The most profound origin of the desire for love
Jurg Willi, director of the psychiatric clinic of the University of Zurich and professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy, says that in every human being there is the desire to be able to give up in the complete enjoyment of an eternal embrace: it is the desire to realize the perfect abandonment in love.
In life, the perfect abandonment in love is limited only to some moments of happiness that are impossible to prolong and preserve.
In the period that characterizes falling in love, for example, a climate of intense emotional enthusiasm is created in which the lovers experience the momentary sensation of perfect abandonment in love, the feeling of unconditional and total acceptance beyond the ego. and of you, of time and space: this is not the absolute but a window from which transcendence can be glimpsed.
This type of love, initially, knows no other need than to be together, but it is a period that has a limited duration and that precedes the daily effort for the success of the relationship.
Falling in love is the period in which we want to achieve with the person from whom we are attracted a complete, exclusive, total union and, in the nascent state of this movement that the lovers undertake towards the goal of emotional fusion, they experience a intense, extraordinary, exhilarating sensation.
The extraordinary emotional enthusiasm that one has in the period of falling in love is a transitory state destined to diminish as soon as love begins, which consists in being together truly with reality and with the totality of the person of the other: love derives from the Greek word love that means together.
Although the choice of the spouse, which must be made on the basis of affinity and reliability criteria from the point of view of ideas and projects of life, has been a good choice, as soon as the knowledge becomes deeper, through the union with all aspects of the life of the other, we realize that the other is an imperfect being like us: when we live really together with a person, when we live together the constraints of daily life, material concerns and responsibilities it becomes increasingly clear that love between man and woman is by its nature a limited love, subject to tensions, difficulties, disappointments and not able to realize the exhilarating expectations and sensations that accompany falling in love.
The love between man and woman is a love in which it is not possible to abandon oneself completely in the arms of the other without having more problems, but it is a love in which it is necessary to make a daily effort for the success of the relationship. commitment of will and reason, sacrifice, responsibility, the ability to forgive, the ability to start over.
The relationship between man and woman is not immune to tensions and difficulties but, on the contrary, it is always insistently threatened and requires to be defended, renewed and built every day.
Where does the extraordinary emotional enthusiasm of the lovers feel and see the possibility of being able to abandon themselves in the complete enjoyment of an eternal embrace?
This marvelous sensation comes from a need that is purely spiritual. In every human being there is a tendency towards the absolute, the need for an infinite, absolute, total good: this need is in reality a need of God because no material good, no human love can be infinite, absolute, total.
For Jurg Willi, the aspiration to perfect abandonment in love has the archetypal character of mystical union: it is the desire for an original state in which we freely merge into a larger whole, we are part of something that includes everything.
This is the desire to return to that paradisaical situation in which the state of isolation dissolves and flows into a transcendent consciousness. It is, after all, a religious nostalgia for mystical union with God, in which we are emptied of every limited and imperfect creature to be filled with Divinity. In the unconscious of every human being, the desire for love is at the origin of the desire for God. In this life, in fact, the perfect abandonment in love is limited to some moments impossible to prolong and preserve: every human love it is, by its nature, limited, imperfect, subject to disappointment, unable to completely fill the human heart.
All human beings need to feel complete and totally fulfilled, all need this fullness, all need to be filled by God and no one is a vessel with the same capabilities as another: Heaven is precisely that condition in which everyone he will have everything for him.
To believe that it is possible to find in the spouse or lover the one or the one who can satisfy all our needs and all our aspirations constitutes properly the illusion of the so-called romantic love. Romantic love is an attempt to realize the heavenly state on earth through an experience of perfect solidarity with a human being who is considered the bearer of something absolute and which has always failed us. It is a desire towards totality, towards perfection that gives rise to a sort of obsession of fantasy concentrated on the image of the beloved person whose characteristics seem to have a special charm. Psychological scholars agree that, in reality, the image that seduces in romantic type of love - and above all in the phenomenology of the thunderbolt - is an inner image that the other has been able only to recall to the mind: it is an internal dimension that emerges, the individual he is - kidnapped - not by the being in front of him but by an idea of which he was unconsciously a carrier, an idea that is re awakened and evoked by the encounter. Romantic love never works because it does not belong to the reality of human relationships, it is the substitute for a religious need that has not found or has lost its awareness: it arises from the attempt to attribute to a human being a value of infinity, from the attempt to concentrate on this the unfulfilled desire of perfection and of infinity.
When the desire to realize the perfect abandonment in love is sought not in God but in creatures, the human heart becomes restless and this may lead to an almost morbid search for sentimental or sexual relationships which, however, are not able to satisfy it (see Jurg Willi, What holds couples together, Arnoldo Mondadori publisher, Milan 1992, translation by Paola Massardo and Palma Severi, pp.20-24, see Francesco Alberoni, Innamoramento e amore, Garzanti, Milan 1992, pp.21, 57, 62, 77-78, see Aldo Carotenuto, Eros and Pathos, Bompiani, Milan 1994, pp.21-25, 41-47 , see M. Scott Peck, An infinite desire for good, Frassinelli publisher, Como 1995, translation by Laura Sgorbati Buosi, pp.224-225) S. Augustine, who before confession confessed that he could not sleep in a bed without a woman, writes: "You made us for You, Lord, and our heart will be restless until you leave it in You" (quoted in St. Thomas 'Aquino, Theological-Spiritual Brochures, and Paoline, Rome 1976, translated by P. Raimondo M. Sorgia op, page 254) The doctrine of the Catholic Church recalls that the need for absolute and perfect love will find solution and fulfillment only in life of the world that will come because only the union with God will give birth in man a love of such depth able to satisfy every need and able to render useless the same necessity of marriage, the same necessity of sexual relationship: only perfect communion with God he will realize perfect communion with himself and with others. This is why Our Lord Jesus Christ reveals that: - at the resurrection ... we do not take neither wife nor husband, but we are like angels in heaven - (Mt 22:30, cf. John Paul II, Man and woman created him, catechesis on human love, New City Publishing and Vatican Publishing Library, Rome 1985, chapter 68) Pretending a love without limits, without defects, without disappointments means not understanding the necessity of commitment, sacrifice, responsibility for the success of the relationship.
