In Love You Become Your Truest Self

Romantic love is already complex and mysterious but society’s understanding of it has now become terribly flawed by profound confusion and misapplication. Love has been unlearned, and often disabled. The windows into our souls have become more clouded. The roads are rougher and the cars are rundown.

Dark forces have attacked Love on many levels in our world. For me I see the attack in our media driven world. Because I enjoy studying story structure I see more people fall in love on the big screen at the theater or TV than in life. I’ve heard more songs of love sung by strangers on Top 40 Hits than sang by friends. And it follows that I’ve seen and heard more people fall out of love and rip each other to shreds on the big screen and the hits on the radio.

I think this is one of the many reasons I’m such a cynic when it comes to romantic relationships. Not because I don’t believe in the concept of true romantic love – I do! It’s because I have allowed Oprahfied women raised on an unhealthy dose of Katy “hear me roar” Perry feminism to ruin my view of women in general. I know women individually whom I respect and adore but collectively I’m skeptical, having watched Liberal Hollywood depict love and relationships. I think people breathe this toxic view of love in like asbestos when it’s smuggled in endlessly through entertainment and years later it gives them cancer of the soul, if not a virus of the soul immediately, and all that time they were carriers of the virus spreading it by fouling innocence in others rather than forming it for its proper role.

So I’ve protected myself by sending my emotions into my man cave. Fueled in part by the notion in the often quoted meme:

One must be the right person to attract the right person.

So, from within the man cave I tried being the right person but there was no mirror. No one saw me. And, thank God! Because there I wrestled with the monstrosity called, me and my exiled emotions. I’m an eternal mystery, too. With all my skills of observation and sticking to Socrates’ motto, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” I ultimately discovered I can’t understand me. I need a sounding board to be a better man. This monster within is full of sound and fury, a wolf that needs taming or at the very least needs a lot of territory to hunt and bark at the moon. I need a mirror. I need another soul. I need a soul mate to help me manage my flaws.

And I suspect every woman has a she-wolf lurking in her darkness, as well. She needs a soul mate to help her manage her flaws. But feminism has told her a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. In other words a man just might be a needless friend because dear girl you have no darkness.

I’ve thought all these years that I was forced to reluctantly conclude I would never marry again. I’m not so sure now.

As a writer I read a lot of books about storytelling and inevitably I read about romantic love. Recently I was astounded by this from  John Truby in the book “The Anatomy of Story”:

Love stories say that a person does not become a true individual by being alone. A person becomes a unique and authentic individual only by entering into a community of two. It is through the love of the other that each person grows and becomes his or her deepest self.

I have a suspicion that I’m built to tame her she-wolf and she is built to tame my wolf-man. And in that union she could be a better woman, the right woman and I could be a better man, the right man. We were created for each other. In true love you become your truest self. You become less of an animal and more human, more spiritual.