Our love stories, all of them, especially those that actually last, include a large element of disillusionment. Necessary, although painful, these minutes inevitably arise when, under the cover of our projections, another is revealed, as he is, in his authentic presence. “I never want you to look at me with disappointed eyes,” said Macha Limonchik, so shockingly true, in this cult series that people my age received like such a gift, in their early twenties. Life, lifeyes, as if someone started to talk to us about real life, the one that did not correspond to what had been presented to us as ideals, which continued to place us before two ways of living: the good one and the another, the one that we often had the impression of taking in spite of ourselves.
Now, isn’t it at this precise moment, the very first time that the sounds we create together no longer seem to belong to the same harmonics, that something like real intimacy begins in our romantic relationships? The arrows of Cupid/Eros fall limply, at the same time as the spell they generated, and it is then that we discover that there was someone, a real person, imperfect, full of flaws, scarred of its ancient stories, under our outbursts. Suddenly, it seems almost foreign to us, as if everything we had just gone through together, transported as we were by passion, had happened to others. It’s the end of the honeymoon, the moment when we want to run away perhaps, to look elsewhere, blinded by this great illusion which would say: “there exists, yes, the relationship in which I will not find myself in this well-known place of disenchantment.”
Contemporary love misery perhaps lies in this growing incapacity that we have to move beyond this moment when the idealization of oneself and the other is no longer possible. It is so demanding, in fact, this period of the necessary disappointment of the other. When it hits us, it’s a bit of the entire musculature of our sentimental foundations that is called upon; the rejection, the shame, the boredom, the impression of evolving in a world where she does not exist, THE person who could really accompany us, the return to this very small place of ourselves where we are so alone. Loving hurts is well known, but what is less known is that there is something almost inevitable in crossing these darker emotional ranges, in the existence of a person in love.
On this level as on the others, a whole density of experience is often reduced, in discourse, to a simplistic, technical and flattened term, in which we always evacuate what escapes us: the shadow, the unknown, mystery and uncertainty. There as elsewhere, however, it is much more a matter of a personal adventure, the outcomes of which escape us, than of an à la carte menu, centered on the full satisfaction of our desires. Here again, the era tends to format the whole, creating selection guides, fleeing any form of negativity, of de-coincidence, according to the thinking of the philosopher François Jullien, whose entire word continues to open onto our century of wonderful projects of possibilities.
We will “swipe” to one side or the other, of course, but, above all, we will often continue to believe that it is not about us, but about the other, when problems arise. However, it is often when they arrive, the great disillusionments, that the true potential of a bond also presents itself. If the red flags become part of a vocabulary that allows us to run quickly to the next story, they also become, sometimes, the first words of a potential aborted love story.
Naturally, I am not talking here about the red flags that reveal potential violence, stories of abuse or power games that we have learned to leave behind because they will teach us nothing other than what we already know it too well. No, I’m talking about this observed tendency to withdraw as soon as an otherness presents itself, a crease protrudes, a real person appears and then we are disappointed.
Now, this is where something of a more authentic encounter arises. It is here, too, that the arena of the relationship takes shape, with its limits, its space of play, its tensions, its dramatic line and its possibilities of liberation. Almost every time, it will be possible to move towards greater self-awareness, recognizing what, regardless of the partner, re-invites itself again into our stories. We remain the common denominator in our relationships and, although we often prefer to blame others for our emotional misfortunes, there is indeed an invitation to take responsibility for ourselves, in our repetitive romantic disappointments.
If the observation is hard, it is much harder when we refuse it, reinviting the same situations into our lives, constantly replayed, as if, still, we had not learned what we needed to deploy, to change the third act of a play that we know by heart. “Repetition compulsion”, Freud would say, “drunting of the soul”, Thomas Moore would tell us, repetition of “love patterns”, as a whole pop psycho would tell us which, by wanting to do well, often creates more illiteracy by its lack of density.
When does love start? When it fills us, or when it leaves between our desires and their satisfaction this space of emptiness, this absence of completeness, which opens for us the whole field of self-knowledge? Love perhaps begins in this moment when it is no longer completely the other who carries the weight of our shortcomings. It perhaps begins where it ends, in its form which is often only its preamble.