Neither With You Nor Without You, With Me

Jealousy, fears, reproaches, anger, complexes … How far can a love become contaminated? We talk about those loves with conditions, those for which we wait, for which we stand aside in the hope that one day they will give us what we need.

But in this life there are few things that take us by surprise, we are able to quickly predict that what we long for will never come to us from the hand of a love that is subjecting us to waiting.

Then the shadows arrive, the 7 plagues, the thousand evils, sadness, fatigue and disappointment. And when they do, the most absolute desolation reigns, the one that prevents us from moving forward and makes us abandon ourselves.

We are not born captive, we are captivated

The sad reality is that we fertilize the emotional ground to cultivate insane loves, the kind that obstruct and destroy. We don’t keep weeds out of our way and that has consequences. If we do not first cultivate genuine love in ourselves, we will tend to seek it in others. This can lead us to establish even unhealthy relationships.

” I’d rather be bad with you than alone and without you”,  many people may think. In this way, we are making a choice based on the fear of loneliness, on not knowing how to be with ourselves, and even on thinking that we do not deserve to be happy. This last thought underlies many toxic relationships. A low level of love and empathy towards oneself leads us to seek that toxic love under the unconscious premise that we do not deserve someone who makes us happy.

It will not be possible to get rid of sadness and grief if we do not act in the opposite direction. It is better not to cover your eyes. When something goes wrong, it is simply known, sensed and felt in the environment.

Neither freedom is lack of love nor attachment is love

In truth, the way of understanding relationships and love is very relative. Wanting to be a free soul does not mean giving up love. In the same way, there are relationships that, although we love the other person very much, are really toxic and painful.

There are many love stories that are lost due to pride, forgetfulness or, simply, due to neglect. But today we talk about those relationships that have been poisoned by the black widow of love: emotional submission.

So when love becomes neither with you nor without you, it is time to abandon it or recycle it. That is to say, in every relationship the emotional health of oneself has to prevail. There comes a point where instead of feeling love, what prevails is attachment. That is, the dependence and need of the other person. We label the partner as the cause of our happiness and hold them responsible for it. This approach is completely misleading since no one has an obligation to make us happy.

Freedom is loving the other person as they are, without conditioning them, without telling them how they should be. At the same time, loving in freedom also means letting go when the time comes. You may think that you need that person, they may bring you many things, but there are times when you have to take off the blindfold and come to understand that they are bothering your emotions.

You don’t love yourself until love hurts

This is true, we cannot love ourselves until we don’t need to. That internal need to love and understand ourselves arises when someone or something fails us, because only then do we see our shortcomings.

When we give everything for a love that does not deserve it, we begin to love each other.  Being touched by pride makes the sparks of our inner love fly. We wonder where we have failed, we wonder how we can feel better and how we will get ahead. In other words, self-love enters through the head, not through the heart.

The sadness and the feeling of emptiness that is created by letting go of what does not do us good is only a reflection of the longing that offers us what could be and was not, what we wanted it to be and did not come.

If you let that sadness enter without fear, it will lead you to definitive liberation, to independence, to a life without resistance, without jealousy, without reproaches and without contaminating guilt.