I wake up in the morning....

I wake up in the morning, and each day is a little better... but then, I begin to think. And all my confusion crashes in, and becomes too much. I'm so hooked, and I want relief from this so badly, and I hope I can think my way out.... but thinking only makes it worse.

My soul craves what my soul craves, and seems independant from my thinking.

I cant fix this, I cant change it.... I can only get unhooked.

One of the things I am thinking about, and is utterly confusing to me is the difference between attachment and being hooked. According to buddist teachers, unattachment is something of a goal. But, according to everything I believe about life, healthy attachment, love, partnership, commitment - these are things to be sought and nurtured as part of being a healthy human.

The other thing I am trying to look at is the difference between love and limerance. Love is what I was trying to have, but limerance was the state I got stuck in. I seem particularly sensitive to uncertainty and rejection, and once uncertainty comes into the mix, I become simply insane. My attachment and desire becomes completely detached from any objective reality - it seems to depend on feeling anxious. This is a really nasty trap.

I dont resent Ale for the year I spent with him, but I resent the fuck out of a situation that is going to cost me anything to recover from. This is not my fault. This is not his fault. This just is. Its going to take me months to get over this, and honestly, I would rather just move on.

But - if I dont examine this - my attraction for people who are slightly rejecting of me, I will repeat this ad nauseum. My intellectual understanding of it won't help me. I need to get it on a deeper level, so that I can break this habit.

However, it is this limerance - when experienced by two people simultaneously, that leads to healthy attachment and to pair bonding. It is a biological force, driven by the limbic systme of the brain, enhanced by dopamine and oxytocin, and is largely involuntary.

So, somewhere between not experiencing this at all, and not letting it "hook" me is the answer - but I am not sure where the answer lies.

The truth may be that I, for all his sweetness, and all my desire, had he reciprocated in full - we would be dead in the water anyway. In the breif moments that I can see him objectively, without the positive qualities I have imbued him with - but which he doesnt actually posess to my knowledge (this is a two part post today....), love most likely would have grown, I would have seen him as an unacceptable long term partner, and we would have parted. And, with MUCH LESS pain on my part.

However, for me, being trapped in a limerant state, robs me of all of those things which I KNOW to be true. It really truly makes me nuts. Even as I was trying to tell Ale to not mistake limerance for love.... I was as surely locked behind its doors as if I had been commited to an insane asylum.

I want a long term partnership, and I want it with someone who has many of Ale's qualities. First, I want it with someone where the sex was like it was with him. I want someone with his inherant sweetness and natural state of loving-kindness. These were very attractive qualities.

However, the truth about Ale is that I always felt he was a little bit shallow. I took his buddhism for a sign that maybe he was deeper than he seemed... but now I am sort of doubting this. I think that Ale has taken some of the core messages of buddhism, and misunderstood them - for example, his notion of detachment seems to be a justification for a lack of commitment to his life. His notion of impermanance seems to be a justification for not really taking full responsibility (what is the use of love, purpose, and commitment when everyone dies anyway)....

He's smart, but he doesn't read books - he finds them boring. He makes summary judgments about things (Harry Potter is a nerd). When asked about the strange disconnection in his family, he didnt even think twice "Thats the way we are".

I don't want a male version of me - but some things are core values to me. With a partner, I insist on REAL and abiding freindship, because lovey-doviness is a transitory emotion. It comes and goes. But a freindship bespeaks a real loving commitment. When I tried to speak of this, he has not one clue what I was talking about (or worse - he pretended not to.) I want someone who has core values about taking responsibility. And understand the full meaning of being commited in an uhooked world.

Those are not that boy. More on that later.