QA190 QUESTION: Why, in my love-life, when I’m not relating to someone that I’m really attracted to, it becomes distracting to almost everything that I do. Yet, when I am relating to someone that I’m really attracted to, I act out not wanting them, and the minute I feel the slightest rejection, I cut off entirely from the whole relationship. I just won’t have anything to do with them anymore.
ANSWER: When you are attracted to someone, there is, in addition to the normal healthy desires and needs for mutuality, an old unfinished business in your striving and in your drive for union. The expectation you have toward the other person is not only enormous but completely unfulfillable, unrealistic. But you do not see this.
You are still trying to block this out and to rationalize and to believe that what you expect is quite normal – and it can be falsified in that way. But when you really go very deeply into these feelings and into your true and honest expectations, you will see that they are unfulfillable by any human being.
Another part of you knows this – since everyone knows really, on one level, everything about himself – but sometimes the message that comes through of this deeper knowledge is then garbled. It is misread. But your knowledge, your deeper self, your real innermost being, says to you, “This is impossible. You cannot obtain this.”
This creates, on the surface, such a tension and such a fear that it becomes unbearable, that it kills your feelings, that you withdraw, that you say, “It is not worth it – all this hope and fear of disappointment, and then inevitable disappointment and the feeling of absolute despair that I encounter at the thought of the disappointment is too much. I cannot go into it.” And then you withdraw your feelings, and you withdraw at least yourself from the person in question. This is really what is behind it.
In your case I would advocate that, in your work, you look very carefully and allow yourself to be really and truly irrational and not make sense, and express your expectations. The more leeway you give yourself to express the impossible – but the true expectation as it is in you – the more you will be able to see what you impose upon a relationship. You will see that this imposing makes its realization impossible, and makes it fearful and too problematic to cope with. Then, of course, you can go further and examine the inner reasons why this is so.
But let us not be premature here. Begin on this level, at this particular juncture of your path. Begin on this level, to truly express to yourself your expectations as they really are, your demands as they really are. Do not whitewash them. Do not rationalize and explain them away or minimize them. Truly express them!
In connection with this, I would also advocate that you meditate specifically for help and guidance that you can find the possibility to be more committed to the processes of getting well. If you really want this commitment – and commit yourself to wanting it, as it were, to begin with – circumstances will conspire to help you with this, because this must be the first expression. And you can be quite sure that everything will be guided in such a way that you can do it.
But when man puts the cart before the horse in this respect, and at first says, “It is impossible, I cannot,” his whole life will be in such a way that his commitment will be only half, at best, and therefore the results will be commensurate. So my advice is that the first step should be, “What is most important in my life? It is possible the universe can yield to me under my present life circumstances and conditions, the possibility that I take care, first of all, of my getting healthy and whole.” If you want this and if you have faith that this is indeed possible, everything else that will come will help you.
