after the passion cools, it’s almost as if the scales fall away from our eyes. We see the person in their unvarnished beingness—our costume of illusion has been shed. At that point, we may feel “disillusioned.” We say things like, “you’re not the woman/man I married,” or “you’ve changed.” We almost never realize at the time that it is we who have changed—we are seeing our beloved as they are and not as we want them to be. And, that’s a good thing! Now there is a real possibility of “falling in love.” Or, not.


            What if we were to go into new relationships with this understanding. What if we could lower our expectations of perfection from the very beginning. What if we knew that love is, if not a battle, at least a negotiated peace? We must put our true selves on the list of necessary terms—it may be the differences that attract, but it’s also the differences that repel. We must be able to accept and tolerate and, if not embrace, at least make allowances for our differences rather than condemn them.


            Lasting love may not be the war that Baldwin proclaims, but it definitely requires deft skill at peacemaking. We negotiate, which means we don’t always get what we want, but in the end, we usually get what we need. I hope your Valentine’s Day is worth celebrating.



                                                            In the Spirit,
                                                               Jane