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One of the key things that can go wrong in our search for love is that we get fixated on a particular person who - for one reason or another - turns out not to be a promising or realistic option. It may be that the person is in another country, with someone else, definitely not interested in us - or dead.
Fixation is the conviction that there is only one person we can genuinely love - even though we can’t actually have a relationship with them. When a new person comes along - who might really be potentially quite a good partner for us - we reject them. We feel it would be disloyal to the individual we are fixated upon - even though they may neither know or care about this.
Fixation disguises itself as a very Romantic attitude. Our love is unrequited, impossible - and yet it also seems especially intense and pure. The most famous love story of the 18th century, Goethe’s Sorrows of the Young Werther, is about a fixation in love. Werther falls passionately in love with Charlotte who likes him but doesn’t love him back - and soon gets married to someone else. There are plenty of other nice women who are single, attractive and interested in him. But Werther has no time for them. The only one he cares for is Charlotte, the one who can’t care for him.
It sounds Romantic, but to loosen ourselves from the grip of our fixations, we should realise that a devotion to an unrequited situation is in essence a clever way of ensuring we won’t end up in a relationship at all. Fixation is really a fear of a relationship.
The fear may be motivated by a dread of possible loss, self-hatred or a fear of self-revelation: a reluctance to let anyone into the secret parts of ourselves. These are the issues we have to grapple with, rather than the surface matters we endlessly discuss (how to persuade the uninterested lover to love us; and how, despite their rejection, they are so perfect).
Once we see fixation for what it really is, the idea that a particular person could be so important stops looking like a great act of love and devotion. Fixation isn’t a manifestation of love, it’s a calculated commitment to an obstacle to finding love.
Another move to unfixate ourselves is not to tell ourselves that we don’t like this person or to attempt to forget how much we are attracted to them. It is to get very serious and specific about what the attraction is based on - and then to come to see that the qualities we admire in fact exist in other people who don’t have the set of problems that are currently making a fulfilling relationship impossible. The careful investigation of what we love about someone shows us - paradoxically but very liberatingly - that we could in fact also love someone else.
Understanding what we like in a person - what gives us pleasure - is therefore a central anti-fixation move. By strengthening our attachment to qualities, we are weakening our attachment to specific individuals. When we properly grasp what draws us to one person, we necessarily identify qualities that are available in other kinds of lovers as well. What we really love isn’t this specific creature, but a range of qualities we have first located in them, normally because they were the most conspicuous examples of a repository of them - which is where the problem started because over-conspicuous people tend to attract too much attention, get over-subscribed and are then in a position to offer only very modest reciprocation.
Yet in reality, the qualities can’t only exist there. They are necessarily generic and will be available under other, less obvious guises - once we know how to look.
Fixation is the conviction that there is only one person we can genuinely love - even though we can’t actually have a relationship with them. When a new person comes along - who might really be potentially quite a good partner for us - we reject them. We feel it would be disloyal to the individual we are fixated upon - even though they may neither know or care about this.
Fixation disguises itself as a very Romantic attitude. Our love is unrequited, impossible - and yet it also seems especially intense and pure. The most famous love story of the 18th century, Goethe’s Sorrows of the Young Werther, is about a fixation in love. Werther falls passionately in love with Charlotte who likes him but doesn’t love him back - and soon gets married to someone else. There are plenty of other nice women who are single, attractive and interested in him. But Werther has no time for them. The only one he cares for is Charlotte, the one who can’t care for him.
It sounds Romantic, but to loosen ourselves from the grip of our fixations, we should realise that a devotion to an unrequited situation is in essence a clever way of ensuring we won’t end up in a relationship at all. Fixation is really a fear of a relationship.
The fear may be motivated by a dread of possible loss, self-hatred or a fear of self-revelation: a reluctance to let anyone into the secret parts of ourselves. These are the issues we have to grapple with, rather than the surface matters we endlessly discuss (how to persuade the uninterested lover to love us; and how, despite their rejection, they are so perfect).
Once we see fixation for what it really is, the idea that a particular person could be so important stops looking like a great act of love and devotion. Fixation isn’t a manifestation of love, it’s a calculated commitment to an obstacle to finding love.
Another move to unfixate ourselves is not to tell ourselves that we don’t like this person or to attempt to forget how much we are attracted to them. It is to get very serious and specific about what the attraction is based on - and then to come to see that the qualities we admire in fact exist in other people who don’t have the set of problems that are currently making a fulfilling relationship impossible. The careful investigation of what we love about someone shows us - paradoxically but very liberatingly - that we could in fact also love someone else.
Understanding what we like in a person - what gives us pleasure - is therefore a central anti-fixation move. By strengthening our attachment to qualities, we are weakening our attachment to specific individuals. When we properly grasp what draws us to one person, we necessarily identify qualities that are available in other kinds of lovers as well. What we really love isn’t this specific creature, but a range of qualities we have first located in them, normally because they were the most conspicuous examples of a repository of them - which is where the problem started because over-conspicuous people tend to attract too much attention, get over-subscribed and are then in a position to offer only very modest reciprocation.
Yet in reality, the qualities can’t only exist there. They are necessarily generic and will be available under other, less obvious guises - once we know how to look.