Love Thy Self, but not too much...

Sometimes it happens. Things come along that confuse you. For no particular reason you’re thrown into a world you don’t recognise. Its familiar but it’s not. As one character says in the film War Boys:

“It’s like I’m walking down a street, and I know it so well that I don’t even have to think about where I’m going. I’ve been down it a million times before. And then suddenly I realise that I’m in someplace new. Someplace I’ve never been before. But it feels like I’ve been here my whole life.”

And that’s exactly it. It’s that unknown that becomes your reality. It’s the natural change that happened of its own accord. And it scares you and intrigues you at the same time.

Things change between my friends and I. Sometimes it’s for the worse and sometimes for the better. But things do change. And at one stage I was afraid of that. I was afraid that it would mean the end of something or that the change would bring about a new way of being that might not live up to its past. But experience begins to teach me otherwise. Relationships are living organisms. They grow and mature. Sometimes they get ill and sometimes they recover from illness. Other times they die. But most importantly, they are alive with possibility. They happen at the level of change.

Probably hardest to deal with is the fact that a relationship is an interaction where both people can grow separately but not drift apart. My personhood, my identity, is not up for consumption by the other party. Nor are they my slave. I can only exist in a relationship if my boundaries are flexible but still present. The minute someone seeks to have a symbiotic relationship with me, they have lost the battle, and the war. I am one person and you are one person. I cannot know what you are thinking and you will never understand my motives completely. And this is not a sign of a failure but rather the sign of a healthy respect for the fact that you’re in a relationship with me as another human being. Symbiosis is essentially being in a relationship with yourself, which is pointless. When someone says to me ‘I know what you’re thinking’ or ‘we always think alike’ it reflects to me the notion that this person wants us to be symbiotic. It does not in any way represent reality. It represents their desire to be merged. An understandable desire, to be sure, but it is nothing more than a subconscious yearning to achieve personal validation. What better way to feel that your own opinions are justified than to find someone who completely agrees with you?

The inherent flaw in symbiotic relationships is that they are generally one-sided. One person gives and one person takes. One person becomes the emotional donor that sustains the other. One person wants to be completely in tune with the other in order to feel validated whilst the other tries their hardest to fulfil the role because they want to be needed. But in the end, the donor burns out. They cannot long withstand the constant demands on their energy, their personality, their essence or their love. And the partner is left wanting more.

Well, I have reached just such a stage. And I’d love to find a way through it that doesn’t involve running from the problem. I’d like to find the path of greatest growth, for both myself and my friend. And through it all I only hope that we can come to share a deeper love and a greater understanding of where we fit into each other’s lives, as individuals and on our common ground. And most importantly, I hope that in every relationship you and I come to realise the value of our own identity as well as the value of being able to love someone else for their own individuality. Because at the end of the day, the person you love should not be you.