Happier in Twos

The days when you come to a point of realization tend to be the most wonderful of all time - skip down the streets, take on the world, roast a chicken and feed all your friends kind of wonderful; regardless of the rainy, slushy, ugliness outside. In my Violence Against Women class yesterday we had a little discussion about violence (shocker) in relationships and what a positive relationship would actually look like. What usually turns into a Blackberry strumming, nail picking, drunken weekend gabbing extravaganza ended up being an unquestionably relevant conversation - and it just kept going. This got me to thinking about sensibility, desire, and ultimately survival. 

What makes us stay in relationships is our need to feel valuable. For some reason we believe that, should we leave right now we will never be deserving of it again.  Held captive in our own deconstruction of what we think is happening, we lose contact with the outside world. It's like walking through and endless maze of mirrors: as hard as you might try, you simply cannot make the world around you any clearer. In sense, lose your own relevance within it. Everything but that person tends to be blank space.  Perhaps I have had the most unnatural of relationships or have simply fallen too far in love, but I have found that there exists a loss of self.

We want 'love' so badly, that we will do anything to hold onto it. When it comes to an end, we shuffle as quickly as possible into the arms of another suitor - even if he is the most unwanted of men. It's bread into us and reinforced in everything we do. I think I may have said it before, but our constant need for 'love' is just a natural reaction to that which we are told is the highest level of human success (in our culture anyway). 

The point of all of this is that I think that we fully become ourselves when we escape this cycle of loving and needing. The space afterward has the clearest of air, and we can finally breath. In this time we learn what it is that we love of ourselves, rather than what we are told we need to love through another being. 

How, without this process, can we learn that the most important lesson in life is to do just that; to learn? We can't. We have to learn from our experiences and move forward, all the while realizing that standing alone, we have incredible power. 

This is not all to say that we are better off alone or with another person, but I think that before we get to that stage we need to have an awareness of self that is unbreakable.  We must be able to understand our own singular value. In the 'perfect' relationship, if that were ever to exist, there must an adequate balance of devotion and selfishness where you may realize your own worth and use this in growing alongside another person. And passion. You need to have passion.