Love Addiction*

Sometimes I feel that I am completely addicted to the Concept of Love.  I am 'in love' with love! As far back as I can remember, I have been in love. With someone or something. Probably some childhood coping mechanism to escape from the boring school and homework. Even now, I am always escaping into a fairyland where my shining Prince Charming comes on a handsome white horse and rescues me - the eternal damsel in distress. Nothing out of the ordinary, a standard fantasy of countless girly girls. Nonetheless, I often wonder - why love? Why not something else like monsters or bunnies or ...whatever? It bothers me. A lot. Because in my regular life I am an independent, intellectual, feminist type and am quite happy with that. No place for a hopeless, logic-less romantic there.  Yet I cannot reconcile my fantasy with my reality. And in my heart, I am constantly looking for an object to get devoted to.

So bipolar!

Anyway.

It is not such a bad thing. This love addiction. Rather quite enlivening. Anywhere, anytime I can turn the imagination switch on and start coloring. For example, I am at a train station/airport and he shows up DDLJ** style! Or I am walking by the bay and this tall perfect handsome stranger comes straight to me, looks in my eyes soulfully and says "It's you!". That's it. Simple. I can command its "high" at my will without any substance aid. Anywhere, anytime.

Do you see the beauty of this fantasy? No, not the pink kind. The smart kind.

--It is goddamn vague!  I can never hold it down with my hands. I can never pinpoint at it. Just like all other fantasies, it is there to validate my fears and protect my laziness. After all, real relationships are hard work. More on that later.

* Addiction to something happens when the circumstances in life go beyond our coping capacity.  In most cases, it is a substitute for attention, care and love.  Addiction is essentially an obsessive behavior triggered by brain's reward/memory system. A glass of wine, makes me feel divine! sort of a thing. Food, drugs, alcohol, nicotine, sex, internet are some well-known forms but it can take many other forms. Behavioral addiction, as defined by wiki, is a recurring compulsion condition where a person engages in a specific activity despite harmful consequences to his health, mental state, or social life. Examples include gambling, food, sex, pornography, computers, video games, internet, work, exercise, spiritual obsession (as opposed to religious devotion), pain, cutting and shopping (I say, leave shopping out of this!!!).

** DDLJ -Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilwale_Dulhania_Le_Jayenge

Love Sick

Friday morning has brought some penetrating insights into my love life.

As far back as I can remember, I have been in love. With someone or something. Always looking for an object to get devoted to - a hobby or an activity. Always escaping into the fairyland where my shining prince charming would come on a handsome horse dressed in all white and rescue me, the eternal damsel in distress. But I never did. Never succeeded in actually committing to something serious or love someone completely, fully. I was always holding back. Never being able to trust anyone or anything. Also there never was any happily ever-after in my dreams. The prince would come and ....it always became a blur and I felt even more miserable. I never understood that. Why can't I be happy even in my dream love story? Don't get me wrong, there was always plenty of romance. Strong passions, gentle touches, melting kisses,...a lot of sensual stuff. But it rarely culminated in the ultimate pleasure. The big O I mean or anywhere close to that. It mostly stayed superficial. At the first case, if you will.
Why?? I always wondered. What is stopping me from getting there mentally. Am I not mature enough? What do I need to do to get there? It was like a big black box.
A flash of revelation came this morning. You know how it is, you hear some words regularly, you utter them but they remains dead words. Yeah yeah, true love, yeah yeah the sense of complete absorption or yeah yeah, misplaced feelings, yeah yeah, attention seeker..whatever.
And a day comes when the same words start glowing with a force of light. They actually start communicating to you. Revealing their secrets. Dancing around you, letting you touch and feel them. It happened to me today. "Love" had become my addiction. Not just romantic love but any love. Love for my friends, love for my family, love for my guru, love for...anything and everything. The "high" of feeling of love makes me forget my surroundings, my reality. I feel euphoric. Add to that some spice of romance or the sugar of spirituality and you are on cloud 9. I can stay there however long I want. Or so I thought. But slowly the feeling of unease starts creeping in from the back door. This is not it. I can't believe it - but this too is really not it.

What is it then? What is the damn thing that has been evading me all my life?

The answer is right there. Right inside of me, right in front of me, all over me. I am too busy distracting myself with love to look at it. Rather, I am getting myself Love Sick so that I don't have to really see it.

Why? Why would I do such a thing??



1) I am lazy. 2) I am afraid.

Yes, I know what I want to do and what will make me happy. Who else is going to know it better than me? But I am too lazy to actually do it. Because it requires work, a lots and lots of hard work. Patience, perseverance and self-whipping. I am afraid. I am afraid that it will break me, it will disappoint me. When I was little,everytime I wanted something and didn't get that, it created a small hole in me. Lots of small holes over year turned me into a sieve where nothing could stay in for too long. A weak, mostly useless drainer. These the disappoitnemts I experienced as kids and your adults on many fronts - mostly emotional and mental because people around you weren't always sensitive enough converted into insecurities, feelings of inadequacy or incompleteness. I am incomplete because I didn't get that red dress in 6th grade. My parents didn't love me enough. anyway. So basically I am scared to take the steps that will make me happy because I have hardly done it before. I worry about how? what? when? where? What I am most scared of is my own expectations from the results. I am putting too much pressure on myself to get it absolutely right. To not fail whereas there IS NO right. anyway. So I am lazy and I am afraid. I expect that someone else will come in and transform me from this heavy burdened maid to a beautiful elegant princess. But it is never going to happen. For no prince will ever come for me if I am not already a princess. You see what I am saying?

Paulo Coelho says that people kill the thing they love the most because they are afraid to be happy, they think that I don't deserve it. Everyone around me is unhappy so how can I be happy?

So I guess, unless I cure myself of this love sickness, I will not be able to get my act together and really feel and experience the true love.

Ironically, I did experience the true love that shook me to my core.. and you know what I did?

I ran away from it. I ran away from it as fast as I could.

That was the right thing to do. I need to cure my love sickness before I can truly love.

Love Lab

One smart psychologist has quite neatly laid out a procedure to fall in love. It goes like this:

• Find a complete stranger.
• Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour.
• Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes.

He conducted a study where he asked his subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married. Some love lab!

I admit, he is right on about the key ingredients - someone listening to you and caring about you deeply. We all have experienced this at some point or other. I, personally, have gone through this lab procedure several times. I still do but less frequently. When someone who I just had a stimulating and meaningful conversation with, slowly leans forward and looks deeply in my eyes, I start trembling.  The dopamine, oxytocin in my body start firing up and I start feeling deeply attracted toward that person.  I am going to be careful with my use of words here. Attracted if that person is a man. Deeply connected if that person happens to be a woman. This is very important because these boundaries are very clear for me naturally. However, I have had many conversations with my gay/lesbian/bisexual  friends on this topic - about how they 'converted'. To my surprise,  for many of them it wasn't the natural biological preference. They confessed that they felt so deeply connected to the other person that the boundaries of gender melted, attraction flared up and before they knew, they had converted from a heterosexual to a homosexual person. It didn't matter that they had to go through tremendous  resistance from the close family, cultural/social re-adjustment or in some unfortunate cases, leaving the old ones behind. The strong force of love was able to carry them across.  When I asked them, would you 'convert' back if you met someone of opposite gender in similar way?, the answer was always - Yes!

So, going back to the 'laboratory of love', is this really it? Is that all it takes for you to get swept off your feet completely?  Steps 1-3?  Probably. For few minutes at least. But what he doesn't talk about is the time effect on this initial explosion of feeling of love. In my case, almost invariably, scales start falling down my eyes within a short time. It could be the next sentence he utters or the way he sips his tea ..or the reminder by my left brain that he is unavailable to me for various reasons such as he is a film star or a fictional character (!) or my friend's boss or my own boss or ..you get the idea.*  I imagine that it is true for most of us. It may happen in a less straightforward way but it happens. Soon you realize that you are projecting way too much onto something where there is nothing much. But once your chemistries are entangled, it is hard to get away. Really hard. Love or hate or both, no matter what form it takes, it will stick. That emotional mess will stick like a glue. And if sex was involved, well, it will stick like a super-glue!
  
So, the answer is, No. Steps 1-3 may be necessary but not sufficient to truly fall in love. Refer to my previous article for what it means to "truly fall in love'. 

What does it take then? 

I don't know. 

But I do know that it feels like a divine intervention. 

Something that is meant to be.  


* Luckily for me, another natural boundary I have is the strong, unshakable belief in fidelity/marriage. It means as a rule I never get attracted to a married man. He automatically goes into my Friends bucket if I like him. That is why I stayed in my marriage for so long even when it wasn't working and that is exactly why I got out of it too. A story for some other time. 

Doomed to suffer AND destined to be happy

Love is incorrigible. Excruciating agony and limitless sweetness simultaneously. As long as I am alive, I can never resist it. Thus: doomed to suffer AND destined to be happy

It shakes you to the core when it happens. Shattering your body/mind/heart/soul by its force. You lie there helpless, exhausted. But Smiling. ...And I am not talking about sex. Sex can be a part of it, sure. As one of the expressions. But it is not necessary.  Now a days people are fond of explaining tsunamic emotions of love by using neuro-biological terms like Adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. I suppose it gives them a sense of control. A false sense I must say for no amount of rational and scientific thinking can help you get back in the driving seat again. When love is driving, the only thing you can do is: sit back, relax and enjoy. The anatomical part it affects the most is - well, the heart! There is a reason why those cheesy red throbbing hearts you see on the Valentines' day are so popular.

You create your own heaven or hell with these emotions.  Eat some chocolates, get some sunshine and tread that exercise machine if it gets too overwhelming. If you try to resist the feeling or try to control the object of your love, you are walking down the path to hell. I am not kidding. So, don't. Carefully avoid those habitual mistakes. I have a lot to say here, saving it for some other time.

Are you one of those hopeless romantics constantly falling and failing in love? 

I am. 

And I am at it again.   

 

* Love, Explained: http://www.chemistry.com/datingadvice/LoveExplained

Science of love: http://www.youramazingbrain.org.uk/lovesex/sciencelove.htm

My First

I am going to explore the much trodden territory of relationships, love, intimacy, boundaries etc here. Primarily to get to those hidden places in me and gain some clarity. With the hope that this will lead to a happier, healthier (love) life.