Perfect Love

2009-08-02T07:10:17+01:00

Perfect love …. Some initial thoughts.

outside the spiritual realm I struggle with the idea of “perfect love”. Literature and the media would have us believe in some kind of romantic nirvana where we can meet someone and fall in love with them and find the love we have always longed for and never had; a love which is always unselfish and which holds us, without fail, at the centre of things; and under whose warm glow we can grow and blossom. Of course it is what we should have experienced at times in our infancy and childhood. And of course that would have been far from perfect too. Our parents are fallible and come to parenting with their own troubles and confusions. Also it’s not something we would have had for very long and something of which we were disillusioned rather sooner than we would ever have wanted. Hopefully we had enough moments of this blissful loving holding and a gentle enough disillusionment that we become able to live with good enough loving and can begin to enjoy the benefits of ordinary imperfect loving, the main benefit of which is its mutuality.

But I do like the idea that love can cast out fear. Loving for me includes understanding, the ability to suspend one’s own certainty and one’s own perspective and the willingness to enter into another’s world. To be understood; to have one’s feelings and struggles understood, rather than judged or swept away by another’s perspective is confidence building. In relationships it builds trust and a readiness to share what is troubling and shameful. To feel safe to do this with another person, builds a truly strong relationship in which fear cannot set root. I wish I were better at it than I am. It’s what I strive for.

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Perfect Love