Our Quest Of Love

Why Love Is Important?

Love is another form of dedication, passion and consistent performance. The best technique to evaluate happiness is to understand the value of a situation and act upon it wisely. We can say that happiness is indirectly proportional to love. Happiness is not something we can buy, it has to be created. Love is not a relationship between nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by serenity of soul. Love is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of peace. Lasting love can come only to lovely people.

While there are many facets and faces of love, we’re going to focus on what is traditionally love. Here is why love is important, and what you can do to find yours.

1. Connecting With Another Human Being

The ability to have an affectionate and intimate connection with another person, and to have that fondness returned is an anchor to base the rest of your development and future around.

2. Why Love Is Important? It Is A Path To Self Discovery

Love can reveal a lot about ourselves that we may not have already known. Our preferences, tastes, morality, thought processes and instinctive reactions when we are in love reveal a lot about our character to ourselves upon reflection, especially considering that we are in situations where we may never have been before.

3. Why Love Is Important? It Is An Excellent Source Of Motivation

When you’re in love, you always tend to strive for better and not just in a vain sense either. That is to say, it is not merely for the sake of your partner loving you more (though that certainly is a motivation) but also, to do better in life, to set new goals, and generally strive for the best. The upswing in positive thoughts is also noticeable and that itself makes a big difference.

4. Love Is A Reformer And Teacher

In the same vein, love is also a great reformer. Have a bad habit that annoys your SO (significant other)? Likely that if you are in love that is reciprocated, you will defeat the habit and be rid of it, whether it is the fact that you’re late, lax with your upkeep or even if you smoke. In the same way, if you are in love, and you make all of the above efforts, but for reasons the love goes sour, you still learn many vitally important life lessons even through the heartbreak. Just remember not to be too hard on yourself, and that if you had one bad restaurant experience, you’re not going to be giving up on eating out, though of course, we realize the two are not the same. The point still stands.

5. Why Love Is Important: Because It Is The Greatest Feeling

Isn’t it? But don’t take our word for it, just read any of the majority of the classics of the twentieth century that deal with the topic, or watch any of the classic films (or even the not so classic ones) etc. You get the drift. Being in a healthy, two way, loving relationship is an incredible feeling, and is one of the pinnacles of the brief existence that is our life. And make no mistake, it is a feeling, a state of being, one most definitely worth striving for.

6. The Future Is Yours

Love is thus a support structure for you to build your ship on. Whatever future you envision, whatever methods you want to follow, and wherever you see yourself going, you know that you have someone by your side who believes in you, trusts you, wants to see you succeed, and always has an ear for you. This is why love is important.

 

We unconsciously want from our intimate others what we were deprived in the past, often by our family of origin. We repeat the story but are secretly hoping for a different outcome.
This is why some of us continue to be attracted to abusive, unavailable or emotionally stunted partners that repeat our childhood trauma.  

However, this sets an impossible task for our partners. After all, the weight of our unmourned hopes and lost childhood are too huge to be carried by any one person, or any relationship. For example, we ‘mind-read’, misinterpret their words and actions, and say things like: “I know what you think”, “I can tell- you must think I am a terrible person.’

Although unmanaged transference could bring problems in a relationship, transference is not in itself ‘bad’.  Rather than criticizing ourselves, we could look at our actions as a quest for love: It is our inner child trying to get their needs met, our innermost desire to heal and become whole are out searching for what might help. Our efforts and attempts might be clumsy, but the intention is virtuous. If anything, we ought to have deep admiration and respect for the creative strategies we have come up with to heal and to become whole.


THE THREE FORMS OF PSYCHIC HUNGER

According to psychology, there are three major types of early relational needs that influence the developing self: mirroring, idealizing, and twinship. They make up the three types of transference that we experience in our present-day relationships.

1) OUR HUNGER FOR “MIRRORING”

Mirroring is essential for the development of our self-esteem and sense of safety in the world. If we did not have an adequate mirroring experience as a child, we could end up becoming ‘mirror hungry’. As we feel closeness in an intimate relationship, and have a glimpse of the hope that there is someone to, at long last, see us, care for us, and love us as we are, our need for mirroring then get re-evoked, and regress into a child-like state to try and get our needs met in our adult relationship.  As a result, we experience an insatiable compulsion to demand empathic resonance, reassurance and loving responses from our partner.
Some manifestations of mirror hunger are: feeling that our partners are never doing enough, saying enough, celebrating us enough. If we hinge our self-value on our partner’s responses, when they are not around, we might feel like we have lost a piece of ourselves. We might become extremely sensitized to the slightest changes in their voice, utterance, and actions, and see everything they say or do as either a warm welcome or a brutal rejection. We then seek more and more time, attention, and reassurance through clingy, demanding behaviors. 


2) OUR NEED TO IDEALIZE 

Our second significant childhood need is to have someone reliable to count on.  To feel safe in the world, a child ought to be able to see someone- usually our early caregivers- as ‘all-powerful, omniscient and perfect’.
Idealizing transference develops when we see others as “perfect and wonderful”, and feel ourselves to be healthy and vital under our connection to them. It is through emulating and idealized other that we learn to internalize their strength and resilience as our own. In an optimal situation, we would first idealize our parents as the ‘Superman/ superwoman’ of our lives, and then through a process of gradual discovery, we find out that they are not perfect. In this process, we also realize our own strength. Though not painless, the dropping of our initial idealization should be gradual, natural, and not traumatizing.  . 

Idealizing others is not all bad- Some degree of romanticizing is natural, even necessary, at the beginning of any romantic partnership, and we often project the best version of ourselves onto an idealized other. Eventually, as the relationship mature, we could see our positive qualities in the other, and be able to reclaim some of them as our own. In other words, understanding the nature of our idealization can help us become a more integrated person. Too much idealizing also prevents us from seeing our partner as who they are, but as a set of projected images and ideas.

3) OUR HUNGER FOR TWINSHIP

Also known as ‘alter-ego’ transference, twinship transference concerns our belongingness and participation in the world.  Twinship transference occurs when we need to “feel an essential likeness” with others. Our need to feel connected to similar others could be met in an intimate relationship, friendship, or community, brought about by a similarity in interests and talents, and the sense of being understood by someone like oneself .From a young age, rarely finding someone with whom they can relate or who makes them feel understood leads to deeply internalized loneliness. Many intense adults spend their lives trying to find connections that have the intellectual, emotional and spiritual depth and breadth that meet them where they are at.

When we bring an overwhelming need for twinship into our intimate relationship, we may feel alone and sad even when we are engaged with another. We may feel disproportionately sensitive when our partner does not ‘get us’, or when they fail to match us in the intensity or rigor that we demand. We may set unrealistic expectations when it comes to closeness and distance, or too easily make individual differences and benign disagreement a source of conflict.  It can be increasingly despairing if we struggle to find fulfilling connections in the world, or when again and again we realize “the One” is not what we had expected. Being disappointed enough, we might revert to isolation and counter-dependence to avoid future hurt.
We are in a partnership with a full human being,  based on an honest reality, rather than a child-like fantasy. Such is the foundation of a mature, authentic partnership.
We could finally meet our partner as they are, not under the filter or how well they could meet our needs, and without projections and false expectations. We do not need them to be perfect, as they do not reflect on us, represent us, or limit us. We might still like, or dislike certain things, but their limits cease to become a threat. We can compassionately hold their good and bad together in our heart, without flipping into black-or-white thinking.We would not be acting from a place of desperation, neediness and resentment, but out of love, and the pure joy of giving and relating.We would be able to hop off the cycles of co-dependency and symbiotic relationships and move towards independence, self- containment, and freedom.Then, we would have taken a giant leap towards a soul-fulfilling partnership with a fellow journeyman.

A life where you are truly alive would not be devoid of pain and grieve, but rainbow and roses too exist

I hope you make the best of this journey we call love and life. 

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