TO FIND & KEEP ROMANTIC LOVE
Learn how self-esteem can generate a sense of what we believe we deserve.
Imagine that you have a vessel inside you that is designed to hold love. All the love that comes to you must fit into that container. If you receive more love than this vessel will hold all the excess love will drop away and be lost to you.
How large is your vessel? If your vessel is quart sized, then what happens if life wants to shower you with a gallon of love? Is your vessel large enough to sustain your need for love? Who decided how large your vessel could be?
This exercise offers us information that is related to our ability to receive and tolerate love, especially romantic love. Many who do this exercise realize that the love-vessel inside of them is rather small. When romantic love showers down upon them unannounced, they accept what they can. However, if the power and intensity of it is greater than the vessel within them then they begin to deflect everything that seems more than they can handle. Romantic love is notoriously immense. In many cases it overwhelms our interior love-vessel to the point of overflow. If we hold too tightly to the beliefs that form and limit our ability to tolerate love, we will not be able to increase the size of our vessel and we will begin to shrink from the flow of love. Much of today’s self-help psychology emphasizes the importance of selfesteem and the difficulties that arise due to the lack of it. Low self-esteem is blamed for many mental and emotional ailments, including a difficulty in tolerating affection and love. We might say that low self-esteem is a major factor in deciding the size generates of our interior our sense love-vessel. of what Selfesteem we believe we deserve. If then, we encounter a person who loves us more than we think we deserve, we could easily find ways to deflect or even reject some or all
Romantic love permeates our being with intense passion that is unlike anything we have ever experienced.
of that loving care and attention. Given the special intensity of romantic love, this could result in an enormous internal conflict between the limited size of our love-vessel and the enormity of the passion of our lover. The miracle of romantic love, however, is its ability to re-shape and expand our interior love-vessel, if we consciously allow it. Currently, there are only three ways to substantially increase our ability to tolerate love; psychotherapy, which can take years and great financial expense; a transformational spiritual experience, which can occur gradually over years or in a lightning strike of divine intervention, which is not under our control; or finally by surrendering to the power of romantic love when it graces us with its joy. Both psychotherapy paths to self-love, and and spirituality it is true that are loving viable
God can include many of the experiences of romantic love, depending on the spiritual tradition. But this work is about romantic love and it appears we would do well to pay attention to its life and selftransforming powers.
It would be safe to assume that romantic love overwhelms everyone’s love-vessel.
For most of us, it is greater than any love we have experienced and our inner being is most often not prepared to fully accept and integrate it. Our task, then, is not to take what we can handle and let the rest fall away into the abyss of our selfhate. Our task is to muster all our strength and consciousness and open our heart to receive it until we think we are going to shatter internally and then open even more.
The best and most effective response to romantic love is surrender. To surrender, in this instance, is not a sign of weakness. In fact, it is the opposite of weakness. It is actually an act of love responding to love with the only appropriate means we have. As we respond to love with love our inner vessel grows and expands until it can accept and hold the entirety of the miraculous gift is has been offered.
Surrender allows us to bypass the inner argument between our limited self-image
Self-esteem generates our sense of what we believe we deserve.
and love the offers glorious us. Rational wonder defences that romantic will not suffice. We cannot argue our way into believing that we deserve this immense blessing that has been bestowed upon us without our effort or request. We know, in our hearts, that we did nothing to earn it. Yet here it is, and it is our task to honour it by letting go of all resistance. Then love can enter every dark corner of our being and heal what we believed was unredeemable. At this point the inner love-vessel shatters completely and love fills all that we are. We are, once and for all, the vessel itself.
Take Away Points:
Learning to tolerate love is essential to the success of your romantic relationship.
It is important to identify your ‘love vessel’.
The best response to romantic love is surrender.
Dr Matthew Anderson has a Doctor of Ministry specialising in counselling. He has extensive training and experience in Gestalt and Jungian Psychology and has helped many people successfully navigate relationship issues. Dr Anderson has a best-selling book, ‘The Resurrection of Romance’ and he may be contacted via his website.