The good side in a friendship’s breakdown
I don’t know what love does to you but I will gladly tell you what it can do to me.
What most people don’t seem to realise is that love CHANGES people. Once love is on you can’t turn it off. It turns off if the fire burns too low, and that happens if the oxygen has become too scarce. Trouble is that no two fires turn off simultaenously… It’s one person’s love for another that’s gone cold. The other person’s fire then seems to feed on extra oxygen; the flames often consume that poor victim…
When in love, we see in the other person an idealised partner; he or she is our MIRROR in which we recognise that which we hold dear in ourselves and believe we find in our partner. Often love is merely an urge to enjoy the company of someone of the other gender; the motivation for this kind of love is self-centered and thus cannot last long: a man craves a busty female for obvious pleasures; a woman wants to lean against a strong shoulder that promises to carry her burden of survival needs too. If sex (for the male) and money (for the female) is the driving force behind romances there inevitably is bound to be conflict in the medium to long term.
But true love goes beyond such basic instincts; the warmth from one’s own heart radiates out to the other, turning both into a single Self. A Self is a single identity comprising two bodies. A single identity doesn’t necessarily mean that the two happy individuals share an uniform outlook; indeed this would not be healthy!
It means they try to improve, nay: perfect themselves to be as good as the other person is in the eyes of the beholder. This entails that a man sees more than just the physical beauty in his female partner, and the woman accepts that her male partner is not a superman that solves her material needs through his ingenuity and industry alone.
It means they conspire to find common solutions to the challenges of day-to-day living. Thus a woman may come to forego her traditional privileged position of living at a man’s expense; and a man may stop thinking of his partner as a weaker Other Self with no compensation for that perceived weakness.
In today’s hectic and hurried time, people are often too self-absorbed; they forget to make certain necessary adjustments in order to survive with their partner in harmony; some feudal thinking often presides over the attitudes to the opposite sex, while modernity is viewed as a new epoch rather than a set of new values and concepts.
When your next relationship breaks down and up, think a little bit! Did that relationship change you? Did it make you a better person than you were before? Did it teach you something about yourself?
Don’t forget: only through the eyes of others you can get to know yourself well! Trust others’ judgements! Trust them especially if they come from a loved one!
thats all …