Nothing is to any avail, and that's the fact of the matter

I've been realizing over the past 14 months that I have, in past situations, cavalierly interacted with Aphrodite in ways where I figured I was the one calling the shots and she was pretty much okay with it. How arrogant of me, really. There's a lot of warnings in Greek lit about what happens when people spurn the imperatives of Aphrodite. In particular, I'm reminded of Hippolytus, the breaker of horses, devotee of Artemis and recklessly dismissive of Aphrodite. The Euripides tragedy is a fantastic cautionary tale about such one-sidedness. 

Aphrodite: "How dare he? I'll cause his stepmother to fall in love with him, have him repudiate her, have her hang herself, make it seem to his hero father that he has raped her, have his hero father call in one of the favors his dad Poseidon owes him and summon a gigantic bull out of the ocean, terrifying Hippolytus' precious horses that he has dedicated to Artemis, so that they drag him to his death. That'll show him."

Rubens, The Death of Hippolytus

Harsh. 

I think Aphrodite has been willing to let me have my delusion of agency because I have also suffered. I have always been willing to take the risk of going with emerging feelings of falling in love. I have not once put the brakes on in my life. In general, I have no regrets about that. 

Aphrodite leaning against a pillar, 3rd Century BCE

But here is the way things seem now. The loml and I have tried many different interventions, all of which have at least the appearance of rationality. Clearly, when either one of us ticks down the list of circumstantial realities, our continued relationship is irrational. I have been used to either myself or the other person managing this, calling it quits, and that has been that. 

Our efforts to manage have resulted in precisely nothing. The reality is unmanageable by either of us. Many of my dear readers may scoff at such a claim. The evidence is clear, however. 

This has repeatedly pushed me back to my own responses to the circumstantial realities. Since outward circumstances are not changing any time soon, my own responses are the only things I have even the slightest hope of changing. In this way, the situation is the perfect, if painful, arena for me to encounter my codependency until it is perfectly clear that I need recovery in these areas. And I know there is a lot along the lines of a repetition compulsion in my own pain, because the exact same responses of mine keep arising, again and again. 

Specifically:

Loneliness
Paranoia
Lack of trust in more general ways
Abandonment
Mind reading
The rapid evaporation of anything reassuring
Catastrophizing
Absolutist language in self talk involving "never" and "always"
Unconscious attempts to get her to change her mind
Strange setups for disappointment

Most recently, I've been more skilled at seeing these things come up in myself and breathing through them, simply observing and not getting attached, and letting go. Walking away. The codependent tendency is to try to get her to fix these things and to resent it when she can't or won't or doesn't. It's been intense work finding other skills. I am at least getting better at seeing the storm on my own horizon, feeling that little knot beginning in my gut or that very beginning of a tightness in my chest or a cloud in front of my forehead, or the incipient murk of the melancholia of self pity, and heading away from the situation rather than more intensely toward it. 

You may wonder why I don't simplify my life and hers and just end things altogether for good, or until she's available. That's the same voice of reason that both she and I have, that has spoken several times. But that is so small an energy in the midst of what both of us are experiencing that it has no staying power whatsoever. Nothing is to any avail along those lines. 

As humbling as that is, it's good in the long run. I can tell. I think Aphrodite knows what she's doing, even though I, a mere mortal, may not have chosen it. Now, if I could just get Hades and Aphrodite working *together* more effectively, maybe it all would ease up. 

  

From 1677, Aphrodite, Eros, and Hades on the other side of the river, an illustration from a French edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses