romantic relationships - Involvement vs. Entanglement

Let’s pretend, living here in the states, you decide to take a 3-week trip by yourself to Costa Rica. On the first day of your vacation, you stop to have a drink in a bar adjacent to the pool and you meet the most attractive, engaging, charismatic, intriguing person you have ever met.  Everything about the person draws you in; their physicality and physical presence, their mind, their wit, and charm.  Unfortunately, he or she just so happens to be from New Zealand, the complete opposite end of the planet; what feels like light-years away from you. 

Upon meeting this person, you engage them in conversation. In doing so, you become totally engrossed with this person to the extent that day turns into night. You cannot believe how fast the day has gone by. It's all a blur. After hours and hours of engaging in conversation, laughter, and shared stories, the two of you part company and decide to retire to your separate rooms, agreeing to meet the following morning for breakfast. You absolutely cannot wait to see this person again. This person seems perfect for you!!!

After reflecting on the amazing day, the two of you had, you start to think about the rest of the vacation. Suddenly you come to your senses. You think to yourself, “What am I doing? What am I thinking? This individual lives on the complete opposite side of the planet. Am I nuts? Okay, so I meet them for breakfast tomorrow and then what? What, we spend the rest of our vacation together every day? I mean, it would be amazing . . . but, this vacation eventually has to come to an end, and then what? We go back to our respective homes, our respective lives? We are never going to see each other ever again. I know if I spend any more time with this person, I’m only going to get emotionally entangled and ultimately hurt because, as insane as this is to admit, I think I’m falling for this person. This is craaaaaaaazy!!!”

Taking a moment to be so logical about your self-proclaimed insanity, you convince yourself that you would rather just avoid the hassle, the emotional entanglement, and the heartache that will transpire at the end of the vacation if you choose to explore this. You decide you are going to avoid this person for the next 20 days, ignoring their text messages, their phone calls, and any and all attempts to contact you. A clean break will be in your own best interest.

The Trappings of the Mind

Let’s explore what just took place. Riveted to the screen in the theatre of your mind as a victim of its endless musing, you’ve created an entire fantasy in your head of who this person is, what they could mean to you, where you will end up emotionally, and how everything will meet its tragic end. In other words, you have written an entire script in your head that you are now attempting to project onto your life with all kinds of emotional implications and trappings.

It’s a tragedy that as children we are ALWAYS PRESENT. We know nothing outside of the moment we’re immersed in. But as adults, we are almost never present. We are either ruminating on memories from our past or projecting ourselves into the future, creating novellas in our head and predicting how are our life will unfold.

But, there is another way this could have been approached.

In eastern mysticism, it is taught, that the only LOVE that exists is love without attachment. Anything else is codependency. Here in our Western society people tend to think being untethered or unattached is to be uninvolved. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What if in this scenario you chose to become a little less calculating, a little less strategic, a little less guarded, and chose to step beyond your fears and just remain present, neither drifting back into the past, remembering broken relationships and how they crippled you, nor projecting yourself into the future trying to predict a plausible outcome. What if you decided to simply remain present allowing each moment to unfold as it will and be whatever it is, suspending all expectations and resisting the urge to make it something that it’s not? 

Choosing to become fully immersed in each moment with this person, knowing that it is all coming to an end in three weeks is anything but un-involvement. To the contrary, you have never been more involved with another person in your life and yet knowing that it is all going to end with the two of you parting company and the possibility that you will never see each other again, you simply immerse yourself in the “NOW” and enjoy every moment together with this person.

We settle into acceptance with respect to the temporal and transient nature of this short-term relationship. We may even fall head over heels completely in love with this person, but we except the fact that because of the distance between us we will simply enjoy every moment we have together knowing that we will enjoy creating unforgettable memories together that we will be able to cherish for the rest of our lives. Wouldn’t that be crazy? It’s anything but, crazy.

Knowing that everything in life is permanently impermanent, endlessly transitioning from one experience to the next, it’s healthy to recognize that nothing lasts forever, not a single relationship. Why is it we cannot simply enjoy the company of another person without the need to reduce them down to someone that belongs to us and we belong to?

The answer is simple. We fear the unknown. We convince ourselves that if we are committed to one another we will be together forever or at least long enough to stave off our insecurity and insanity for awhile.

We like the idea of commitment because it creates predictability, continuity, and a false sense of security for us. All of these things we think we are securing for ourselves are illusions. There is no such thing as a relationship that lasts a lifetime; not one. We will die before our children in most cases and they will go on without us. Either we will die before our spouse or they will die before us. Sadly, friends will die before us. There is a price to pay for being the last man standing. We watch everyone we care about move on without us.

Every relationship has an expiration date, except one. The relationship with ourself. The only relationship you are ever actually having from the day you enter this world till the day you leave, is the relationship you are having with yourself, within yourself. So, it is best to cultivate the relationship you are having with yourself. Doing so will enrich every other external relationship you ever have.

If we could treat every relationship, like the short-term relationship we had with the person we met on our vacation, whether it be 3 weeks, 3 years, or 30 years, being completely involved and yet untethered, we would see and accept our lover, not for what we want them to be to us, but for the essence and beauty that lies within them. We would truly be able to love unconditionally and extend to others a love with no conditions, no titles, no commitment, no expectations, no rules of engagement, and no sense of belonging. Sorry Beyoncé. No need to “put a ring on it!”

LOVE and commitment have nothing to do with each other, and monogamy is NOT the same as a commitment.  One is a choice and one is an obligation.

Oh, but how many tend to conflate LOVE with a whole host of things it isn’t? This is a recipe for misery.

It’s unfortunate, but most people conflate Love and Sex – the two are completely independent and mutually exclusive of one another. Sex is a physical desire, love is an intangible feeling. Sexual encounters can be filled with tons of emotion or devoid of emotion and purely a physical exploitation between two people for the mere experience of enjoying the delicious and sensual nature of sex. The LOVE drug. When we give ourselves to another person physically, most of us generally want to believe there is a very emotional component driving the physicality of the sex we are engaging in. If we discover the other person doesn't share the same intensity of feelings we have, we feel used. Even if you’re “in love” you’re still exploiting each other, but I digress. More on this in my blog post, THE “SELF”- ISH NATURE OF BEING HUMAN.

Then there are those who conflate LOVE with being needed. This creates what I refer to as emotional bartering, arguably the deepest hook of codependency.  “I will love you as long as you love me. Leave me and I will hate you, gossip about you, and vilify you to everyone.”

No one breaks our hearts; they only break our expectations.

For most people LOVE is completely conditional. As long as the other remains in compliance with our expectations of them and our expectations of love being reciprocity, we feel loved, and if they don’t, we feel unloved. 

Everyone wants to find a lover that will accept them and extend to them unconditional LOVE, but very, very few understand what unconditional love is, and even fewer are willing to extend it to their lover. To do so requires us to rise above and supersede the desires and will of the ego - letting go of our dependence on another. That’s terrifying for most.  But the capacity to be alone IS THE ONLY CAPACITY TO LOVE OTHERS. 

Only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of going into the deepest core of another person without the need to possess them, without becoming dependent on them, without reducing the other person down to something to be exploited, and without reducing the other down to an addiction.  LOVE NEVER DESTROYS THE FREEDOM OF ANOTHER PERSON. Instead, it celebrates it. 

When we are capable of LOVING others, we don’t worry if the other person leaves, because we will be just as happy regardless. Our happiness cannot be taken by the other because it was not given by the other. - OSHO

It’s unfortunate, but Unconditional Love is always perceived as apathy by the recipient because people in intimate relationships need to be needed. They require titles, mile-markers, contracts, emotional bartering, and commitments, as opposed to just being together, being “present,” and enjoying the process of “relating” to one another on a moment to moment basis.

Because most of us are ruled by fear as oppose to operating from a deep abiding love that we have for ourselves and for others, most relationships become a means to an end. We seek commitment from others, as a way of securing for ourselves a life of no surprises, and the belief that we’re important to another, never understanding that the very act of requesting someone commits to us, means we will never know again if our lover’s with us because they love us, or because they committed to the cause of staying with us with the vows we exchange on our wedding day. How blindsided we are when our spouse approaches us asking to be released from their “commitment” and the desire to get divorced. People generally tend to be committed until, they simply aren’t. That’s when we go through the motions and remain feeling trapped as we role play and undertake the exhausting task of trying to convince our partner we still care. Being inauthentic, hiding from ourselves and our lover, drains life out of us and our enthusiasm for it. We’re no longer involved . . . we’re entangled, paralyzed with fear of the alternative - starting over, venturing into the unknown, and going it alone.

The danger in demanding commitment from our lover is that, we are choosing to identify ourselves, our self-worth, our relevance, our importance, and our sense of self-acceptance with something that is NOT “US.” Our lover cannot in any capacity reveal anything about us, and even if they could, it’s something we have no control over. What we love has legs and can leave us. 

Everything external to us eventually goes away.  This is what makes the world a scary place and very few of us have the courage to go it alone. So, we always arrive back at commitment.

Commitment does not create love, nor does it sustain it. Commitment is a requirement of fear. When we fall into romantic love, commitment always follows. If one day love disappears, that commitment will also disappear, because commitment was never really there. Commitment is only the shadow cast by immature love. It’s a ruse. We end up role playing in relationships, feigning confidence and selling the assurance that our feelings will never change. But like everything else, they eventually do, primarily because human beings are very dynamic systems like nature itself, in a constant state of transformation, change, and evolution. With each new experience we have we accumulate new perspectives, new impressions, new beliefs, new preferences, and subsequently new feelings.

Real LOVE gives our lover the freedom to change, and subsequently seek out paths that may no longer include us.

Love is a dance with another person,
not a tethering…

To truly be free, means that you will be alone, and guess what? You’re okay with it.

In romantic relationships, all too often, we conflate concepts like being “in love” with “LOVE.”  We confuse “Attachment” and “LOVE,” “Commitment” and “LOVE,” “Sex” and “LOVE.”  Though each of these may have complexions of “LOVE” woven into them, they have nothing to do with LOVE itself. 

I’ll leave you with this consideration. The walls of security we build today more times than not, become the walls of our self-imposed imprisonment tomorrow. Being naive, we fail to realize the human spirit always longs to move beyond, to see, and to experience what lies on the other side of boundaries, walls, and barriers . . . especially the ones we built to protect ourselves. Things deemed taboo are always alluring. Forbidding our involvement always makes us want it more.

This is the difference between involvement and entanglement. True LOVE wants for another what they want for themselves whether it continues to include us or not. It allows who we love the freedom to stay or go, to venture beyond their sense of confinement to find themselves with an open door, open arms policy should they return, with no condemnation of them should they choose to do so. This is to be involved with someone and supportive of their journey of self-discovery as opposed to being entangled, and allows us to be involved and committed to our own journey of self-discovery.

Life only works for us while we’re involved with it. Once we’re no longer involved or engaged with it, it becomes a series of entanglements and entrapments. We feel stuck and life loses its luster very quickly.

Give LOVE as a free gift to those who choose to receive it. It’s the only LOVE there really is.

I would love to hear from you and hear your own personal thoughts on relationships in the comment section below. Let me know if the content of this article resonates with you, provides perspective, or helps you see things in a different way that empowers you to make different choices or see life and relationships through a different lens. I value your thoughts and feedback and look forward to hearing from you.

Love & Light to You in your continued Journey of Self-Discovery!

David