The Gospel According to Gorski Part the Third

I am so goddamned in love it's silly. But dealing with the plain  fact that there's no arena for it. This goes to how I always have experienced "romantic" love- as a more general pull to the sacred. Dante and Beatrice always made perfect sense to me, as does Borges and his story The Aleph. In having no human and direct arena for being in love the way I am, I am forced to be creative and find ways to "sublimate" it or whatever. I hate it, to tell the truth. I can change my behavior, and I can redirect my mind as often as I am able, but there's honestly nothing I can do about being in love the way I am. That's how it is. I am by turns frustrated, offended (in that sense of having unwanted feelings fuck with me), tender, yearning, accepting, etc. In my past incarnations, I have tried to control, eradicate, avoid, even going so far as to hate the object of my affections. And all of that manipulative behavior was in response to feelings far, far less powerful than these, where Blake's dictum comes to mind: "Those who restrain their desire do so only because it is weak enough to be restrained." 

Anyway, I am quite sure the good people of recovery would see my heart-state as problematic, to say the least. But maybe many would not. Maybe instead the truth is that I am accepting what I can't change, that I have the courage to change what I can, and that I'm developing the wisdom to know the difference. Maybe sometimes we grow the most in the most uncomfortable and seemingly irrational fires. 

Back to Gorski: statement of the day: "If sexuality is the primary foundation of a relationship it will lead you into a dysfunctional relationship 90 percent of the time." This leads to the typical sex negative lines of thinking around relationships that I often find shaming, dismissive, white cis, heteronormative and with a default set of unexamined values that underpin a lot of the "help" that's on offer. On the other hand, certainly for me, an aspect of intense involvement from early stages of relationships with women arises out of early sexual engagement. I have always had a more culturally "feminine" experience of the connection between sex and emotions, finding it difficult not to become emotionally atached to women if we've had sex. I am told many men, and people in general, do not experience any necessarily intense emotional bond with people with whom they have sex, and that interests me. In my active sex addiction at a low bottom in connection also with a conflagration of alcoholism, when I was seeing sex workers, I even romanticized them. I seem wired that sex and "girlfriend" go together, and found it amusing that some sex workers actually sell something the abbreviation for which is "GFE," that is, "girlfriend experience." 

So I do get a lot of the cautionary wisdom about sex. I have never employed such wisdom in my behavior however. And in my current case of being in love with the woman I know intuitively is the love of my life (cynicism be damned), it would not have mattered- gradual acquaintance leading to deeper intimacy or sudden intense conflagration, it would have al led to the exact same place. There may or may not be other reasons sexual behavior was damaging for her and me, but the timing or spacing out of it absolutely does not come into play.

Again, I feel like there's wisdom and then there's just what people do. Sometimes we are wise, and sometimes we hide behind wisdom or morality or ethics in order to avoid terrifying changes that might actually be great for us. Sometimes we just do our best and mess shit up and grow as much as possible as a result. It seems funny to me in a larger sense that the emphasis Groski puts on this process is "staying safe," when it seems to me that no matter what, this stuff is never, ever safe. It's painful by necessity. That doesn't mean we ought to dump a shit ton of kerosene on what is already risky by nature, of course, but it does mean that the stately, slow development of a romantic relationship arising from a gradual experience of the other levels- superficial to companionship to friendship to sex- is going to be "safe." I mentioned to a friend of mine, a woman I've known for 25 years, that maybe I should wait to get sexual with potential partners, take it more slowly and really become friends first. She said "Sounds nice in theory, but what if you are sexually incompatible? I like to find out fright away if that basic absolute necessity is there." There's wisdom in this also.

Having said that, for now I will list Gorski's characteristics of an addictive relationship, and leave a lot of the exploration of these ideas for another post, because I have to get back to work. 

1. Magical or unrealistic expectations
2. Instant gratification
3. Dishonesty
4. Compulsive and obsessive overcontrol or avoidance
5. Lack of trust
6. Alternating criticism of partner or self
7. Isolation (of the two people together- isolation of the relationship)
8. A repeating cycle of pain

Definitely a painful list, absolutely familiar to me from years of experience. I think the most glaring things for me at the moment are dishonesty- the tendency to not express what I am actually thinking and feeling when I sense something is at stake- and lack of trust- this is nearly universal for me right now. I have been experiencing truly a lack of trust in the entire universe for the past two years, basically. It manifests in specific ways of course, but it is a global feeling that nothing whatsoever has my back. 

More when able. For now, this from one of my all time favorite writers:

"I took the Metro to Cité. I walked past Notre-Dame and thought of the hunchback Quasimodo swinging his misshapen body across the bell-ropes of love for Esmerelda. Quasimodo was a deaf mute. Cupid is blind. Freud called love an "overestimation of the object." But I would swing through the ringing world for you."


~ Jeanette Winterson, from 'All I Know About Gertrude Stein"