Ages of Love

Love and relationships are the most complex experiences we can meet in life. Unfortunately many of us have never grown beyond the baby or adolescent love stage. If you recognise and admit it you can start moving on. But unfortunately our culture tends to believe it is normal to stay at an infantile level of love.

The following stages of love may help in defining this.

Baby love:

The great lessons of love have their beginnings in the womb or at mother’s breast – if she offers it. The lessons or etch into us at our very foundations and colour our whole life. They either lead us to either be a person who is sure of their own value and stands with something of value to share with others – or a person who is forever lost in the great emotions of jealousy or fear of abandonment. At this level of love they are completely dependent upon the loved person for one’s needs, physical, emotional and social. Great anger, jealousy or pain if the loved one relates to anyone else, is lost, or threatens to leave. Also not being able to mature beyond this age may lead to men seeking pornography or even being too immature to develop a moral nature and have murderous instincts that are natural to young children.

Birth has not yet been mentioned, and without someone there to meet us, and in meeting give years of their life to supporting and nurturing us during infancy, we would not survive. Not only is the giving of food/the breast and protection necessary, but also, if we are to grow into a reasonably well adjusted and happy adult, that a caring person, and many others, also need to give a lot of themselves.

Somewhere in this giving and supporting of life lies a more fundamental definition of love. Birth is an introduction to this. Birth demonstrates to us some wonderful things about the mechanisms of love we might take for granted, but that are true at many levels. The forming baby links to its mother through the umbilical cord. This remarkable link brings nourishment to the forming child, and is an enormous self giving of the mother’s being to that of her baby. In a very real way, the umbilical cord is the flow of life. If it were cut without any substitute the baby would die. This is the world of the baby, which is a deeply feeling, emotional and responsive world – It is our first level of love.

Many of us fail to develop beyond this first level of love and in an adult this enormous feeling reaction may also be felt at a time of emotional withdrawal of the partner, even if there is no sign of them withdrawing physically. There is a desire for unconditional love and a need to be always with the loved one. In an adult with this level of love, sex may be a part of the relationship, but the main need is a bonded connection. This is sometimes felt as a need to have the loved person want you as much, or as desperately, as you want/need them. Obviously many people never develop beyond this level.

Example: A man come to visit me as a psychotherapist, having driven many miles for the visit. He told me that his wife threatens to end their marriage unless he can stop his enormous jealousy every time she simply looks at or talks to another man. He admitted that in fact he has such reactions. So I asked him when he remembered having similar feelings. He sat quiet for a while and then said, “When I was five.” I then took time to help him see that such feelings were natural for children of that age because for millions of years any sign if losing ones mother meant desertion and death. That was why one would crazilly try to keep the bond intact. If you hadn’t out grown it you would be driven by the same enormous feelings in any relationship.

I explained that I too had suffered enormous jealousy and had to use what I called Parenting Yourself – Fortunately I had some insight into what was happening as I experienced all the drama of feelings a child feels in relationship with its mother. I met intense feelings that drove me to want to be near my loved mother/wife all the time. I would follow her from room to room like a dog for fear of losing her – not only had I cut off from my mother, but she had sowed the seed of terror that she would abandon me. Also for the first time in my life I felt intense jealousy and would turn up unexpectedly at the house to see if my new wife was with another man. The tricks of survival I had learned in childhood also surfaced. So, I had to learn to parent myself in way that I could raise myself into a non dependent, non-grasping and non-jealous adult. I had a sort of mantra which I held in mind when things got tough – “Love without grasping – Power without breaking or bending other lives – Wisdom through which love can flow.”

Of course that meant moving into and through emotional adolescence. Believe me, none of it was easy on my wife. Our poor partner gets hit by all the miseries of childhood we meet in our growth.

Remember that the first lesson of love was with ones mother, and whatever happened between you built your very first lessons of love, and they are the foundations upon which and any further feelings of love are built or crumble.

Possibly the greatest fear, that can trigger great anger or an enormous desire to placate or earn love, is the threat or fear of being abandoned. See Beware of Love 

An example of how young children feel about being supplanted by another can be seen in this young boy who was born to a native woman whose world was the jungle. The boy was here first born and was raised with all care such mothers give to their  child. But she became pregnant again when her son was about four. When the baby was born the boy became slowly anxious. Then one day looking at the baby he said, “Can’t we take it into the jungle and leave it their.” Quoted from a BBC documentary.

Many adults in today’s world never manage to grow beyond the baby or child level of love.

Adolescent love:

Initial uncertainty or clumsiness concerning emotional and sexual contact. Desire to explore many relationships. Still finding out what ones boundaries and needs are. Great sexual drive. Partner will probably be loved for dreamers own needs – for example the dreamer wants a family and loves the partner to gain that end; the dreamer loves the partner because in that way they can get away from the parental home. Great romantic feelings and spontaneous love which are not easy to maintain in face of difficulties.

Sexual Love

Having sex is often called ‘Making Love’ — but often it has nothing to do with love, but is an instinctive urge as ancient and as powerful as the urge to survive. It is in fact not created by our self, but our awareness is possessed by it. Love is the overall caring and support of another, and sometimes love may enter into it, but in many cases such as rape or as casual sex, it has no place.

Adult or Unconditional love:

Growing sense of recognising needs of partner yet not denying ones own. Ability to be something for the partner’s sake without losing ones own independence or will. Becoming aware of the issues that colour or influence relationship, and meeting them as partners. Independence and closeness together. Caring sexual partners through discovering each others needs and vulnerability. It can lead to needs and directions that are not considered natural. For instance many people desperately want a partner, but those who have developed an adult love can live easily without such need.

At this level of love we offer freedom to those we love, and of course we therefore expect freedom in return. But that can be very painful to those who are still in other ages of love.

My grandmother told me, that God has given us the gift of love, and that was a special thing, like a gift of the spirit. She led me to the sense that this gift is like a potential. It isn’t something fully formed. It is a rare thing, and difficult in our world to fully live it, to make it real in the physical world. But this is what the gift is for, to make real, to live and let it shine. She said that although we will have to work at it, it can be done, and that this love can bring us a sort of happiness few have.

But it is important to realise that we are all dual beings. Which exist strung between enormous duality – sleep and waking, male and female, pain and pleasure, light and darkness, life and death, and death and resurrection. To be whole we need to accept and meet these opposites. In the pursuit of love we need to recognise that we must integrate the other gender to become whole.

What happens in a relationship that doesn’t integrate ones own inner opposite is that when we take a person into a close partner we actually integrate them into us as our male or female. Then if the relationship breaks up it feels like a part of us has been torn out – painfully. If we have become whole however, not such pain can occur, for we have our own inner male/female. See archetype of the anima and archetype of the animus

 “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male shall not be male, and the female shall not be female: . . . then you will enter [the kingdom].” Quoted from ‘The Gnostic Apostle Thomas’

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An Old Mans Thoughts

Love and attraction for a partner are full of strange feelings. These feeling are made weird largely by the ideas and feelings we have inherited from our culture – love for ever lasting; the Right one; Soul Mates – and other strange ideas.

From the view of Spirit that I have tried to look at life from, we are all whole and have no need of sexual partners or marriage.

“..for people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.” Matthew 22:30

But life in the body is a different matter, and because the physical world is all split into dualism/opposites, and because we are mammalian animals who have only recently attained a measure of self awareness, we have  millions of years of instinct in us to seek a partner.

That means we find self awareness very stressful for we are bombarded with our instincts to have sex, and at the same time have personal awareness built out of cultural beliefs which in many women are twisted into huge romantic dreams. WOW!!! It is the way it keeps us looking.

In human life our unbalanced life, caused by believing and feeling that we have to have a partner, makes us constantly search for a man/woman. That is fine and natural, but it is turned into a bloody mess by our amazing romantic fantasies, or by neurotic tendencies caused by the misplaced sexual urge. For as far as I understand from three or four partners, and several love affairs, and from looking at people’s dreams of love, the thing we are really seeking is our own wholeness. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/archetype-of-the-animus-the-male-in-the-female or http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/archetype-of-the-anima-the-female-in-the-male/

Of course traumas we  received as a baby or child screws us up in relationships sometimes for a lifetime. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/trauma/#Kicks

So we can make do with a decent partner because it takes the edge off the search for wholeness. If we get too deep into believing we have found it in marriage, it tears us apart when it ends. But if you adjust your feelings to see a partner as a good friend and sexual partner without getting yourself screw up by jealousy or feelings about cheating, or all the other things people even commit suicide over, you are onto a good thing.

Beware of Love

The following stages of love may help in defining this.

Baby love:

Completely dependent upon the loved person for ones needs, physical, emotional and social. Great anger, jealousy or pain if the loved one relates to anyone else, is lost, or threatens to leave. In an adult this enormous feeling reaction may also be felt at a time of emotional withdrawal of the partner, even if there is no sign of them withdrawing physically. There is a desire for unconditional love and a need to be always with the loved one. In an adult with this level of love, sex may be a part of the relationship, but the main need is a bonded connection. This is sometimes felt as a need to have the loved person want you as much, or as desperately, as you want/need them. Obviously many people never develop beyond this level.

Possibly the greatest fear, that can trigger great anger or an enormous desire to placate or earn love, is the threat or fear of being abandoned.

Adolescent love:

Initial uncertainty or clumsiness concerning emotional and sexual contact. Desire to explore many relationships. Still finding out what ones boundaries and needs are. Great sexual drive. Partner will probably be loved for dreamers own needs – for example the dreamer wants a family and loves the partner to gain that end; the dreamer loves the partner because in that way they can get away from parental home. Great romantic feelings and spontaneous love which are not easy to maintain in face of difficulties.

Many women often remaing at this age, and search for romantic teenage love dreams their whole life, causing much emotional pain. Men may not move from the very genital phase of this period, so go on a life long search for the next woman’s vagina to fill with their dreamed of big penis and great manhood.

Adult love:

Growing sense of recognising needs of partner yet not denying ones own. Ability to be something for the partner’s sake without losing ones own independence or will. Becoming aware of the issues that colour or influence relationship, and meeting them as partners. Independence and closeness together. Caring sexual partners through discovering each others needs and vulnerability. It can lead to needs and directions that are not considered natural. For instance many people desperately want a partner, but those who have developed an adult love can live easily without such need.

At this level of love we offer freedom to those we love, and of course we therefore expect freedom in return. But that can be very painful to those who are still in other ages of love. Very few people grow beyond the baby stage, therefore the pain when a partner dies or leaves.

Example: As I examine these feelings I don’t see it to have any relevance to the ideas of male dominance. I feel it is equally true for women. It is not the case of, look, I am your man, therefore I have sexual rights to you. It has got nothing to do with that. In fact, that is out of date. The relationship should be nothing like that. The relationship that I sense arises out of a feeling for and caring for each other and being mutually supportive. It arises out of recognising each other’s actual human needs for warmth, for sex, for being affirmed. If we want to call that love, well and good. Except that love is sometimes often associated with possessiveness, domination, and childlike dependence on one’s partner. To me, this new sort of love – or maybe it’s an old sort of love – is a type of organic Christianity. It is a type of love and care that takes account of one’s real needs as a person and as a member of society.

But it is important to realise that we are all dual beings. We exist strung between enormous duality – sleep and waking, male and female, pain and pleasure, light and darkness, life and death, and death and resurrection. To be whole we need to accept and meet these opposites. In the pursuit of love we need to recognise that that we must integrate the other gender to become whole.

What happens in a relationship that doesn’t integrate one’s own inner opposite is that when we take a person into a close partner we actually integrate them into us as our male or female. Then if the relationship breaks up it feels like a part of us has been torn out – painfully. If we have become whole however, not such pain can occur, for we have our own inner male/female. See archetype of the anima and archetype of the animus

People say they are falling in love or that they are ‘making love’ when actually they are having sex, often without any care for each other and are driven by the instinctive drive to mate. But unlike many animals and birds which are very choosy about their mate we are lost in dreams and desire for sex.

Most of us so not fall in love but fall into infantile or childlike behaviour and so in films and the media it is shown as normal to ‘fall’in that way and normal to suffer the pains of childhood – most likely through not being mothered as the baby’s instincts tell it it should be. See A Pygmy Model for Beautiful Parenting

Beware of Love

Okay, so it’s a strange title, Beware of Love, but it’s true. When somebody says they love you they are usually telling a big lie.

What they really mean is, “I will be nice to you and share myself with you as long as you do exactly what I want you to do.”

In detail this means that I will have all those exotic and erotic feelings about you as long as you don’t dare look at another person, and as long as you fulfil all my needs of dependency, fear, and all the other hang-ups I don’t really admit to myself.

That is the baby stage of love.

The word love in the English language is a crazy word. If you look up its meaning it simply says that you love somebody, or care about them. That is really no definition at all. And when most people tell you they love you, what they really mean is, “I will let all my childhood dependency, unfulfilled need for love and attention that I didn’t get from my parents; and all my fears of being abandoned, all my need to possess somebody and have them do what I wish, and of course all my sexual needs, be projected onto you”. That is one hell of a load to put on someone – and to carry.

Most of us have not actually matured to the point of being capable of love. The very roots of love arise out of the incredible survival drives of a baby totally desiring its mother to give utter and complete attention to it. Without that attention, millions of years of survival in harsh environments, tell the baby it will die. So it holds on to that connection with its mother or carer with every jungle trick it knows. These includes tantrums, acting out sickness, sulking, anger, emotional cut off to see if the parent still cares; and if you haven’t outgrown those, then you will use them in your adult relationships.

Quite honestly, few of us have outgrown them, so we are mostly five or six year olds when it comes to the business of love. I remember a man driving many miles to consult me because, as he said, “My wife is going to leave me if I do not change.” He explained that his wife said that he was so jealous that if she talked to another man it would cause a row. So I asked him to remember the first time he felt like that. It took him a while before he said, “I was about five”. I then explained that he had not learnt to grow emotionally since then. I also explained that I, in my mid forties, had married again, and discovered much to my horror that I had regressed to a four years old in relationship to my wife, and I needed to be near her and follow her around. Realising what was happening I started leaning to grow, and went through childhood, teenage and on. the man went on his way with a new intent.

Often we make a satellite character of the person we “love”. In other words we try to make them swing around us in the way that suits our emotional and physical needs. Notice how many people have breakdowns, depression, or even commit suicide when their partner leaves them, goes with another person or dies. Those things point to pretty desperate internal situations – in other words the baby level of feeling response.

What ‘lovers’ are really saying is, “I will love you if – if you don’t go against any of my childhood needs – if you remain my possession – if you don’t do those things that remind me I am a vulnerable baby and open up that incredible pit of feeling.”

Mature love is when we accept that the person we care for is a separate and unique individual with their own needs and directions in life. We do not love them “if”. We love them simply because they are who they are, because we respect and admire them, and we allow them the freedom that hopefully we give ourselves. This is a level of unconditional love. It doesn’t place the conditions on the other person of only being loved or lovable when they remain our satellite. When we do that we make of them a possession, somebody manipulated by our own moods, emotional blackmail, or underhanded tricks. If we are grown up in love and our partner leaves us or goes with someone else, having matured we will have already seen that as a possibility (come on, look around. There are only a few marriages that survive). It will mean difficult changes, but not ‘heartbreak’, not depression or long years of grief. It will also mean that because we love that person we will continue to be interested in their welfare and be glad if they are happy.

To grow up and become a mature lover takes courage. Each time we try to possess the other person, lash out at them through jealousy, curtail their life through our fears and insecurities, we need to stop and say, “This is childhood behaviour. I will not let this anger, possessiveness, jealousy or emotional blackmail be perpetrated on the person I presumably love. I will face this and deal with it as a problem in my character, and will not rationalise and excuse it by saying to my partner that I love them. That is an underhanded excuse. It is not love.”

Love for someone can be a strange thing, wonderful but sometimes painful. I have traced love back into the deeps of dreams and myself, and I found that although love has many faces, your mother or  partner for instance, it has in the end only one source and it flows through all if we allow it. So don’t be hard on yourself, but let love flow through until it becomes one great love that is everyone – it is Life itself.

So, how about it? How about growing up?

Also we are always alone. It is that which drives us on to seek others so frantically. If we love, it must be out of this realisation of aloneness and death, of not being, of the Nothing. Then human existence is seen as a poignant togetherness against the nothingness that is actually everything. All importance and rigidness drop away, and there is only a tenderness.

See Learning to Love