Falling in Love & Finding Your Passions
Would you agree with the following passage? I think there's some truth in it.
We spend days feeling frustrated because we are not doing what we feel is missing in our lives. Perhaps it can be likened to how it feels to being a part from the person we love. Being apart from the actions and the people we dream of loving --
I think we know what we internally feel is missing from our lives... I think we have to recognise it takes time to clearly identify these things, and clearly seek them out. Like the process we go through with the persons we are to fall in love with - finding our passions seems to need taking time, from getting to know further, exploring, discovering more, making mistakes unto and with. Every step may have a pre-disposition to be tentative, like holding hands, kissing and making love; until we find a point where the love just grows
All we have to be is patient with ourselves and our finding/discovering/learning/loving or even loving our passions again.
May this excerpt taken from the works of Adrienne Rich and Adam Phillips awaken insight.
“An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word 'love' – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other." But among the dualities that lend love both its electricity and its exasperation – the interplay of thrill and terror, desire and disappointment, longing and anticipatory loss – is also the fact that our pathway to this mutually refining truth must pass through a necessary fiction: We fall in love not just with a person wholly external to us but with a fantasy of how that person can fill what is missing from our interior lives.”
“All love stories are frustration stories... To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had (of one’s formative frustrations, and of one’s attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction. It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing – nothing comes of nothing – but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies.
However much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence. Falling in love, finding your passion, are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by.”
