Love...How do we learn how to love? First is our mother--as she nurses you or feeds you as a baby, she gives of herself, and hence we associate food with love. Our first experience of being loved is being fed, clothed, housed. Then there is Maslow's heirarchy of needs. Those are just the first ones. Self actualization is where we actual have an idea of how to start creating love. Transcendence is where we truly love. That's long way to go! Parents are only as loving as they themselves know how to love. Most are somewhere along that climb to self-actualization. Where else do we get this?
Psychologists talk about "good enough parents" but psychologists define "normal" as what works in our society. That ain't always love! So what is "normal" for loving? Or do we go beyond normal--and aim for evolution? I vote for the latter!
I can mostly speak to my journey through years of not getting it right, to beginning to get it right. My parents were loving parents, and for a variety of reasons tedious to everyone else, but which I spent years thinking about, they had limits to their ability to love. Mom was very loving, but without creating a boundary of caring for herself. Hence she took the martyr's path. Jesus was called on to be a martyr--God calls on some to do this. But for most of it, the needle tips over into narcissism--I do this to feel like I am better, and I start to resent it, and then I am not so loving. I tend to become self-righteous, judgmental. I would have done better to draw a boundary where I knew that I had needs to meet.
My journey to really learn how to love started for me with Erich Segal's "The Art of Loving" How like me--knowledge first. Then I tried to love a man with all my heart--and he couldn't end it, but he ran like a rabbit! It hurt so badly. My mentor sent me to a therapist, who told me, "you need a better relationship with your mom."
I agreed. I had told her at age 18, in full hubris of that age, "Mother, you are the antithesis of everything I ever want to be."
So I invited her out for the first of our special trips--I wish there had been more, but maybe these are more precious for being so few. We spent a week staying in B&Bs along the Mississippi. By then, my dad had had his first stroke and she was dealing with his paralysis, loss of income, the dealings of his lack of financial planning. She needed the rest, and I could afford it then. It was the start of our developing a really loving relationship. I didn't bond with my mother at birth--we never talked about it, we both just felt the lack of bond, and desperately wanted it. It took several more years. The worst I did was wake her up on Mother's Day and tell her that she had been the terror of my childhood. She had an unpredictable temper--Dad's was worse, but I knew what to do to avoid it--Mom's would blindside me! And the day wasn't my choice. I was taking a class which I had no idea would demand this of me, but I knew it was what I needed to do to get the full lesson of the class. I apologized ahead as much as I could. She tolerated that--how many mothers would?
So I established a relationship with Mom, then I could love myself--and I did. First a crush on a professor who was who I knew I could be, then in love with a nerd because I am a nerd, partly, and that was the part of me that I couldn't love. He had never dated, not really, and his family gave him an ultimatum--her or us. He chose them. Probably good for me in the long run. Hurt like hell though. Remember how badly it hurt the first time you fell in love and got rejected? Four times for me--that's how many times it took before I got down to really being able to love. I must be really hard-headed--and really hard-loving. My love was overwhelming for two of the four, the other two just weren't capable of love. Then there's the ones who I decided not to love for one reason or another--God forgive me for hurting them. I cared for them, and knew that they didn't offer the life I wanted--but there were a couple whom I really loved, and they were hard to let go of. So I screwed with their heads--poor guys. I pray that they have had good lives, and I pray that they find love if they haven't.
So on to Love. I let go of it after that--gave it up to God. Your turn I told Him. I have screwed this up so many times, and I am tired of even doing it. AND Voila! the best fit walked into my life--or more specifically I drove into his. I can see parts of the earlier ones in him--the parts I loved and some that I didn't, but the parts I love are good.
"When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them." Martin Buber
I can't say it better than that.
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