“Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest in reciprocity“
C.S. Lewis
Are you sure, C.S.?
No, I’m not going to discuss the details of my love/dating life publicly but I have definitely had romantic feelings in the past for the people who didn’t deserve it. Multiple times.
Looking at this embarrassing past of mine, I have only ever really loved one man, and probably it won’t be too much of a personal disclosure if I say that it was my ex-partner of 8 years. For some reason, I stayed with him for all of those years and for the same reason, he did with me.
However, love has many names, as Dandelion said once in the Witcher saga.
As it changes its names so often, I can’t help but wonder, and that thought cannot leave me alone: where does love go when it’s gone?
“… I would reflect sadly that the love one feels, insofar as it is love for a particular person, may not be a real thing, since, although an association of pleasant or painful fancies may fix it for a time on a woman, and even convince us that she was its necessary cause, the fact is that if we consciously or unconsciously outgrow those associations, our love, as though it was a spontaneous growth, a thing of our own making, revives and offers itself to another woman.”
So you basically fall in love again, it all feels new, and you don’t even remember how the last time felt. Did it even matter then?
This is from Proust again and as I said in this post, he seems a bit too negative about love for my taste. However, I feel connected with him in this reflection about love – a feeling that can be so overconsuming, become the centre of our universe, bring obsession and temporarily at least change our lives – all of that will last only for as long as it must.
Sometimes it will be really short and intense, bringing us to our knees, and then making us ask what the hell were we thinking.
I probably talk about Friedrich Nietzsche too much on this blog (and probably in life too, sorry for ever sounding like a douchebag) but he said a lot of wise things, like this one:
“One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter, are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.“
Nietzsche, just like Proust, was a miserable man with a sad love life. He wasn’t gay, but his relationships with women were far from fruitful.
Friedrich had a quite wild love triangle involving an extremely interesting Russian lady, Lou Andreas-Salomé. Salomé, as a young woman, was not interested in sexual relations, and wanted to pursuit her passion for philosophy, theology and other stuff that really matters (good for her). The first famous guy who fell in love with her was the author Paul Reé.
The level of friendzoning she achieved with him was something that I aspire to: she proposed that they would live and study together as ‘brother and sister’. Reé agreed, probably still hoping for more, and proposed that his friend, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, be added to the mix. Nietzsche then fell in love with her instantly.
They proceeded to live together as an intellectual commune, with two men lusting after one woman, and her wanting to just study with her philosopher brothers.
It is quite clear that they all needed therapy, however, this all happened in 1882, when Sigmund Freud was only 26 years old, and, according to wikipedia, occupied with ‘comparing the brains of humans and other vertebrates with those of frogs and invertebrates such as crayfish and lampreys‘.
Salomé eventually married Reé and it was a celibate open marriage (open for her). She even had some sort of affair with the aforementioned Freud.
Nietzsche suffered severely following this almost-romance. He blamed everyone around him for the failure, threw fits and wrote Also Sprach Zarathustra in ten days.
What I’m trying to say here is that toxic undefined relationships are not an invention of 2020s as recommended reels on Instagram are trying to convince me all the time (I don’t want to even know how this algorithms works).
People are very often incapable of healthy love, unable to commit, unsure unless obsessed and erratic.
And when they don’t care about you, they will feed off the validation and flattery your attention will give them, probably like Salomé did with various men.
And this is another thing that Instagram reels are trying to convince me to be something that has been only recently discovered – a plague of narcissistic abuse trying to get you from every corner.
It seems like everyone these days is a “victim” of a narcissist and everyone dated a person with a personality disorder at some point even though it is estimated that only 5% of people have NPD.
Are we all dating the same 1/20 people of the world?
My own therapist told me that, when described, several of the men I have dated in the last couple of years showcased some classic narcissistic traits. So I suppose we are.
With that, I wish you a very happy Valentine’s. I won’t lie – I don’t have answers to any of the questions about love and at this stage of my life, all I pray for is a peace of mind. I still remember how it is to love and be loved but I am not sure if I would not confuse love with lust as I have done in the past (again, many times). We are all a little stupid when it comes to our feelings.
But one thing that you need to remember of is that: if you are in an unhealthy situation, involving narcissistic abuse or not – your feelings do not have to dictate your actions and you can always remove yourself from it. You do have the power to do that and that is real love towards yourself I wish upon everyone.
Couple of extra points:
- If you are reading this and I have dated you and you are worrying now about your narcissistic traits – I’m certain you are the exception, not the rule.
Theory
Into love and out again,
Thus I went, and thus I go.
Spare your voice, and hold your pen-
Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung,
All the words were ever said;
Could it be, when I was young,
Some one dropped me on my head?
