This week Jeff Flick was here visiting from Vegas. We had dinner together one night. We stumbled into a deep, though short, conversation about what real love means. He pulled from the deep recesses of my brain some insights from M. Scott Peck. These thoughts had been dormant in my mind for years. Here are some quotes I pulled out later to re-examine what I had remembered. These thoughts may seem dark and pessimistic as to marriage and love and first -- but I think a more careful consideration of them shows that once the love feeling is not as strong, the chance to really love someone begins -- and that's the good stuff!
The quotes:
Of all the misconceptions about love the most powerful and pervasive is the belief that “falling in love” is love or at least one of the manifestations of love. It is a potent misconception, because falling in love is subjectively experienced in a very powerful fashion as an experience of love. When a person falls in love what he or she certainly feels is “I love him” or “I love her.” But two problems are immediately apparent. The first is that the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience. We do not fall n love with our children even though we may love them very deeply… We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated. The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we have fallen love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough. This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love. But it is to say the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes. The honeymoon always ends. The bloom of romance always fade.
The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual’s ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity wit that of another person. The sudden release of oneself from oneself, the explosive pouring out of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most of us as ecstatic. We and our beloved are one! Loneliness is no more! . . .
Or to put it in another, rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage… On the other hand, without this trick, this illusory and inevitably temporary (it would not be practical were it not temporary) regression to infantile merging and omnipotence, many of us who are happily or unhappily married today would have retreated in whole-hearted terror from the realism of the marriage vows…
In summary, then the temporary loss of ego boundaries involved in falling in love and in sexual intercourse not only leads us to make commitments to other people form which real love may begin but also gives us a foretaste of (and therefore an incentive for) the more lasting mystical ecstasy that can be ours after a lifetime of love. As such, therefore, while falling in love is not itself love, it is a part of the great and mysterious scheme of love.
--taken from The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck, pp. 84-97
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