Purifying Your Psyche: Letting Go Of Frivolous Romantic Searching
I have always wondered why society is rife with loneliness and romantic despair. I have seen it within the faces of others, and have had to admit that it at times exists within myself. But why? You are told that you need to “love yourself” or focus on your goals or something and eventually the right one will come along. Although that advice may be true, I don’t think it ever helped the majority of us. We can tell ourselves this and try to instill self-love, but that same desire for companionship usually remains. This leads us to feel needy, a feeling I don’t think any of us would like to have. It seems we must take a different approach to finding peace with ourselves and escaping the terrible pain of romantic longing.
Enlightenment through Understanding
I think one of the first steps to escaping excessive loneliness and romantic desire is through a deep understanding of love and romance. There are two extremes that people can tend to tread towards in their view of love: they can either have an over idealized and unrealistic view or one of nihilistic disgust and distaste. I think we must have a balanced view of love. We must recognize that it is full of sweetness, but also full of pain. Maybe divorce is caused when we divorce sex from sacrifice, sweetness from service. Perhaps when we understand that love is a means, and not an end, we will begin to treat it as something that we can live without, at least for a while. I have found that this balanced approach has filled me with a peace with myself, and dispelled any excessive desire for love. In a way, a little disenchantment with romance is essential to experience true enchantment with that which is actually real. By recognizing those ideas that we have fabricated in our minds, thanks in large part to society, we will not be as burdened by any amount of waiting.
Make Love to the World
If we cannot currently make love to a person, there is always the opportunity to make love to the world. In his book The Way of the Superior Man, David Deida talks about feeling the world as if it were a woman, and making love to it with every breath and every longing. In this way, we don’t have to be burdened by internal groans of desire, but can rather feel the desire in all of its entirety, and make it our principal pleasure. Then the world around can become a means of poetic captivity, and the beauty of those around a reflection of the perfect symphony of people in the different melodies of spiritual and physical speech. Try the following practice. In the times when you meet the passerby that charm you, the ones that attract you, thrill you, captivate you, do not suppress the desire, but rather allow yourself to feel all of your longing. In this way, it is not wasted, nor held in, but is allowed to return to the source from which it came from. There is no shame in feeling desire for love, as it is one of the most beautiful aspects of the human condition.
Talk to those that Charm You
This is a practice I wish I followed more, and has been most helpful in times where the voices of lonely disconnect have filled my mind. It is most helpful to talk to those that, in the past, where only mechanisms of unfulfilled want, of mental fantasies, and never-to-be romances. It would be nice if those that we wished to love would always love us in return, but part of the reality of life is the fact that oftentimes this will not happen. The best way then, to let go of any intense obsession, or worthless fantasy, is to bring the fantasy into the reality of the world. A very important thing may happen. First, when you talk to the person you so longed for, you might find that they were not what you expected. I mean this not in a negative sense, but you may find that the god-like figure that you made of them in your head, was really just in your head. Then it will not feel like such a burden to leave them. Then you will not keep yourself awake at night wondering what could be, when you have brought the fantasy into reality. It is one of the most helpful remedies for what I call romantic anxiety, which is what I like to call the feeling when you meet or see someone you long for, and are unable to meet that longing. At least by talking to the person, you will find something tangible, and if not more than a passing acquaintance, it will be a pleasurable moment to cherish within the day.
Finding self acceptance and personal intimacy is never an easy task, but we definitely don’t have to feel miserable about our state of non-companionship. Start to vibe differently, from a state of want to that of fullness, and perhaps you will attract the love you search for. Until then, ceasing the romantic search will free your heart to love not in the future, but now, and to experience, at least in part, the ecstasy of life.
Deida, David. The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire. 2017
