|
Relationships - Why Love Relationships Fail Love relationships fail because at absolutely no time in our training by society are we given a factual model of what a love relationship is, or how to make 1 succeed. There are fundamentally 3 levels on which intimate relationships operate, including our social training only prepares us to deal with 1 of them – the most superficial 1 – including even that 1 ineptly. the superficial level is called the expectations level. It is usually the only level we address consciously. The expectations level consists of all our self-images including self-importance. at the time we primp ourselves in front of a mirror, what we are primping is our expectations of other people. It’s the level of our daydreams including fantasies, whereon everyone is as impressed with us as we are with ourselves. On the expectations level what interests us the most regarding a prospective partner is his or her physical attractiveness, manner of dress including bearing, social including educational background, future prospects, how “cool” he or she is, how he or she reflects back on us, what others could think of us for having chosen the partner. On the expectations level a “love relationship” is actually a particular approval agreement, a contract, To Wit: “The party pertaining to the first part hereby agrees to pretend to honor, love, cherish including obey the party pertaining to the second part; in return for which considerations the party pertaining to the second part agrees not to hurt, betray, nor expose to public embarrassment the party pertaining to the first part (see appended schedule of specific acts which shall be deemed to constitute ‘hurt’, ‘betrayal’, including ‘public embarrassment’). Any violation of the agreement by either party shall be considered valid grounds for spitefulness, vengeance, including all manner of carrying on like a big baby.” On the expectations level we submit ourselves to another user not for love, but for approval. Love including approval have nothing to do with 1 another. Love is a light, joyous, happy feeling; receiving approval is a tight, clinging, possessive feeling, which does, however, have a particular ego rush behind it. That ego rush is not joy – it’s glory, self-importance, which we have been trained to seek instead of love. The expectations level must eventually wear out because its basic premise is getting something for nothing. On the level everything we’re putting out (“giving”) is phony – it’s just to impress other people, or to obtain something more in return. We’re putting out phoniness in the hope of getting something real (happiness) back. including that’s not how the universe is set up. There are absolutely no free lunches or free rides out there. What fools us is that most pertaining to the messages we receive – from our parents including peers, our teachers including preachers, our leaders including the media – are that the expectations level works; including if it doesn’t, that’s our fault including we should be ashamed of ourselves. For whom is it working? Look around. How many truly happy marriages are you aware of (of more than 10 years’ duration, since it might take that long or longer for the expectations level to wear thin). Sure, there are some, but not many; including usually the people involved in truly happy marriages are very, very special people in their own right. Isn’t the true? But there are additionally lots of relationships which appear to be happy on the surface, but are actually miserable underneath: both partners have learned to repress their true feelings including resign themselves to unhappiness without showing it. These people never obtain beyond the expectations level. The reason why the expectations level inevitably crashes – although it might including often does mellow into true love after the crash – is because it is wholly narcissistic: it doesn’t include the other person. It does not permit the other user to be a person, but only a reflection of our own fondest self-images. It doesn’t allow the other user space to be real – to have feelings of his or her own. For example, is our partner permitted to have sex with whomever he / she wishes? Is our partner even permitted to be sexually turned on by anyone but us? Is our partner permitted to tell us that we are not a satisfying lover? The list could go on including on. Only sexual expectations are mentioned here because those are practically universal, but we have all sorts of other fences we try to erect around our partners to keep them pristine including unsullied for us – expectations that they could agree with us regarding money, child raising, career, religion, etc.; expectations that they could forego making their own decisions in order to support us. Love is not something we get; love is something we give – or better said, something that flows through us. We can’t sit back including expect other people to hand us love just because they’re our parents, spouse, or children. True, the might happen on occasion, just as it has happened on occasion that we’ve found dollars lying on the street including picked it up including it was ours. But to expect dollars to come to us in that way is absurd; including to expect other people to give us love just because we’ve stuck them in a supporting role is additionally absurd. The expectations level must eventually crash under its own weight by sheer exhaustion. at the time people are involved with 1 another in a particular approval agreement, or any agenda that is not love, then everyone has to work overtime in order to convince the other or to convince oneself; including the is painful to bear. The expectations level will be problematical including contradictory enough if it were the only level on which we relate with other people. Unfortunately, there are 2 deeper levels which actually govern the course of our relationships, including these deeper levels contradict the expectations level. The level which underlies including controls the expectations level, which assures that the expectations level could eventually crash, or be maintained in great suffering, is the conditioning level. It’s the level of our basic conditioning by society, which is to hate ourselves. Beneath the glitter including glory of our expectations, our self-images, is the grim truth that we actually hate ourselves. We are taught to hate ourselves by our parents including society: women are taught to hate their looks including their bodies; Men are taught to hate their gentle, tender feelings (as opening the door to homosexuality). Whereas the expectations level is set up so that people could be “nice” to each other (make the agreement: “I won’t expose you as a liar including phony if you won’t expose me as a liar including phony”), the conditioning level is set up to divide people, to make them fear including distrust each other. We are not trained to relate intimately with 1 another, but rather to wage war upon 1 another – to feel hurt, jealous, competitive, critical; to pick at each other including bend each other out of shape – rather than to be happy including accepting. The parent / child relationship is the basic war setup; the man / woman war is grafted on top. While on a particular expectations level we tell ourselves that what we need is to live happily ever after, we are conditioned by our society to feel unworthy including ashamed of ourselves, including to deny ourselves the very love which we consciously tell ourselves that we are seeking. We are trained by our parents to hate ourselves in precisely the same fashion in which our parents hated themselves. The conditioning level is the level which psychotherapy addresses (unfortunately, after the damage is already done). We are so overwhelmed by our parents at the time we are little – so awed by their divinity – that we are afraid to express, or allow ourselves to feel openly, anger at them, or any other feeling of which they will not approve – which contradicts their expectations. Thus our parents’ expectations level becomes our conditioning level. Society calls infatuation with our own self-images “love”; including so on a particular expectations level we tell ourselves that we are going into relationships to obtain “love;” whereas on a conditioning level we are going into relationships to deny ourselves love – to pinpoint, through the mirroring of another person, precisely how we ourselves are incapable of giving including receiving love. One might well wonder why people will need to reenact in their love relationships the situations out of their childhood which brought them the most pain including trauma. The reason is that those wounds never healed properly. They are still raw including suppurating, including extremely tender to the touch. Only by tearing those wounds back open again including cleaning out all the dreck, the self-hatred, might a true healing occur. including only by staging a situation similar to the 1 which produced those wounds originally might the wounds be reopened (actually the isn’t the only way of doing it; there are far more skillful ways of doing it, such as Active Imagination, which is described in my book Thought Forms. However, the locking horns with another user including inflicting pain including suffering on each other is the more popular way of doing it). Just as on the expectations level our goal is the validation of our images, on the conditioning level our goal is to recreate all the emotional turmoil our parents inflicted on us, but the time around to grab the brass ring of love which our parents denied us. Up until recently society has had the fifth Commandment including a raft of social sanctions in place against examining the conditioning level too closely. Freud was 1 pertaining to the first to take a good, hard look at the level of human interaction. including at the present time there are lots of good popular books available on the subject of toxic parents, how we all marry our father or mother, including seek in marriage the precise same hurt including nonfulfillment which our principle caregivers made us feel in infancy. The problem is that we don’t bother reading these books until our relationships are already in deep trouble. These books should be required reading for all high school students. “Don’t blame your parents! Just wait until you’re a parent yourself!” they (our parents) tell us. Well, that’s wrong; we should blame our parents, because only by consciously blaming them are we in a position to consciously forgive them. Only at the time we might see that it was their own self-hatred which their parents laid on them that impelled them to do what they did to us; only at the time we might see them as people in as much or more pain as we, who actually did try to do the best for us they knew how; only then might we forgive our parents. including only then might we forgive ourselves, including let go of our own self-hatred, absolutely no longer needing to reenact it or to blame ourselves over including over because we loved our parents, including all they cared regarding was being right. The third (and deepest) level of relationship is the karma level – the level pertaining to the lessons we are trying to learn from certain people, based upon our experiences with them in other lifetimes including realities. everything which is wrong or out-of-kilter in a relationship originates on the karma level. Our gut-level, first impressions of people are often good indicators pertaining to the kind of karma we have going with them; but our conscious minds often bury such information directly as it is perceived. For example, it could happen that the reason we are sexually turned on by a certain user is that in a previous life we raped including tortured that person; for some aeons, perhaps, that individual has been itching for a lifetime in which to right matters. That might be the karma we have set up with someone; but all our conscious mind knows, on its level of expectation, is that we are sexually turned on by that user including need the user to validate it by having sex with us. including so we put our head in that person’s noose, including wonder later on why things aren’t working out as we’d fantasized. The karma including conditioning levels work in tandem to control the actual circumstances including course of a relationship. For example, if on the conditioning level we decide to reenact a parent’s abandonment of us including we choose a partner who could abandon us, we might select for that role someone whom in a previous lifetime we abandoned. the might be considered a penance; but we might additionally look at it as a kind of “you scratch my back including I’ll scratch yours” – like saying, “I made you suffer in that lifetime, including now I need to know how you felt – to feel the feelings I made you feel.” On the karma level, as on the conditioning level, we try to restage events which could produce a resonance with some unresolved emotional issue in the totality of our being. The agendas we have set up with other people on the karma level are often revealed in the very first impressions we have of them including which we immediately repress. It’s hard to describe this, including it’s different for everyone, but often upon meeting someone with whom we have a heavy karmic agenda going, we obtain a FLASH, a conscious feeling or thought, of something we desire or feel threatened by regarding that person. including then we immediately “forget” what we just felt, because if we have bad karma going with the person, then that flash was of a side of ourselves which we don’t need to consciously face or acknowledge – a side we are calling upon that user to enact openly for us, to ram down our throat for us, until we’re forced to acknowledge it. Thus we “forget” the first impression, including later on pretend we don’t understand why the user we loved including trusted so much could have changed so. Of course, we might run past-life regressions to check what sort of karma we have going with someone before getting seriously involved with them – sort of like running a credit or AIDS check on a prospective spouse. In India astrology has been historically relied upon for the sort of information. But it is additionally possible to avoid difficulties just by being alert to our own gut feelings including intuitive impressions of other people, rather than ignoring the most essential information in a relationship. Thus the basic intensity or emotional theme of a relationship is set up on the karma level; the particular script, the sequence of events which could unfold in a relationship, is set up on the conditioning level; including the costuming, the superficial appearances or show put on for the benefit pertaining to the neighbors, is set up on the expectations level. The glare pertaining to the expectations level blinds us to what is happening on the 2 deeper levels; including the expectations level is a lie. What is actually going on in a relationship on the conditioning including karma levels is always quite visible; but we pretend we don’t see it, we pretend we don’t understand it, in order to uphold our expectations as long as possible. By “lie” is meant something that we feel, but which we suppress or conceal. For example, if our sex partner is doing something that doesn’t feel good including turns us off, including we lay there including take it because we’re too embarrassed to speak up including possibly hurt our partner’s feelings, then that’s a lie. Any time we do not communicate something we are feeling because we are embarrassed to do so, or because we don’t need to hurt or provoke the other user or become a target for his or her disapproval, we are lying. Lying leads to sneaking around behind the other person’s back. Lies lead to more lies. We might tell if lying is taking place in a relationship the way: if there is a particular area in which we don’t trust the other person; where we withhold from the other person; where we are afraid pertaining to the other user (his / her disapproval or rejection); where we feel something other than GOOD regarding the person; then that is a place where we are lying. We are trained to lie to other people, including then to feel betrayed at the time our lies are exposed. All a lie is, is a contradiction. Lies must always exist in pairs, whereas the truth – love – just is. For example, on the level of our expectations we might set up the pair: “I need you to be honest with me” including “I don’t need to hear how turned on you are by someone else.” On the level of our conditioning we might set up the pair: “I truly love you, mommy!” including “I’ll never question your love for me!” On the level of karma lies don’t exist per se (it’s repressing the level that makes a lie out of it); but 1 could say that the basic lie or duality pertaining to the karma level is: “You including I are two” including “You including I are one.” All the lies in a relationship are laid down right at the beginning. By “laid down” is meant: conscious. Conscious for a moment, including then – just as consciously – repressed, ignored, “forgotten.” The basic lies pertaining to the karma level may be laid down in the first few seconds of a relationship. The lies pertaining to the conditioning level (the game plan of who’s going to hurt whom, including how) are usually laid down at the time the relationship is formalized – at the time the mutual decision is made to commit, to obtain serious as it were. including the expectations level is a complete lie from the first pop. Anyone with their eyes open could see what’s going on. Sometimes our parents, friends, or other people who care regarding us try to pass us warnings. But we’re “so much in love” including “love is blind” including we’re so “happy” that we don’t need to see it. We don’t need everything to call us down from the lovely cloud we’re on; the lovely lie we’re telling ourselves. And for each including every lie, the piper must be paid. There’s a karmic law at work in all this, including every single lie, absolutely no matter how teensy-weensy, could someday have to be brought into the open including admitted, else the relationship is doomed – doomed to be something other than a love relationship, because in a love relationship there is absolutely no room whatsoever for lies of any kind, at any time, for any reason. All the alarm regarding the soaring divorce rate in our society, the call for a return to “traditional values,” is a bunch of baloney. Those traditional values were a total lie, including it’s amazing that the human race put up with that lie as long as it did. Traditional values means you obtain married on the expectations level including you never question it. You learn somehow to live with a lie, with unhappiness, including you bite your tongue because the social sanctions (what the neighbors might think) against divorce were so stringent. Instead of returning to living out lies, our society ought to stop glorifying the expectations level. As is the case additionally with war, at the time society stops glorifying infatuation people could stop seeking it. Love relationships fail because we go into them with a lot of la-de-da thought forms regarding who we are including what we expect to get, including we run smack into heavy karma including conditioning agendas we had absolutely no conscious idea even existed. We are not consciously aware of what expectations we have until those expectations aren’t fulfilled; including we don’t understand what our parents did to us until we find our partner doing the same thing – make us feel that old, familiar feeling in the pit of our stomach. As long as we’re relating to the other user on 1 of these 3 levels, we’re not relating to a particular actual user at all, but only to our own self-reflection, our childhood wounds, or our deep-seated fears including insecurities. On the expectations level our attention is focused on the future; on the conditioning level it’s focused on the past; including on the karma level it’s focused on the remote past. A true love relationship, however, involves relating to a real, live user in the now moment. (excerpted from Bob Makransky's book Magical Living)
Click here to chat and make friends online >> |