All of us hold dreams of being loved, cherished, honored, understood, supported, validated and wanted...in fact, whether we admit it or not, being loved or "in love" is likely the deepest desire of most humans on this earth. We all secretly, or not so secretly, hope that someone will recognize the wonderful recipe that we are and wonder how in the world they have ever lived without it...and that we feel the same way about that person. Some of us are lucky to find it at a young age...and some are even more lucky to experience a life long relationship that evolves and grows without a separation of paths. However, many of us find ourselves still simply fantasizing about the possibilities...imagining what life would be like "if only"...
When we are single and have no serious relationship in which to invest this energy and love that burgeons from us with no receptacle, as a coping mechanism, we perpetuate hope for such by creating and visiting the dream or idea of a life that holds these possibilities. In fact, dependent on how deeply rooted the hope of love is to our hearts and how long we have been waiting, we may even have a whole movie reel in our mind of what our mate might look like, what kind of life we will lead, exactly what attributes he or she will possess, what our physical response will be to them, where we will live, etc. Even those of us who are married to people who don't fulfill our needs or desires find ourselves daydreaming of and mentally populating missing aspects of our lives. The connection we have to these images, however, can be detrimental to our real chances of experiencing happiness.
Many of us become so attached to these illusions, which are really just structuresdesigned to keep us from becoming disappointed, depressed by or discouraged with the absence of what we seek, that we forget to turn our projector off. When we meet a new person, for example, who seems to be a love interest...we must be careful to not allow ourselves to project our dream or movie onto that person, obscuring the reality of who they are. When we are married to someone or in a relationship, we must be willing to analyze how much of the connection is real...and how much of it is romanticized or rationalized by our powerful mind, imagination and desire. Have we fashioned our idea of an ideal life and assigned our mates attributes or roles that they don't actually posses or want? We should be willing to love people for who they are...not who or what we want them to be, need them to be, or have imagined them to be after our "overhaul and makeover". We must turn off our projector...reel in our own images that belong to us...erase all of the sketchings we have made to trick ourselves into seeing what we want...edit and undo all of the imaginary enhancements we have made to other people unbeknown to them...and stand in the reality of what is truly there. If that raw version of a person or relationship is still who or what we want...minus our elaborate decorations...we know we are in the right place. If it is not...we must reconcile our projection with reality...and be prepared to move forward in truth.
Please share your thoughts by commenting...
Erin Williams, Houston Life Coach
I've tried many types of love: for example, naive love, practical love, hopeful love, but none of them worked very well. I was mildly and regularly disappointed.
LOVE came when I met the right person. We just fit. We have no arguments, disagreements. We live like streams of water running together.
By the way, I found her on the internet.
Posted by: J. Harry Duggan | July 03, 2009 at 11:38 AM