When Love Helps Us To Change

So many gifts from the book, “The Mermaid’s Chair” by Sue Monk Kidd. I read that book ages ago—sitting on a Cape Cod beach, contemplating a relationship that felt like it was  

tearing me apart.

I had gone to that beach to pray and surrender, “What is this relationship about?” and “Why now?”.

I had loved Kidd’s earlier novels and I thought, “OK, …good beach book.” Such prophetic words.

In the novel, a woman –an artist-writer--falls in love with a monk. Not convenient, not smart, not without agony. I related to that immediately. So much for distraction from my own state of affairs.

But then this, “When a person is in need of a cataclysmic change—a whole new center in the personality—his or her psychic world will produce an infatuation—an erotic attachment—an intense ‘falling in love’. Falling in love is the oldest, most ruthless catalyst on earth.”

And then this, “We fall in love with something we are missing or seeking in ourselves.”

Oh!

And then I knew where to dig.  And why this thing was happening.

With whom have you fallen in love? Does it seem to “make no sense”? Is something being reorganized in you? Does the object of your attachment—that so desirable other—have something you are missing or seeking in yourself?

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More on love and relationships in "Out of the Woods--A Woman's Guide to Long-term Recovery" published by Central Recovery Press.