If in your relationships you experience both “love” and the opposite of love – attack, emotional violence, and so on – then it is likely that you are confusing ego attachment and addictive clinging with love. You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next. True love has no opposite. If your “love” has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is the ego’s substitute for salvation, and for a short time it almost does feel like a salvation.

But there comes a point when your partner behaves in ways that fail to meet your needs, or rather those of your ego. The feelings of pain, and lack that are intrinsic part of egoic consciousness but had been covered up by the “love relationship” now resurface.

Just as with every drug is available. but invariably there comes a time when the drug no longer works for you.

When those painful feelings reappear, you feel them even more strongly than before, and what is more, you now perceive your partner as the cause of those feelings. This means that you project them outward and attack the other with all savage violence that is part of your pain.

This attack may awaken the partner’s own pain, and he or she may counter attack. At this point, the ego is still unconsciously hoping that its attack or its attempts at manipulation will be sufficient punishment to induce your partner to change their behavior, so that it can use them again as a cover-up for your pain.

Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to – alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person – you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain.

That is why, after the initial euphoria has passed, there is so much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate relationships. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you. Every addiction does that. Every addiction reaches a point where it does not work for you anymore, and then you feel the pain more intensely than ever.

This is one reason why most people are always trying to escape from the present moment and are seeking some kind of salvation in the future. The first thing that they might encounter if they focused their attention on the Now [present moment] is their pain, and this is what they fear. If they only knew how easy it is to access in the Now the power of presence that dissolve the past and its pain, the reality that dissolves the illusion. If they only knew how close they are to their own reality, how close to God.

Avoidance of relationships in an attempt to avoid pain is not the answer either. The pain is there anyway. Three failed relationships in as many years are more likely to force you into awakening than three years on a desert island or shut away in your room. But if you could bring intense presence into your aloneness, that would work for you too.

@ TPP – lol thank you my friend, you humble me. The pic was supplied by the editorial team of consciousness, a bunch of gifted creatives that never cease to amaze me!!

@ Mbali- Wow that is a very interesting angle there my friend!! Well a person can definitely love more than one person, I love your example about losing a husband and yes there is absolutely nothing stopping them from meeting their other ‘lover’ while married. Have you ever heard a track by Erykah Badu called ‘next lifetime’? The track is basically about her and some guy she’s fallen in love with even though she’s in a relationship with a guy she also loves, which is the situation you speak of. When the new guy communicates his affections for her, she admits to feeling the same way but tells the guy that she is in a relationship which she respects and loves so they will be together in the ‘next lifetime’ lol which i found to be cute. As you can see, it’s about how you handle such a situation as an individual apropos, choice. So even if the rule is 50/50, 60/40 it still all boils down to choice. I agree that the emotion of love is one that generally defies reason but I honestly believe if one acted on that genuine emotion, then that would be the response when caught out instead of ‘i don’t know’, unless of course they are confusing the elation of naughtiness as love. Am I making sense to you? What are your thoughts?