So many people get into relationships thinking that other people can give them security, or feelings of self-worth, feelings of worth at all, something to live for, validation. Validation. People who are this confused and out of touch with themselves are simply unable to love or be loved, but they sure do play the parts, and go through the motions mistaking motions for true. These are the people who look for “love” (desire) from other people to make up for a lack within.
Though they don’t know it, the love that most people look for, and sometimes think they find, is a substitute for self-awareness (love within).
Then there are those people who are so scared of being hurt (maybe again) that they never open themselves up to others, and avoid love, because they feel they know it will lead to pain and disappointment—rejection. Each may go about things differently, but the result will be the same: they will be alone.
Why do we assume that love is wholly emotional and nonsensical? There seems to me to be a rationale behind most “love” that people feel; perhaps because they have been conditioned to think of love as something beyond rationality they do not seek to understand their feelings, and therefore mistake what they are feeling for love, when it is probably something else. Most relationships function under the Platonic notion that another person “completes” us, implying that they fill in our gaps, they provide what we do not, and this is, by way of ignorance and cowardice, considered a good thing. Either that, or people are upfront with themselves that they are basically using another person to get what they want. Though, for some reason, this, as well, is seen as acceptable. Then there are those who are just in denial.
In fact, I question whether loving (someone) necessarily entails being vulnerable. I think that rather than being a truth about love, it is a misguided assumption of this conditioned culture. Because the thing is, vulnerability is something we control for ourselves. We are the ultimate captains of our own level of vulnerability, for we are in control of our own level of strength or weakness. It is we who mistakenly assume that to be invulnerable necessarily means being closed, cold, emotionally unavailable. And the problem with this theory is that being that way is even worse, more regressive, than being vulnerable.
I actually think that love and vulnerability are not partners. Only if/when we are pathologically insecure, when we do not know who we are, when we don’t understand what we are doing, how things work, what love really is—only then will we be vulnerable, and that has everything to do with our own level of “spiritual” and emotional enlightenment and awareness, not with the person we supposedly love.
I think that the idea that loving someone means being vulnerable to them is an unsophisticated and ignorant understanding of love, for it discounts the roles personal power, awareness, and enlightenment play in the very ability to love and be loved. We grow up assuming that to be open necessitates or is synonymous with vulnerability, when it ends up that it is actually the exact opposite—that being closed and “secure” makes us vulnerable, for being closed and self-protective is a manifestation of weakness.
This has everything to do with strength and weakness, and that our assumptions of what it means to be strong or weak are all wrong. For it actually takes strength to be truly open, and strength is not vulnerability.
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From my personal notes, 9/11/99.
