11: On Love that Poisons

Full book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1791781527

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Before every prancing with love, ask yourself thus: “Is it myself I love through my beloved?”  Absent this shattering question, love quickly becomes poison�"the sweetest of poisons and all that’s addictive.  When you see your beloved, do you treat them as a mirror and pose only in the most attractive angles?  Thus your love is a craft, an image assembled to please.  Not to please your beloved, no! To please yourself through the eyes of your love.  Your self is the only object of love.  If this is the case, a day quickly approaches where they can no longer see the image you offer: they assemble their own portrait, one without your approval.  And all at once, as if overnight, they hold up your crafted image beside their own newly assembled portrait: you're not who they thought!  Thus love becomes poison, you fall under its spell.

If your beloved is at all firm, they’ll end things at once, but in the back of their mind screams: “what if I’m wrong!”  Thus they too are under the poison’s spell.  The spell starts a game, one without any winner.  You delude and deceive yourself above all, for now you must believe that “In love I did fall!”  This becomes the only means to nourishing the image you planted in them: if you think you love them, you can go on loving yourself, through the fragments of your crafted image that remain in them.   

As both partner’s images and portraits slowly fade, loving becomes a testing of time, waiting to see who gives in and gives up first.   You take step after step to make them feel your indifference, for in thinking you don't care, you maintain your dignity and your grasp on them tightens.  Conversely, you desire them more than ever when their indifference shows, when it seems they will give up: your insides scream at the possibility of losing your source of self-love.  Thus their indifference becomes your feeling of love.

When it truly is ending and both pack up their things, one feels they are guilty, while the other one sings: “I'll have them back in a weeks time!” If your beloved gives up first, you say to yourself: “I was not in love, love is not real!”  By speaking thus to your heart, you close the potential of seeing where things really went wrong, you explain it away with denouncements of love to avoid seeing that it never was love.  

But if your beloved does not give up and give in, you take step after step to secure their devotion�"to prolong self-love through the beloved.  If you give up first, you maintain in your heart: “they will never get over me!  They belong to me for life!”  Thus your self-love lives on.

After some separation�"if neither one breaks and contacts the other with secret hopes to rekindle�"you each come to realize that what you've done to the other, they've done to you!

Friends, avoid love that poisons, and if you are poisoned seek the anecdote: separation!