(This is part of my pondering about the nature of my love for Krystal.)#

How I Learned To Stop Being Afraid Of Love#

The counter balance to the discussion of why we should love others is how I came to this conclusion and what went in to this decision. I used to be of the mindset that I should not be in love with anyone because that would mean giving up a part of myself. I thought this was logical, by the fallacies I spoke of earlier, but over a period of time realized that not only was I wrong but I was torturing myself and leading myself further astray.

 

I feel myself a romantic and have always been this way: longing for love and dreaming of the gifts it would create. But somewhere the goal was lost and it was only the path that I followed. A desire for love turned into an extremely judgmental view of relationships and a strange perception of the nature of love. Love was a particular ideal to me and anything that did not measure up to that was certainly not love, only an illusion that I had to be careful of. This meant that I entered every relationship with the assumption that this girl could never complete that picture and there would be no love from this one. This also meant that if ever my girlfriend told me that she loved me I would think of her with scorn because she couldn't possibly, this was not love. How wrong I was.

These things together caused me to ignore the blossoming of the thing that I longed for the most and made me feel like I had to manufacture the trappings of love and this distracted from the true meaning. (This is like Cargo Cult Science.) The unfortunate result was that I consistently sabotaged every attempt and chance at recognizing Love and hurt many in the process. Through misunderstanding, pride, and misplaced passion I turned my greatest desire and raison d'être into my greatest fear and most offensive foe.

I have traced this fear of Love to these things and can summarize: By having a pristine and divine notion of what Love was I made it impossible in my mind to have any type of experience comparable to that, this meant that Love had to fight to grow organically as in its nature through the forceful hand of oppression. So because no true Love could exist, I had to be suspicious of anything remotely like it because I did not want to be 'confused' and then get myself hurt.

 

One part of this feedback loop was the distorted vision of what Love was. Love is not a broker of wishes or the winner of boasts. It does not exist for or because of flowers and kisses or magical towers and misses. When you are in Love, it is your reason to be happy and to continue your life. I thought that Love was direction and a guiding force through your life, but that is not the case. Love is the whole car, not the steering wheel; It makes it possible to life and it establishes a rosy frame around the world. It makes this possible not in the sense that it prevents other action or that it guides towards a happy life. Instead, it is what carries you when you are too tired to walk - not a marching beat - it is a communion between two like hearts.

This view of Love meant that Love was about coercion and control rather the gift of Liberty and unending support. And this meant that Love was morally reprehensible and vile - another form of constriction.

The other component of my old model of love was that love would be the only thing keeping me stable and the most important thing to me. This meant that the prospect of having my love not returned or love not being there was even more harmful. And, as previously mentioned, because it was deemed 'impossible' for Love to occur, any remote inkling of Love was shut down immediately because it was going to be a large problem in the future.

 

That was the of the world before the Rise. Each relationship was giving no chance and proto-Love was constantly abused and told to get lost. But in these dire circumstances one Love was unable to be stopped. And the bearer and beauty of this love was Krystal Goguen. With no offensive could the 'beast' be fought back and with each day an inch or so of ground was lost the Horde of Happiness. Scared of the meaning of this and my inept defense skills, I did what I thought would work equally well: Ignore it and persuade myself with logic. It was at this time that I justified to myself that it was not honorable to give up a piece of yourself and thus I was fighting temptation in a holy quest for truth. It was also at this time that I was the worst to Krystal I had ever been, "But the [Love] is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown [her]." (Emerson)

The only weapon the wicked have against Love is to refuse it. This feels very Biblical to me because souls in Hell are those who have rejected God's love in favour of their own isolation and what they think is "Freedom," and this hurts God because his love is refused. Similarly, while refusing the love Krystal and I share it was like a living Hell of my own making, but this inferno - I told myself - was the pain of truth and it would let up as I left behind the defective thoughts of a romantic. The hurt only got worse and the longing for Love only stronger as my soul had tasted it but was taken away in midstream. Then a shattering thing happen: Love seemed to give up.

Suddenly my life support was gone and the trickle of hope that once made it through defenses and battles became non-existent and torment was now king of my domain. Graspingly I searched for something to replace the Love but when there was nothing there I realized what I have written about here: Love is the seed from which Freedom is born and without Love there can be no fruitful or free Life. Any attempt to refuse love is refuse Freedom and Life and let Anger, Hate, and Selfish own your soul. So, like a dying sinner I was repentant to Love.

Writing this I begin to understand why Dante chose the soul's struggle through Hell, cleansing in Purgatory, and happiness in Heaven. In the Christian tradition, I think the end of your mortal life is like when God stops fighting your defenses and lets you make your final choice after a glimpse of what is to come. Those who choose Hell are the ones who convince themselves that Freedom can have no influence outside of desire and refuse to believe that Love is the foundation of Life. Those in Purgatory are those who spent some time fighting with Love and did not completely honour it, including those who repented at the last moment. And finally, Heaven is reserved for the continued Love of those who accepted it in Life.

 

So, like a repented sinner I seek to cleanse myself of my past transgressions against Love. But Love, like the traditional God, does not erase Sin - it forgives it. The harm I have done to Love cannot be undone but it can be forgiven if Love does not succumb to the same things that I was thought were more important than Love. Hopefully the allegory of after-life is not to exact because that would give me a wait of thirty times the length of my life before I accepted Love before it would allow me to continue in my quest to honor it.

I seek to honor Love by: trying to understand it better; trying to understand where and how I have failed; and trying to leave something for another who is threatened by Love so they can see my mistakes and not make them their own.

 

A final comment that seems pertinent: In The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a man has a wonderful dream on the night he plans to kill himself and this changes his life forever. He saw what good there could be and learned to refused is dismal view of the world. But everyone in the real world tries to convince to ignore it because it was just a dream. And he says:

They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream - oh, it revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of power!

That dream is Love. It gives a cold world warmth and a dark world light. But sometimes you only feel it when you need it the most.

 

And a note on the theological content on this writing: I imagine it might weird some out. I do not believe in God or have much faith for that matter, but I think that reading and attempting to understand all parts of history is essential to being a well tempered mind. And the reason I give fruit to the stories of God with regards to Love is not because I think that God is good and loves and thus is the prototype for all of Love. I think it the other way around, Love was first understood in depth by Christians who imbued the core elements of Love within an eternal spirit and named it God. So I don't feel like I'm preaching, I'm saying: Look someone else said what I am trying to say. Like refusing Love on the basis of misunderstanding, refusing the benefit of religious studies simply because you do not believe is foolish in my opinion. Knowledge and wisdom should be cherished no matter the source.