The Love Dilemma: Part Two
Relationship Insights
You have a relationship problem – Here we go again! LOVE; the eternal event in one’s life, be it man, woman, child, animal, work or nature—we must LOVE something.
It’s the Eros that keeps everything in our world moving and alive. Be it joyful, numinous, painful or stuck—we will have some of that please—LOVE.
There we have it. We are in love. We have loved. We continue to love someone or something and the creative chaos begins causing relationship euphoria as well as relationship problems.
Today’s topic closes in on the painful – the relationship problems.
When one’s beloved suddenly seems to change, one is jarred into a new chaos. The pattern of love responses built up over the years with a devoted partner changes and the heart cries, “Who kidnapped my beloved? Who is this stranger?”
Or perhaps the relationship problem begins the other way around “What am I doing with this person I truly believe I love?” Or “If I find myself, will I lose my partner?”
What’s going on here? In a word what is happing is a love earthquake.
The ground a couple stands on shakes, breaks apart, shifts and splits into pieces. What worked before no longer provides a firm footing. Mary and Steve are in the same house, have the same children and sleep in the same bed, but they become strangers.
There are two ways to cope with this new relationship problem. This can be a catastrophic change that the couple does not return from. The relationship problem created by the change in a partner is never overcome, never addressed and neither individual in relationship learns how to grow with this change. The chaos of these changes begins the destruction of the couple.
But this chaos and the accompanying destruction can also create a new center. If each individual in the couple can establish new grounds of communication and embrace their love and the change as an organic part of being human, they can find a new center. Then the love transforms into another earth shattering event that rekindles the old flame in inventing and inviting ways. Both people in the relationship grow and develop into more alive and vibrant humans enjoying living individually and together, overcoming the initial relationship problem.
Those who have experienced an actual earthquake know that often the most dangerous reaction can be to run with fear. Fearing the love earthquake in your relationship can also pose the same danger. Do not run – choose to see the love earthquake as a creative event to overcome your relationship problems. If both Mary and Steve can pause and hold on to the “negative potential” of such a dangerous and chaotic upheaval, they can reclaim their individual and couple psyches.
Negative potential – What is that?
The poet Keats describes negative potential as the ability to pause in the gap between knowing and not knowing. It is an ambiguous time. Negative potential exist in the space between what the couple knew and accepted as the norm of their day to day lives and the precarious fear of not knowing what will happen next as one partner changes their response to this established pattern.
There is a new perception in their world and all bets are off as to what to expect. A death has definitely occurred, this cannot be denied. However it does not have to be the death of the couple if they can pause in the tension of this destruction. The challenge is to grow into to the uncomfortable place of not knowing – the place of no absolutes, the place of this love earthquake.
Ride the negative out! There is much to gain in the arena of aliveness, freshness, deeper emotional intimacy and a bonding of two distinct unique humans who decide to be together again in trust and freedom after passing through the negative of relationship problems.
A difficult time filled with destructive “negative potential” may open the couple’s psychological and emotional doors for a birth of rich creative energy that both can benefit from.
Just a thought.