At 1:30 this afternoon, local time in Ecuador, it is a sunny 29C. We are delaying our beach walk until later in the afternoon when the sun is less intense so that we don’t have to use as much sunscreen. Yesterday afternoon, we went for a six kilometre walk along the beach before heading into the sea for a swim in the surf. It was the perfect beginning of three months in Ecuador. We finished off the day with a meal with a bottle of red wine at our favourite restaurant in the fishing village we call home during the winter. Life just doesn’t get that much better, especially when you get to do this with the woman I have loved for forty-eight years.
For the next while, I want to talk about love from a Jungian point of view. Of course, that doesn’t really explain everything that there is to say about love as there are as many faces of love as there are people, and perhaps a few more as well. I will draw upon the book Eros and Pathos, by Aldo Carotenuto as I take you and myself on this journey. So, with that said, I take these following words from the introduction as my starting point:
“It can’t be denied that the condition we assume to be normal – the love that lasts a lifetime, two partners who grow old together in continuing love – is in reality so rare as to practically constitute an anomaly.”Aldo Carotenuto, Eros and Pathos, p. 7
I have to admit that it hasn’t always been easy and often, both of us has on more than one occasion been ready to end our relationship. To be honest, love often was an intense exercise in suffering. However, stubbornness more than anything, kept us hanging on and working to get passed the yawning caverns that were waiting to swallow what thin threads of love that remained.
“Too many unions are based on pathological need where each partner represents the other’s sickness.”Carontenuto, p. 7
For my wife and I, it was love at first sight, literally. I had stopped in a town I had no intention of stopping in, because it was raining too hard [I was hitch-hiking en route to Salt Spring Island]. This beautiful young woman served me in the restaurant I had taken shelter in from the rain. I ordered, we talked, and three hours later I proposed and she accepted. It was the September long weekend in 1970. Of course, neither of us knew anything about the other. There was something in both of us that the other unconsciously hooked onto, something we project [our unconscious needs] onto the other. When that projection is cast, when it is received [hooked] and a reciprocal projection is received in turn, there is love-at-first-sight.
Our literature and mythology talk about love-at-first-sight. The stories like Romeo and Juliette and Tristan and Isolde, are just two examples of humans captivated, caught in the throes of this powerful love. In all such stories, the lovers are star-crossed with the ending being tragic. Consciousness plays no part in the dynamic. Yet somehow, my wife and I escaped this tragedy. Why? Perhaps, it had to do with how we navigated through the early stages of our relationship. I risked being nude in her presence. Boundaries were stretched. Layers of the unknown were exposed and made conscious.