What we expect from love…
In his book titled Love and Will, Rollo May mentions that the individual's emphasis on love as a solution to his identity problem and bad life has increased, and he adds: "The value they give to themselves rises or falls depending on whether they get love or not. Those who believe they have found love; Just as Calvinists saw wealth as tangible evidence of being a chosen servant, they tended to consider themselves superior, regarding it as visible evidence of salvation. Those who could not find love not only felt deprived, but on a deeper and more damaging internal level, their self-worth also decreased. They felt branded as a new species of creature pushed out of society, and in psychotherapy, they admitted that what they felt when they woke up in the early hours of the morning was not unhappiness and loneliness, but rather the gnawing feeling of having missed the great secret of life.”
Rollo May wrote these lines in 1969. Can we say that May's words are invalid despite 45 years? A ten-year-long study conducted in America revealed that the most intense emotions experienced by people in modern life are loneliness and depression.
I think there is nothing more natural than an adult in his 30s wanting a companion in his life; But what we need to question is the expectations from this companion and love, or the intense worthlessness experienced in the absence of this love. As May mentioned above, expecting love to be half of an apple... wanting to be complete with it and not being able to exist in its absence... If what is done is beating yourself up in the arms of worthlessness, what we are looking for at this point is not love, but perhaps the value we do not give ourselves...
However, during the therapy process, I always I tell my clients, "Love is painful when you are two halves of an apple, but pleasurable when you are two separate apples." On the contrary... the state of waiting to be completed with love and overcoming our worthlessness is our burden from the past... it is making the lover pay for what we could not experience in the past. As my teacher Mehmet Zararsızoğlu stated, “because we always blame the lover for the unfinished work of the past… we always harass him without realizing it… we wear him out…”
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