(These thoughts stem from a book I just read, WE: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love, and my feelings about commitment, love, and marriage. Not getting married anytime soon.)
I've been doing some major digging these past few weeks, especially the past few days. It's culminating, according to the natural process. I don't know if it's possible to reach the pinnacle point of any process or awareness because it would no longer be called "process," as in anything moving and cyclical. However, a spark of a shred of light will tear through darkness and gain momentum, touching all aspects, as all things are interwoven, and as long as it burns with the necessary intensity.
At the base of myself and reality, I've discovered not castles built in the sky with a princess in the ivory tower, and not dreams or illusions, but the obvious and real. Shedding our delusions leads to a life we can actually attain or create (together). Unreasonable expectations create an impossibility of connecting with what's possible and the potential in ourselves and each other.
Perfection is an unreasonable expectation that we can't live up to. The "perfect partner," otherwise known as the "one," is an unreasonable expectation my partner cannot live up to. We will fail every time we create that assumption and expectation. When we live with each other's limitations and imperfections, it's all very do-able. We can actually live a life with our feet on the ground and our hands in the soil. We're allowing for growth, for what is, and for the reality and true self of each individual in our lengthy life equation with no solution to breathe.
I cannot plaster an ideal image on to my partner. One day that projection will wear off, and I'll be stuck with who this person really is in his or her own right. I will have to either drop the projection and love her ordinarily and realistically, or move on and find someone else who fits the description. One day, I'll realize that I've lived my entire life never having loved anyone for whom he or she is in his or her own right. Instead, I'll have "loved" only my "dream girl," an image that lives in my hopes and dreams. An image that epitomizes what and whom I feel I lack within. Myself. My inner beauty and divinity.
What does this mean for humanity, for her, and for me? "Failure" is the only word I can think of when we cannot make that aspiration and inspiration into fuel that drives us to love in the deeply and profound ways of this world. A world in need of wholeness is further fragmented every time we fail to commit. Completing the circle of ordinary human relationships comes only from the stability of relationships that have weathered the tests of time. Without this stability and endurance, there's something missing.
That "something missing" is our awareness of what's real, ordinary, and valuable. It is my love for whom she truly and ordinarily is that's missing. As long as I chose to entertain and "love" an ideal image and delusion of my partner, I will never commit, love in a real sense, or know the gift of the wholeness that can only come from devotion to a thing over time. I will seek that same image in every woman closely resembling this ideal image, only to be disappointed and caught in the endless cycle of my habit to destroy and fragment relationships.
My externally sought "dream girl" fades into the fantasy and illusion from whence she came, only to drive me to seek inward expression of that girl in myself. An open heart flowers with the knowledge that fulfillment lies in my choice and ability to accept and love ordinarily and simplistically the ordinary woman who needs and deserves to be loved in her own right, as her own person, and in spite of every imperfection I may dislike.
However, my ordinary woman may not know she exists under her assuming guise of the everyman's dream girl. What will wake her?
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