The following text is a reply to an open letter about some interesting topics such as love, loneliness, depression and ways to cope with it.
Dear one,
Thank you for your open letter.
You wrote some intriguing words that make up for a really good conversation starter.
Let me address the topics you are interested in talking about.
Love
Excuse me the pun, I love it.
I mean who doesn't like falling in love and feeling love.
One of my favourite songs is "Love to be Loved" by Peter Gabriel.
I would say, love is the intrinsic bond among human beings. I do believe there is a specific type of bond that connects all living creatures too, I am just not sure if for the sake of this argument it applies here, so lets leave it aside for the moment.
It is interesting to be discussing Love with you, a perfect stranger, when just the other day I was listening to a podcast about relationships. The therapist in the podcast mentioned two things that I would like to bring for your consideration.
First, the confusion most people have with Passion and Love.
For him, Passion is something that is hard to explain, mainly because of biochemical reasons, the personality of each member of the couple, life's circumstances, what makes us feel attracted to someone, but most importantly, passion in relative terms has a short time span.
What happens after the passion stage if the person wants to go on with the romantical partner is that they must want to build a relationship, which is love. So, love is a construction. We do not fall in love, we feel passion and then we start building a relationship based on common grounds.
The therapist continued by saying that the most corrosive aspect in a couple's relationship is the way people handle each other. People need to care for each other with kindness. Although it is usual within a relationship to have different points of view, arguments, it is important that those aspects be dealt in a kind, peaceful, with a tone of voice that does not convey anger (like shouting). Many couples make winning an argument their reason for being, because they are competitive. In an argument between a couple, there are no winners or losers. What the couple must do is talk and think hard on the reasons why they are together. They should not break up at the first signs of trouble. Troubles are normal and they carry with them lessons for the relationship to evolve.
The other topic I think might be important to bring here is a theory that he proposes - the bonding theory.
So in his words.
In a stable relationship, each member of the couple serve has a psychological safety net for the other. So the theory states, that as babies, we connect in a first stage with our parents looking for that safety net. According to the theory it was thought that the behaviour we display as babies towards our parents, is somewhat similar to what happens with the romantic couple. Basically, in some studies, the main ingredient that holds a couple together is the psychological safety they transmit to each other. Put it differently, we all have moments where we are vulnerable, humiliated, offended, where we were badly treated or misunderstood. It is very important to have someone beside us that might listen and provide comfort and psychological safety and support.
That is one of the basic elements for the relationship to last, the fact that you can count on each other. Trust!
So, what happens in many couples today, they are not able to build the safety net among themselves and the trust is never built. Consequently. the relationship doesn't even reach love and stays in the earlier stages such as passion - the biochemistry of pleasures.
I think these points that the therapist mentioned gives us something to reflect about your topic of love.
But let me give you some additional personal insight of mine.
I had many relationships, that I thought were love. But I think most of them were just passion. Unfortunately, most of my relationships never lasted more than one year. My girlfriends and me were not able to build a sufficiently strong bond to hold us through time.
It could be so easy to spread blame, and I could give you different reasons why people would break up.
Let me show you a list of typical reasons:
He stopped feeling passion for her
She felt he was too childish
He was not feeling the connection to continue a relationship of dependence
She was too aggressive
She was too much in control and was eager all the time
They were not able to carry through with a common project.
She wanted to have kids and He did not want to feel attached to her for life.
He was to fragile emotionally, and she wanted a stronger man
The distance was becoming harder to keep and the "I miss you" were becoming harder and harder to cope.
She was emotionally fragile in the beginning and was always predicting that the relationship would end, and so she did.
I could have given you more reasons on why some of my relationships did not work, but they were all interpretations of two different people who were at distinct stages, with heavy emotional luggage that seemed too hard to carry. So, the easiest way was to quit, me or them and sometimes both. But, I think that in most of the times, the passion stage finished when the troubles started showing and one or the other or both were not able to deal with the work needed to overcome the specific situation. In other words, we were not able to build a safety net to support each other in a relationship mode.
I know the letter is going long, but I have the feeling that your interest in the topics you mentioned were of a somewhat personal nature.
Well I might be wrong but you tell me if you feel like it.
In any case, let me just give you a few notes about some of the other topics you brought up.
Loneliness
After a breakup or a loss of a loved one it is not unusual to feel loneliness. After all, even if a relationship lasted a year, there were habits that you were accustomed. Another reason, might be that you were so focused on the relationship that you neglected friends and family for the duration of the relationship, and that now you might feel lonely. My experience is that the real friends they are always there and they will welcome us with open arms to talk about the griefs, ours and theirs.
Most likely, they too have experienced grieves of their own and just want to share their story with us, because our experience resonates with theirs.
My suggestion for those dealing with loneliness is to accept that is just a perception, you are not necessarily lonely, you are just experience alone time in a heavily sad moment. There is nothing wrong with that. It is a life lesson, you learn to ride that wave of grief and loneliness and it might help to know that others rode their loneliness wave too. Somewhere they found a safe harbour where they could feel better even if they were alone but where loneliness lost their hold on them.
There is an hidden advantage of experiencing hard moments in life. It helps you understand the grief that other people experience in their lives. Only after you have experienced certain things will you be able to truly be empathic with another. You do not have to experience all of it, but with a few bad experiences you can start relating to distinct to experiences of others that like you might have bad moments.
Another good way to deal with loneliness is to meditate about it. Do some breathing exercises and imagine that the clouds that surround you in that helpless feeling will soon dissipate and the sun of wholeness will shine once again.
Depression
Fortunately, I do not think I have ever sink that low, but I understand how helpless someone might feel in this state.
Much like loneliness, this can be seen as temporary stage, where the safety net of the self is out of balance.
One might feel completely overwhelmed with the simplest of tasks.
So, the first thing you have to do is to acknowledge that you are not ok.
Seek help. There is no shame in getting help. We get help all the time. To fix our car, to care for our health, to do something that for a some reason we are not able to do on our own.
Friends, family and medical help can and should be the first lines of help given to someone who is experiencing depression.
The main aspect to focus is that it is a temporary stage of life - A bad slope that slowly can be overcome.
I think you can infer that I too have experienced some bad moments in my life. I accepted them, acknowledged the lessons I needed to learn from them and tried to focus on my well-being. I tried doing some kind of physical activity. Some as simple as walking. I tried meditation, using apps on my phone like Headspace. I would call friends and talked about it. But most of all I would try to make a routine of things to do that would make me feel that I was moving towards something. At one point, I joined Slowly, just to talk to strangers to feel connected to someone new.
Happily, this is not my state today. But I know that a bad slope might happen again for me. When that happens, I might need to deal with my issues and learn new lessons. There is nothing wrong with that.
It is not selfish to care for ourselves first at the most fundamental level, our health. Just think, if we are not well, we are not able to help others. So start with yourself and then be kind to others, they too might be grieving.
Take good care of yourself and those around you if you can.
Kind regards,
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