The Lover and the Beloved

There are many routes to understanding yourself and through that the meaning of life. One of the routes is through the domain of work and achievement. Another one is through the domain of seeking knowledge. The third is through the domain of relationships and the relationship between the lover and the beloved is the route I am exploring today. In my understanding these three routes are intertwined and each of these routes play a significant role at a certain stage in life. When I ignored one of these routes and put all my energy in either one or two of them, the third brought itself to the forefront. This made me realise that there needs to be a balance in growing through achievement, knowledge and intimacy. 

I believe that we find that significant other not by accident but by design. However smooth it might be in the beginning as we go ahead the relationship challenges both the lover and the beloved and that IS the design. The challenge is part of the relationship and accepting the challenge and working through it is the essential nature of what it means to "be in love". The lover and the beloved are most commonly what can be associated with a dyad (two people in a "relationship") but it is not necessarily so. It is just a different journey when the lover and the beloved are one and the same person (the lover being the ego and the Self being the beloved) because eventually you meet yourself whichever way you start (as a dyad or as a single person) just two different roads leading to the same end-point. 

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind love was
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere
They are in each other all along

                             - Rumi

"The beloved" has three levels and I compare it to the three journeys of the Sufis. According to the Sufis, we all undertake three journeys, 

 - the journey from God, when in the midst of the world we forget God, we forget our divine nature, the love and the light of our soul. 
- the journey to God, which is the journey from separation back to union. 
- and finally, the journey in God, which is a deepening experience of the divine, of the love and oneness that is everywhere and in everything. 

In the first level the beloved is the person who walks with me in my journey from God, who supports me in making a mark in the world, like a snow plough that clears the snow in front of my path (thank you to the Netflix series "The Good Place" for this metaphor). Sometimes I don't even realise that my snow plough has done her job because I am so used to the cleared up paths that I forget the work done in the background - silently, painstakingly, daily. In a healthy relationship the lover and the beloved are both snow ploughs for each other. If there is an imbalance and only the lover or the beloved is the snow plough the relationship either gets stuck or proceeds with a lot of in-built resentment. If the relationship proceeds to the second level with the in-built resentment then the challenges of the second level are amplified. How can one track if the resentment is building? If there is resentment that is building, then the disagreements will have the following features 

a. The frequency of disagreements and conflicts will increase

b. The intensity of the disagreements and conflicts will increase. Gottman talks about the four horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Stonewalling and Defensiveness. The four horsemen will visit conversations more often. The highest intensity will be abuse - verbal/ physical/ emotional.

c. The recovery period after a disagreement/ conflict will be longer - longer periods of stonewalling and communication laced with contempt and criticism.

If the partnership between the lover and the beloved has grown smoothly with both playing the roles of the snow-plough for each other or if one of them has managed to suppress the resentment, the relationship proceeds to the second level (again not linearly but in the form of a meandering spiral).

At the second level, the beloved is the one who challenges me to become a more complete person than before I met them and they also expects me to challenge him/her. This is the stage where the beloved shows me my shadow side. Theyshows me how one-sided I am and in their oppositeness from me they nudges me to access and accept my own shadow side. This happens because we are usually attracted to a beloved who is different from us and in the first level, this difference is hidden by 

a. projections (what I imagine my beloved should be like). 

b. social norms leading to either the lover or the beloved sacrificing their dreams to be the snow-plough for the other.

c. Busyness related to life in general - children growing up/ financial goals being worked towards/ challenges related to parental health 

This is the stage where most partnerships/ marriages/ self-explorations start fraying because the snow plough expands to work as a mirror - the mirror that reflects back to me what I don't want to accept within myself.

Imagine there is the lover who loves structure, discipline, order and their beloved who is spontaneous, a bit chaotic and not very linearly organised. The lover tries their best to change the beloved because they think that actually their differences are accidental. The beloved is the way they are because they want to reflect back to the lover what they need to access, accept and celebrate within their own shadows. The beloved is the living, breathing part of the lover that the lover finds repugnant and wants to disown. So what does the lover do?  Push, cajole, manipulate the beloved to change to become as closer in personality to the lover. Therefore the journey in level no 2 gets 

a. entangled in a power struggle between the lover and the beloved with each either trying to change the other or 

b. one of them gives up and accepts the continued role of the snow-plough for the other without exploring their own needs and completeness

c. both the lover and the beloved drift apart to live their separate lives under the same roof focusing on either children and/or parents or their own material needs.

At some point in time, either the lover or the beloved will meet someone or find a job or find a vocation that will act as the snow-plough and they will then invest all their energy into this person/ job/ vocation/ goal. If this focus is a person there will most likely be a relationship that will blossom with new projections and going back into the honeymoon phase of snow-ploughing for each other. This short-lived euphoria will give way to the reality of stage 2 - the mirror phase and at some point the lover and the beloved will need to sit down and understand the pattern of their disagreement because there will always be a pattern. And this pattern will be based deep in the psyche. The only way forward would be to access and work with this pattern with the beloved. This requires time and cannot happen if the energy is being invested outside of the dyad. The energy will have to come back to the relationship at some point to address the core issue of facing oneself - seeing myself as I am and not as how people see me.

I am not sure what would happen at Stage 3 to the dyad and it would be too presumptuous of me to assume what it would be like. But still I would like to share what I have seen as glimpses of level 3

- there is a resonance that is felt which goes beyond words and thoughts
- there is a deep attention that it always offered and received because the other is important
- there is a deeper acknowledgement of one's own needs
- there is a clearer communication without assumptions and past judgements
- there is a need to understand while making the effort to be understood

In seeking myself I am finding the other - outside and inside of me and in dancing with the other, I hear my own antarnad (inner music) and sway to it.