Love in 4-D
We perceive ourselves as points moving along a unidirectional timeline so that each person is a moment in their own time. When we love someone, we as a point in time love them as a point in that same time, as though a line connected the two dots, moving forward between their timelines until death or divorce.
In couple therapy, I see each partner as a timeline married to another timeline. The majority of couple treatment beyond basic coping skills and communication strategies comprises addressing unresolved childhood issues that are manifesting in the present.
The reason for most fights happened before you met your partner.
Your past is fighting their past. Your childhood issues trigger theirs. Your inner child’s wounds becomes inflection points: the relationship sensitizes as people get closer or further based on similar or compatible wounds. While your present is dating their present, your past is dating their past. Nowhere is this clearer than when deeply buried defense mechanisms and wounds activate.
Sharing your wound is intimate. It can be more intimate than eye contact during climax or holding someone when they cry. The things we give our therapists or our demons or our gods, we finally learn to give our lovers.
Every wound is its own language. For once a person understands your wound, they speak your language. They know what your fear and love mean. They know why your pain and pleasure alternately reveal and disguise themselves. They know the path you took from and to love.
This is not a circuitous way to the heart, but rather a complete one. For you must love your partner’s past because that is an aspect of them. A resolved person does not identify with their past, does not define themselves in terms of who they once were. It is indeed in the knowing and not the identifying of a person with their past that we appreciate the meaning of their path: what they’ve overcome, why they cry, how they fear love, what it means when they finally surrender.
When my wife and I committed our futures to each other, I shared all my baggage, and asked for hers. I discovered her past the way I studied the autobiographies of composers whose symphonies I love. All their traumas and triumphs and vicissisitudes — they all became an ineffable whole that itself revealed fragments, shards, pain. We are fractals revealing wholeness that succumbs itself to a greater whole.
We are not as I described above: discrete points moving along a timeline. We are amalgams of who we are, whom we are becoming, and whom we were. We are rather blurred spectrums, mostly in the present, but with before- and after-effects stretched forward and back along our timelines. Life as an incessant molt. Signs of ‘growth’ and ‘regression’ may well be aspects of the past holding on and those of the future starting to emerge.
We don’t know the future we have married into. My wife is fit. She’s left-handed, and I can’t beat her arm-wrestling with my left despite my having decent arms. She does yoga and looks the way a body does when it speaks to the life it has taken in and intends to let out. Any maybe she will become a quadriplegic, as dependent on me as our newborns were. Maybe I’ll become that infantilized adult in her arms.
I think of these things. Because I’m morbid. Because I’m open-minded. Because unlikely tragedy is real once lived. I think these things and ponder on the depth of loyalty we humans take on when we throw our lot in with another’s. We marry into a future with little idea of whom we or our spouse shall become. We marry with only a little more volition than we were given to put into being born. Love goes beyond determinism.
I think of the Holocaust. How epigenetically, some of it must remain in my genes, in my children. I see my gentile wife combined her genes, her lifeforce, with mine to make these twins. I see her marry a past that lived before I was born. We marry a person’s history, both personal and collective, a history that is impersonal, faceless, and yet, alive.
I see her loving me; perhaps, epigenetically, this changes some of the trauma embedded in my genetic code. Too late to pass this healing onto our kids, but not too late to alter their environment, their sense of self, their ability to know love is real: more real than the pain that, even for a moment, tells us love is gone.
The moment the pain feels more real than the love, it has you. That moment might come and go, but it sticks out on the timeline like a thorn on the vine. The illusion becomes more vivid than the heart’s reality. We touch love and know it as our own — while our pain whispers:
This will go away. I’m patient. I can wait until love fails. It will hurt enough to make you stop believing in it. That’s when I tell you: Love is not real. I am.
Trauma is an obsessive, cancerous moment in the timeline that resists being integrated into the whole. It tries to restrict the future from being different than the past. It tried to remake the timeline in its own image. A coup d’etat by the past.
Other moments spin-off an entirely new timeline. When this resonates, we call it a triumph. When it dissonates, we call it tragedy. But nothing is so linear, especially, ironically, timelines. Sometimes, despair leads to transcendence. The bottom is that pivotal place where we finally have nothing to lose, and embrace the being we need to become, the being who has attempted to emerge all this time. Jung understood the opposites become each other as we enter nondual states, leading to quantum leaps in development, calling it enantodromia.
A marriage is more an experience of a lifetime than an experience of a person. Your lifetime experiences theirs. The persons at the start and end of the marriage can hardly be said to share the same identity. The one constant is the timeline itself.
I have found my own marriage sacred not because it is easy or what I had thought it would be or but because I am now consciously able to perceive and love and have faith in terms of a timeline as well as of a moment. Though my passions can erupt, my moments don’t govern that which contains them. Perhaps I have learned to choose a timeline because I see I am a timeline. An added dimension in our understanding of love.
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