How to be a better lover

Loving someone doesn’t necessarily make them a better person and other people’s love won’t fix you. 

You are not the Velvetine Rabbit. You’re not a toy and other people’s love is not what makes you real.

Your love for them can’t fix what ails them and they’re going to continue doing what they feel they have to do to work through their issues or avoid them, with or without you.

It may sound bleak but there is a purpose to this design. 

We go through life seeking partners who give us a sense of "fulfillment."

This makes relationships nothing more than people fulfilling mutual needs.
That’s why people get those matching puzzle pieces or locket and key tattoos. That’s why Jerry Maguire won all those awards. We want someone to complete us. Please. Complete me. We’re taught to think that love is when someone else fills the void, the important parts that we’re missing, because most anyone who stops to think about it will inevitably, at some point, feel that something is missing in their lives.

But that’s bullshit.

That sensation of something missing? Everyone has it. It’s likely encoded in our DNA as a way to keep us mating and procreating which is understandable when it comes to sustaining the species, but it certainly doesn’t help us maintain a healthy relationship or quality of life.

To be in a healthy relationship you have to be with someone who is whole within themselves, but you won’t find someone like that until you are whole unto yourself as well. That’s a vague and flowery statement and if you’re over a certain age I’m sure you’ve heard it before. But.... how do I become whole unto myself, you ask?

How do I become... a better lover?

Carl Jung created a term for what it means to be whole unto oneself. The state is referred to as Individuation. It is not an easy thing to achieve because it is not so much a goal as it is a process but it starts with self awareness. That means consistently asking yourself tough questions like. Who am I really? Do I exhibit the personality traits that I find attractive or loathsome in others? Am I a villain? A hero? How have I contributed to my current state of affairs? Am I fully responsible for where I am in this life? (The answer to that last one is always a resounding 99% YES with just enough wiggle room for uncontrollable environmental factors like tidal waves and tornadoes.) You can’t help who you were born to or where and how you were raised, but the moment you started making decisions, you became responsible for those decisions. Accepting that responsibility is a crucial aspect of becoming self-aware.

Step number two: Be honest with yourself. That’s the hardest part. The level to which human beings will deny, justify and delude themselves and others in preservation of a poorly formed ego or because they’re just terribly afraid of facing who they truly are, never ceases to amaze me.

Part of why we love flawed, crazy people is because we can relate. If you’re perpetually drawn to slackers, think about how you’ve used the act of taking care of them as an excuse to not pursue your own greater destiny. If you find crazy bitches irresistible, you are exactly the kind of nut that needs someone that crazy around to make you feel sane. But you’re not. If you were truly sane and reasonable you wouldn’t have to prove it to yourself by attempting to keep someone else in line.

At some level some part of us believes we don’t deserve better because we know that we are not  better. No one’s perfect, right? So we resign ourselves to the partner who matches our level of self-worth. If you can get past the pure, physiological chemistry of sexual desire and observe the relationship objectively that shit becomes as clear as day. Even those of us who perpetually seek to date people we think of as "out-of-our-league" are often just seeking a prestige they feel they lack.

When two people come together because they’re each missing parts, they may both earnestly intend to find fulfillment but what they’re really doing is creating a vacuum between them.

Now we have a void between us. There are many voids out there but this one is ours. We cherish this for a while. We confuse it with longing for each other. But over time we find ourselves just going round and round it rehashing the same issues over and over and we spend so much time working on our collaborative void that neither partner can move forward through life. Fixing what’s missing in the relationship itself becomes all consuming. ...until it’s over.

Sometimes the best gift we can give a person is to allow them to learn from the loss of us. Obviously that’s a case by case solution and it’s up to you to be real with yourself in any given circumstance. 

If the people who have been loved and left behind are smart they’ll reflect upon themselves and figure out where they went wrong and maybe they’ll be better for the next person they end up with.

We can change. The beauty of life is that we do all the time, but the foundations we build with others don’t change.

You can’t build a house over a sinkhole. You can’t take back what’s been done. You laid those bricks together. So if you laid them all fucked up because you were fucked up at the time ...guess what?

 No matter how much love you throw at it...That shit don’t stand. 

You can keep stacking away at your jenga tower or attempt to start over with a clean slate and a more solid foundation of self-worth👈