Runaway Come Home

The problem is not that you need or falsely believe you need romantic partnership in your life.

The problem is your beliefs about how to obtain and maintain that partnership.

The problem is your utter lack of positive vision for what it will actually be like in the day to day.

The problem is the way your desire for partnership is driven by the lack you feel, your insatiability, your loneliness, your pain.

You cannot envision a life that does not contain these things, so you DO not envision the life you would have with your partner, all because of your problematic belief that their love, the love you share, will be the magical cure to all your problems.

Let's walk through that last one in another way.

If my desire for partnership is driven by the lack I feel, I am motivated to partnership as an endpoint of my suffering. I feel lonely, I think, because I do not have this partnership.

I cannot imagine NOT being lonely, so I avoid really forming a clear vision of the partnership that will stop me being lonely.

I'll know it, I think, when my loneliness goes away!

Then I get in partnership and I'm like....

Ok, something is wrong, my loneliness still visits me.

Relationships take work, I think, and I set to righting the wrong.

I'll know it's working, I think, when my loneliness goes away and STAYS away.

The whole partnership is run on lack, negativity, and vaguely formed delusion.

There is no vision for success.

There is no rubric for this partnership that is based in a reality I can vividly imagine.

This is the doomed attentional practice of "not that."

This is the doomed transformational "growth" path of curing the human condition, projected out into relationship, fueling perpetual dissatisfaction and workshopping.

There is nothing to be done for your pain but to feel it. To do anything else is to suffer, to add pain.

This, too, is in service, so that you might end up with so much of it that you simply MUST put in place efficient systems. Pain begets pain because pain is unsustainable. It increases that it might fall.

We don't need to discard this husklike delusion. This old narrative that something, someone, could just stand over here, close enough to me, to make this all feel ok.

I recommend that you enact historical preservation over this sacred narrative and all the understanding you gained from running away.

I recommend you build a more positive, generative narrative in honor of the safety, sovereignty, and power you gained by running away from what was never for you, using your hard-won agency wisely.

I recommend you form a vision of partnership which clarifies what it will offer and what will remain, sacredly, your business alone.