You have fear, the fear of being alone. Your “aloneness” makes you feel a sense of lack. So you want to hook-up; you want to have a partner. A partner that will be with you in a relationship, an intimate relationship. And you meet the person. The person makes you feel special and happy. There are butterflies in your stomach. You fall in love. You feel alive because someone wants and needs you just as you want and need the person. You feel that the part of you you felt was missing has appeared in your life. The relationship is everything and everything else seems insignificant. The fact that something outside of you has become the centre of your life does not seem to matter to you. But there is something you are not aware of because you are unconscious: you are having an addiction.
You are addicted to the other person. No. You are actually addicted to the image you have of the other person. What you call “falling in love” is really an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. This is not true love. True love has nothing to do with wanting. Think of losing your partner. This creates the fear of loss in you which can manifest as jealousy, possessiveness, control, emotional blackmail. And if your partner does leave you, you find yourself in an intense grief. You get “low.” But you feel low because you have been high. Your addiction to the image you had of your partner acted on you like a drug. Your addiction came about because you unconsciously refused to move through your own pain. So you used a person to cover your pain. In other forms of addiction, substance can be used to cover up pain – drug, alcohol, food. Whether the addiction has to do with substance or someone, it starts with pain and ends with pain.
When the relationship ends you feel pain. The end of the relationship is however not the cause of the pain but you do not know this. The end of the relationship brought out the pain that has been in you. And you feel it intensely. “You broke my heart,” you tell the person. But no, your heart was not broken. Your expectation was broken. You can say that the end of the relationship got you closer to your heart. And you felt the pain has been there all along, covered up by the relationship but there. Every addiction gets to a point where it no longer works for the addict. The addict feels the pain more intensely then.
