Love of Self and Other

I yearn for connection with Another. It seems to be an intrinsic yearning of my soul, the ultimate purpose of my life. At least one of them.

Mostly, what I tend to be interested in is relationships. I ask myself the questions, Who am I? What am I? What is another? What is life? What is love? What is this that yearns for connection? And when I contemplate these questions, they all ultimately merge into the same thing--a journey into relationship with Self and Another.

My yearning for Another seems to be a constant, as is my yearning for Self. When I am disconnected from Self, I seek connection with Another. When I am connected with Self, I also seek connection with Another. When I'm disconnected, I have the tendency to want Another to give me what I am not giving myself. Without sufficient connection with Self, I try to use Another to meet my own selfish needs. Needs intended to be met by Self.

This type of striving for connection with Another is exhausting. It is drains and demands. It asks Another to dedicate their energy and attention to feeding my hunger, a hunger that they can never satisfy. These demands on Another become endless and devouring and tax their goodwill towards the relationship.

Connection with, and love of Self, allows for a pure and unconditional connection with, and love of Another. It makes me more capable of loving Another for the Truth of what they are, rather than what I perceive they can give me. This places me in a position of connecting with and loving Another because I want to share joy, not because I need something from them. When I am connected with Self, my connection with Another stems from a pure unadulterated desire to love, which manifests very differently than a love that comes from a lack of unmet needs and the perception that Another can meet those needs for me. This love is free and spontaneous. It's dedicated to growth and it feeds upon itself.

The importance of how I choose to connect and love has become a very powerful understanding for me. As my connection with, and love of my husband has grown and evolved over the years, I started noticing many subtleties in the way we loved one another. Our love was intense and passionate, as well as safe and nurturing. I also observed that much of my love for him was attached to my needs, due to what seemed to stem from a disconnection with Self. I wanted him to take care me, to give me what I was unable to give myself. I also noticed that his love for me was oftentimes more about his needs for validation and security, rather than an actual desire to just love me in the totality of who I truly was. Although I felt loved and cherished, I also felt trapped by what he needed me to be. I felt a shift coming. We had such a comfortable sweetness in our relationship that a significant part of me resisted the beckoning change. A significant part in him too!

An overwhelming sensation of suffocation and unrelenting quest for freedom emerged. As sweet and comforting as our love had been for many years, I experienced a growing uneasiness in our attempts at giving and receiving love and connection to each other that we did not first possess in ourselves. I was no longer willing to demand, nor be demanded of, to give love in the attempt to fill an emptiness that originated in lack of Self.
All this was coupled with a deep and abiding love for my husband that was at the core of any misconceptions we had about how to love, or twisted in the kinks of the actual practice of the loving we were engaging in. We were best friends and I was committed to our love and marriage in particular, as well as the sustainability of love and relationship in general. I was also relentless of my pursuit of a polyamorous lifestyle.

Back during this time, a friend and potential lover once explained his hesitancy to act on our mutual love and sexual attraction. He and my husband had had several conversations and various interactions in which my husband's love for me, and his jealously of my love for my friend was quite apparent. My friend said to me, "He just loves you so much, I can't bear to come between the two of you." I responded, "Yes, I know how much he loves me, and I him. But the fear he is expressing and the demands he is making are not the results of his love." I refuse to support delusions in Self or Another just because those delusions masquerade as love.