Adult love begins with the recognition that others are not here to meet our unmet childhood needs. That’s not a tragedy—it’s the beginning of true relatedness and intimacy. Adult love means relinquishing omnipotence. We must give up the fantasy that someone out there will finally “see” us, “complete” us, or rescue us from our inner world of abandonment.
@BrightonPsych
3 responses to “Adult Love”
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When I was 9 years old I was allowed to go on a two week trip with another family. My mother had packed me a bag that weighed maybe 3 or 4 times more than I myself weighed. When we left the house, a friend’s mother came to pick me up. When she saw me weighted down, she clucked and soothingly helped me unpack to just what I would need. She set the other things aside in her car and told me she would repack the bag the day I came home. We didn’t bother my mother. That is when I finally understood the humanity and the frailty of my own parents. And that understanding with time extended to others- the leaders, the authorities, even the oldest elderly person. I realized we are all just human- whether we are rich or poor, old or young, powerful or helpless.
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This is beautiful.
Also, if you understood it at 9, you are some sort of a genius. It’s extraordinary.
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No one has accused me of being a genius before, but thank you anyway.
None of us has omnipotence to relinquish. We have only the delusion of it perhaps, to lose. But that longing to be seen, to be understood and completed is not a fantasy- anymore than thirst is a hallucination. There is water and we need water. So we all need to be seen, to be understood and completed just as our bodies need water to function.
Love is real- as real if not even more real than the air we breathe. And the source is as real if not more real than the banks and the delta of the Nile. Those will dry up, but the source of Love will never fail.
It’s a painful thing to realize that what we love the most in “the natural” is passing fair. To see and know that your parents do not belong on a pedestal and neither does your best beloved- not even your child. And certainly not your own self. But there is Someone who deserves and is worthy of the highest praise. Someone whose greatness crushes the very pedestal that anyone might try to put in His rightful place. And that is the Someone who Saves. In fact, the only One who can and will and does.
I had immense pleasure and joy to read Revelation over the winter and the spring. And realize that the fairy tale monsters that were used to terrify us as children are toothless and that the jaded lie that- “there is no one coming on a white horse to rescue us” is a lie. There are impostors- but there can only be impostors of something that is Real. May you always know what is real and may you never fall prey to a delusion- even if all the world follows after it. Jesus blesses you & your household today, and your readers, too.
“Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.”
Colossians 3:12
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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