Thoughts are such conjurers, putting on the show they think we like, but no friend of reality.

The difference between who I thought her to be and who she was generated a widening abyss, hard to miss. For a while I did, transfixed on my illusions of her, ignoring ever more. Until the cost of keeping up the charade became too high. The line of excuses became too long and I couldn’t ignore the obvious anymore.

When you can’t pump out enough fiction to distract, that’s judgement day. There is a knock at the door. “Who’s there?” It’s somebody new—her without my projections. Thus begins the downward descent into the aspects of me that want her a certain way. Similar and related to the parts of me that want my coffee the way I like it.

When loving someone you can have them your way, but living with someone you will, at some point, need to answer to what is.

That’s an ending or a new beginning.

An ending will have you keeping company with the projections, offering only imaginary relating.

A new beginning is finding compassion for what you didn’t think you could love. Discovering a deep internal place without judgement.

Finding these parts has relationship usher in not only wider, deeper and fuller love for her but for yourself as well. That’s really the point of relating, to direct us toward the parts of ourselves we don’t yet love or haven’t yet met.

Sobering up

At that turning point you can become sentimental or nostalgic, remaining soft and open to your projections or you can become hard and jaded.

Its best to forgive yourself for projecting. You have always done so, and will always do so: no need to give yourself a hard time for breathing, which you can’t live without and projecting, which you probably won’t live without.

Forgiving yourself softens you to reality, to the way she is and ultimately to the way that you are. If relationship softens us to the way that we are it has done an important job whatever else it brings.

Refuge

Relationship isn’t a refuge as many wish it to be. It isn’t safe, because there are two volatile people involved. And the two of you are plumb full of insecurities, history and expectations. The chemistry of combining these is unpredictable at best, and any attempt to have it offer safety or security is likely to likely to result in resisting rather than embracing inevitable changes.

Compared to relationship the stock market is tame. Sure, in the market you can lose all your money fast but in relationship you lose face, credibility and open your heart to breaking. The thing to do here is become a friend of change, and that entails being continually more flexible than you imagine possible. This is where that trickster, the mind, comes in handy. It spins out illusions that you can learn to love.

Your mind can take you to relating places beyond your wildest dreams and nightmares. To make these places a contribution to relationship perceive them as the illusions that they are. Embrace them as motivational and cautionary tales, not as facts. Don’t believe anything that you think, ever, especially about someone you like, love or care for.

Especially don’t believe anything you think about yourself. Let your thoughts flow and they will present such various projections of who you are and what that look she just gave you means that you don’t need to get stuck on anything you think.

Being entertained by your thoughts rather than believing them makes relationship a game rather than life or death. And as a game it is by far the best one around.

Seduction

Projecting lures you into a relationship you wouldn’t approach without it. It is the used car salesman telling unbalanced tales of wonder about a car that has a ding here, a dent there and is more road warn than he suggests.

Projections welcome us to the wild ride of our lives and it can’t be an accident that we fall for them. She looked so good to me at first, and the way I looked at her had her imagine herself to be the most desirable siren on Earth. That’s what brought us together.

But it isn’t what would hold us together. That would take opening, stepping out of the current of projections and into the flow of reality. That’s a flow going where it does, not necessarily where you want it to.

Let yourself be seduced, always.

~

Author: Jerry Stocking

Editor: Travis May

Images: Pixabay