Humor In Chaos
Searching for Joy Series
Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall
I remember the first time I fell in love. Really in love – as much as I was capable of understanding romantic love with my zero personal experience at the time. My knowledge came from movies, TV, romance novels, friends, and sex education at school. In other words, I didn’t know anything.
I was in another state for a few weeks of the summer of 1986 to babysit when I was 15 years old. I met this 17-year-old who swept me off my feet. The feelings I had were intense, way more intense than I was capable of handling properly.
I remember the first time I saw him. He walked into the room, and I was hit like I was standing on train tracks as the locomotive was flying through. When I think back, those intense physical sensations can still resurface from deep in my memory banks. The blue of his eyes, the dark blonde shade of his hair, and the way his tall frame moved through the door – I remember the finest details. He was fine. He was hot. And I was a lost.
I couldn’t put two words together. My tongue was tied in knots, my brain was jelly, and my insides were on fire.
He was my first date. We went to see the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Watching that movie reminds me of him, and his uncle, who was a lousy chaperone. I spent nearly 24 hours at his uncle’s home with him. It was both amazing and scary. I was as jumpy as if I was waiting for an ax murderer to come around the corner. I survived with my virginity still intact. In fact, he never even kissed me. I wanted him to. I don’t think I gave him the right signals. I didn’t know how to indicate how I felt while maintaining proper boundaries to protect my chastity.
That first experience of intense love has a name that is quite new in human society. It’s called limerence. And I had it bad. I was so deep in it that I was drowning. I knew I was in danger. I didn’t know why or what or how. No one threw me a life jacket.
He didn’t have much more experience than I did, but he did have more physical drive than me. Natural physical drive a 17-year-old boy would have would not compare to that of a 15-year-old girl, even one educated by romance novels. Especially one educated by romance novels and not much else. I was very close to giving in to his desires, and that would not have been good. Wow, it was a difficult and wonderful experience.
I even saw him again years later, with my husband, and those same feelings came bubbling up, only for an instant. That’s limerence. It’s sneaky. It’s romantic. It’s exhilarating. It’s dangerous.
What is limerence? Limerence is an intense love that stems from the physical desire for another person, a specific person, that is so intense, all other people and aspects of life fall away. This one person takes precedence over everything and everyone else. It is a fantasy love that creates a deep, temporary bond even though the person in limerence believes it will last forever. It creates a halo effect over the limerent object, i.e. the person for whom the love is felt. Meaning that the person in love believes the limerent object has no flaws, is perfect, is their soul mate, and can do no wrong. When it wears off, it’s quite the letdown to learn the limerent object is simply another human being.
Some people fall in and out of limerence quickly and easily. Some never experience it. Some have it a few times in their life.
I have dated a few people in my life, but only experienced limerence twice. The first was this young man, and the second was the man I married. With both, it burned hot. So very hot. Seriously, I am remembering the burn of the fires of both as I write this.
Limerent love is a natural, evolutionary love God put into us to propagate our species. Limerence in itself is not dangerous. It’s amazing. It feels good. It’s a dopamine hit. It helps to begin the creation of emotional bonds that hopefully lead to real love, Godly love, that creates a stable family structure for children to be raised, and then a continued relationship structure for people to enter their golden years in harmony. When it follows that pattern, limerence is a wonderful start to lifelong blessings.
Limerence can be dangerous when it is entered into inappropriately. Like all good things, it can be twisted into a curse that breaks what God created through sin. Limerence is bad when a marital bond has already been established with another person. That dopamine hit can become like an addiction when control and integrity are not retained in an individual. It can give a feeling of joy that is not sustainable. What it gives is a temporary ride of happiness that eventually ends. That happiness can lead to true joy if it moves into the other spheres of love that lead to commitment. And it can be a lasting joy if whatever form of committed love doesn’t get too corrupted by sin. When sin enters in, all bets are off.
All forms of love shared between us mortals can be corrupted by sin.
I am going to back up and define love.
Is there an adequate definition of love?
People have been debating the definition of love since humans first walked the earth. Adam and Eve didn’t understand it when they sinned. Cain missed the point of familial love when he was jealous of Abel and killed him. King David forgot about the sanctity of marital love with his affair. Judas Iscariot tossed the love of friendship out the window with his massive betrayal of his friend, Jesus. No human seems to understand love. Yet, it’s been widely studied, and pretty much everyone has some experience with it from infancy on.
It drives me crazy when people are confused about why they are here on earth. What’s their purpose? Love. That’s it. To me, it’s always been obvious. In my mind, we are all here to learn to love. Love God first, and then each other as ourselves. I thought Jesus was clear on that with the two main commandments He gave us that put the original Ten Commandments into perspective.
The problem is us humans have corrupted what it means to love. We’ve taken all the different ways to love each other and decided we knew better than God. God, who is love, apparently doesn’t know as much about it as we do. Except He does. And we screwed up His whole system. We did that. And we need to take responsibility for that.
If we can go back in our hearts, we can see that to love is our purpose, and how we express that love to God and to each other is our calling. Before we can understand our true calling, we need to have a better understanding of love. We need to get that understanding from God Himself.
It doesn’t matter what the calling is. To be a doctor, lawyer, song writer, priest, married person, parent, teacher, coach, cook, janitor, poet, etc. Whatever the calling, all people are here to learn how to love and to spread love.
However, not many of us have a direct dialogue with God. Therefore, we need to rely on the definitions of love from others. Some of them are good definitions. Some not so much.
St. Augustine defined love by splitting it into two types: cupiditas and caritas. Cupiditas is love that fulfills our own needs. Caritas is love that fulfills the needs of others.
St. Thomas Aquinas defined three types of love: eros, philia, and caritas. Eros being the romantic type of love. Philia is a love between friends with a common shared value system. Caritas is more closely associated with the Greek term agape love, which is closer to the perfect, selfless love God has for us that we attempt to have for each other in our imperfect ways. We fail; but, hey, at least we try.
C.S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. Even though it’s complicated and could use a modern language rewrite, I love this book. He divides love into four types: affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Affection can be for anyone including a pet. It centers on feelings of warmth and comfort. Friendship is a love based on mutual respect. Eros is a romantic type of love that has at least a layer of limerence in it. And charity is a love closest to that of agape, that perfect love God has for us, unconditional, wanting what is best for the object of our love.
Modern psychology does its best to throw God out the window in defining love, which is understandable given how our current society is trying to keep science and God separate, except in the Catholic Church where we embrace scientific discoveries despite our complicated history with scientists such as Galileo.
Modern psychology defines love within five separate categories: romantic love, familial love, platonic love, self-love, and compassionate love. Only compassionate love comes anywhere near agape love of God, and yet it still falls short.
I have another beef with the way modern psychology attempts to inform us about what are healthy and unhealthy notions of romantic love – in how it tries to tell us a healthy way to view a romantic partner. The mirroring effect of relationships. I could not disagree more with this concept.
Modern psychology holds that we choose life partners based on a mirroring effect where our long-term partner has personality characteristics that correspond to certain personality characteristics in ourselves, we need to heal from that stem from our own childhood traumas. Partnering for life is about healing from childhood.
I don’t necessarily disagree with this position on romantic love. I agree we do this. It’s that I don’t believe this should be the goal. I feel our goal should be to heal and rise above that, continuing to grow and mature throughout our lives without putting that burden on another to heal us.
If we anticipate that our partner’s personality is supposed to be some sort of medicine for us to take so we can heal our inner child, and vice versa, then we are setting ourselves up to great sin. We are setting ourselves up to expect our spouses to fix us. They can’t do that, and we can’t fix our spouses either. It’s not fair to ask them to do that kind of job in the first place. It creates expectations no one can fulfill. It leads to comparison and competition and takes away the unconditional loving attribute of accepting someone for who they truly are, traumas included. And, it prevents us from being responsible for ourselves.
The only person we should be connecting with to help heal our inner child is God. He is whom we should compare ourselves to, not any other human being on earth, especially not our spouses. He is our mirror to internally heal ourselves.
If my spouse is my mirror, then I have put the love of my spouse ahead of my love of God. That is the problem. That is why Jesus should be the mirror, not my spouse.
We are called to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, to be as much like Him as we can be in our human failings.
What happened to the whole “what would Jesus do?” Where is the WWJD movement? Yes, it was cheesy. Cheesy or not, it was still true. That is what I believe should be the measuring stick for us on our own personal growth.
I was sick for years. During that time, I could feel my husband’s angst grow that he couldn’t fix me. The more frustrated he got and the longer my symptoms dragged on, the bigger the wall between us grew. My illness was not in our long-term plans. In sickness and in health is much harder to work around than anyone understands until it happens to them. He decided it was his responsibility to heal me. It was not. When he couldn’t, he hated me for it.
I don’t say that to excuse his leaving. He made that promise at the altar as did I for him. I don’t know what it is about his past that he looked to me as his mirror that had him up and leave.
Regardless, I shouldn’t have been his mirror. Jesus should have been his reflection. Just as Jesus should be mine in how I move forward in my life with joy in my heart with this ever-nagging thorn in my side: the love I still harbor for my ex-husband. We share too much for that to ever go completely away. That’s life.
Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more!
Sarah
Humor In Chaos
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