Love thrives and grows only to the extent that the partners in it refrain from holding on to any one stage, something we often do from fear of losing it or fear of going on into the unknown. Holding on, not letting go, not accepting the natural rhythms undermines the veracity of our love relationships. When a round ends a another round begins. If the rhythm is broken, if a stage is missing, or if one gets stuck and can't move on, the meaningfulness of the relationship is to that extent truncated. A mother and child, a husband and wife, dedicated coworkers, hopefully learn to accept approach and separation as the natural rhythm of relationship.
Our most fundamental learnings and our presentations of ourselves are triggered by and conditioned to the social distances through which we pass on the way to love, and the sometimes unhappy road back from it. The development of the self, we must conclude, depends greatly on the dynamics of approach and separation in I and Thou situations. Without love and loss we can hardly grow or care to grow. Without a connection with another -- without the intimacy of a friend, parent, lover, teacher somewhere along the line -- a great chunk of the self cannot grow. Responsiveness needs a living other. So there is a coming to know oneself in love that cannot be found elsewhere, a special and deep self-affirmation which, when it reaches certain heights of security, yearns to be known and to know.
Oh that thou wert as my brother,
(8:1-2)
That sucked the breasts of my mother!
When I should find thee without, I would kiss thee;
Yea, and one would despise me.
I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother's house,
That thou mightest instruct me
We want to know and be known at those moments as we want give and receive, indistinguishably but with great longing. That's why the song concludes:
Thou that dwellest in the gardens,
Make haste, my beloved,
The companions hearken for thy voice:
'Cause me to hear it.'
And be thou like to a gazelle or to a young hart
Upon the mountains of spices.
The fuller the realization of the movements between approach and separation, the more conscious we are of the moments of turning between the stages, the more fully alive we feel in living it out, the more we gain from it, the more we suffer from it, the deeper we are made from it, however it turns out. Miss this experience of love and you've lost the crux of life. Rabbi Yochanan said: "All scripture is holy and all the Torah is holy, but the /Song of Songs/ is the Holy of Holies."
The greatness of the transaction of love, with its ethical resonances of promises given, becomes apparent and is sealed in the heart in the times of closest approach. As Neruda said:
Because the earth shook -- it did --, that awful night;
while inside, a ferocious love wound around
(Pablo Neruda. from a hundred love sonnets. 3.)
then dawn filled all the goblets with its wine;
the heavenly sun declared itself;
and around me -- till it pierced me with its thorns, its sword,
slashing a seared road through my heart.
Whatever takes us to that place of intimacy in any or all of the four kinds of love opens the moral heart of love. That's why in every mutual approach there is a greeting and a getting to know that keeps happening on different levels as more of the other person is disclosed through closer contact -- but it happens just as well in every departure. That's why in true separation there's a holding of the image of the other in consciousness. As Blake and Sissell sang:
Waking skies
At sunrise
Every sunset too
Seems to be
Bringing me
Memories of you.
The ethical energy that finds its strong bottom in the mutuality of giving and receiving is tremendously powerful, "for love is strong as death." But mutuality is rare. We get to know ourselves and each other through our attempts not through our achievements. And with wholehearted attempts the approaches and separations evolve. Our early adult love experiences that have to do with the losing of the self and the finding of the other are prone to be filled with need and dependency, high passion and jealousy. But if we endure them our mature loves (at least that's the hope) will be giving, compassionate and peaceful, reaching out to embrace more of the world's reality.
In an unexpected way the rhythm of approach and separation generates its own constancy. It is kept alive by change. And this constancy in change endures as long as one person's separation phase isn't experienced by the other person as so far away as to constitute abandonment. Conversely, the approach distances must be commensurate too. Otherwise one person is likely to feel smothered while the other feels cozy and close. The basis of compatibility in relationships, it follows, is not identity or mutuality, but time-based compatibility of approach and separation rhythms on sexual, romantic, friendship and spiritual planes.
In viable relationships in every kind of love the desire for constancy is not met by impossible pledges that cancel out approach and separation, but by expressing the rhythms openly in the minor cycles. When the natural systole and diastole become occasions for anxiety instead of cues for change, we are in trouble. We are estranged from nature. In this condition we are likely to lead each other astray, in every kind of love, with painful accusations, false demands and self-fulfilling prophecies. Better to have a living, changing bond that transmutes itself through rhythms of distance and closeness! Constancy can be false and cold. With rhythm compatibility every problem is solvable. Except one. We cannot escape the non-reversable reversal of a final separation at death. Both lovers die, all lovers die, and finally even remembrance fades, as in Alzheimer's
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