Day 5 — Do You Need, Desire Or Love?
Desire often starts a relationship and love takes over to keep it going. Desire can leave, creating a sterile relationship with no core. The balance between love and desire is critical in building our life with another.
Filling the Void
Need can drive a relationship into the ground. Filling the void in ourselves through another is neediness not desire. It creates co-dependence and destroys the freedom of an inter-dependent relationship. This is common with multiple marriages and affairs.
Do you leave need behind and simply love? Do you love in a way that absorbs desire but doesn't need it? Do you simply love her for who she is? Love is central to any relationship. Love should flow from you to the other person without demanding anything in return. Love just exists and grows.
Men love because they are afraid of themselves, afraid of the loneliness that lives in them, and need someone in whom they can lose themselves as smoke loses itself in the sky.
My Loneliness
During the first few years of living on my own, after leaving my parental home, I felt lonely and lost. I had many friends and colleagues but nobody close to me.
I realise now that I felt a deep need to fill a void. I found someone who made me feel different, made me feel wanted. I hung onto that, it was what I understood to be love. It took many years for me to clarify my emotions, years of turmoil and heartache.
Eventually I was able to see that the relationship was not based on pure love, it was based on need, from both sides. Realising this caused heartache and guilt, but it also created freedom, freedom to find love.
I now live in a new inter-dependent relationship of love and desire. We love to be with, and around, each other, but we can easily be apart. I do not have any neediness around my love and desire. I deal with my needs myself, I resolve my internal issues through help and support, so my love remains clear and pure.
Challenge
- In your relationships, either current or past, what was the nature of your love? What was the balance between love and desire? Can you see a separation between them?
- What needs do you have that are, or were, being fulfilled by your relationships? Do, or did, they get in the way or confuse matters?
- What needs do you have that are, or were, not being fulfilled? Do, or did, that cause you concern or do you deal with them in other ways?
- What would you feel if you were, or did you feel when you were, apart? Feel this deeply and use it to understand the basis of your relationships.