LOVE AIN'T NO SCHEMING GAME

Credits: Pinterest

Love and Power. I've been thinking about the two's interrelation with a keenness I never had before. Can the two coexist? Does the yearn and pursuit of one disarm and weaken the presence/pursuit of the other? Can Love and power function in the same space, at the same time, or at all? This recent pull at my consciousness led me to become more interested. As a result, I found myself paying more attention to mine and the interactions of others happening around me. I found myself looking out for the interplaying display of Love and power and their resulting impact on relationships.

In my own life, I vividly witnessed the clash of Love and power. I saw how the yearn for power undermined the very essence of Love's truth, how the hungry pursuit to be the one with "the upper hand" in relationships (of every kind) sets us up to crash and burn, how the desire for dominance in loving partnerships dents our vision of what truly matters– what should truly matter.

"To love and be loved is to rest." - @howelljenkins, Tumblr     

I look to relationships, loving ones, as a place of unwind and truthfulness. Somewhere we can relax, stop the performances that characterize life, and be our most honest selves, separate from all the struggles of our ever-patriarchal and capitalist world. However, this isn't always the case. We live in a world where we're taught it's most important above (almost everything else) to be the one in control and told that to gain this control of others and keep it in our grasp,  we must engage in psychological warfare and mind games. 

We are encouraged to falsehood so repeatedly, so convincingly, and so honestly, we have little time left to be honest and love honestly. When we are so concerned with dominating our friends and partners, there's very little focus on anything else. Falsehood easily becomes the norm– especially in our workplaces and professional lives, and with no surprise, this easily spreads out into our personal lives. In this system, we're taught life is a rat race, survival of the fittest (usually the trickiest and most dishonest). We're encouraged to utilize all kinds of gross mental and emotional manipulation tactics. We spend so much time trying to remember and master the 48 laws of power; we become obsessed with figuring out which of the twenty-four manoeuvres and strategies of the seductive process is best to apply at a particular time, which one would work more effectively with which specific person and for which specific scenario. Fixated on all these things, we have very little time and effort to invest in showing up in Love and truth. In fact, our priorities are shifted so fundamentally we become less concerned about showing up in Love and truth.

Somebody might argue, "Oh, no! I do that only at work. I don't bring that into my personal life and relationships." But I have no faith at all in that theory. Ours is a very spiritual experience, and I think it most difficult (if not impossible) to separate who we are from who we are– the values we hold in esteem, the principles and beliefs that guide our actions, the mental, emotional, and physical practices we engage in every day. To argue that we can, at our very core, be false, dishonest, brutally unloving and selfish at work and then totally transformed into these loving, selfless, and honest people in our personal lives sounds to me like an overestimation of our will and abilities as human beings. 

I find that this is a culture self-help books very greatly share into. On a good day, I'd argue that it's one of the fundamental values at the centre of self-help literature. Especially those focused on relationships. As I am more familiar with the ones targeted at women, I can point to books like "Act Like A Woman, Think Like A Man", "Why Men Love Bitches”, and "Don't Be That Girl", etc. as some bodies of self-help literature not only drastically informed by patriarchal philosophies and theories, but also bodies of work that centres the art of manipulation. At these books' core is the idea that the most effective way to make a relationship work is by engaging in a long game of physical, mental, and emotional manipulation. These books are all dedicated to teaching women how to play the game of being and staying appealing to emotionally unavailable, emotionally withholding, and emotionally abusive men who are themselves unwilling to do the self and love work. These books tell women readers: take all the things that make you woman and you, stop making them about yourself, refocus them on your male partners, and rewire them into strategies to win their appeal and approval. It tells them: And remember(!), you can't just invent a brand new person to trick this man into sticking around and stop there; come up with other tricks to keep him under your mental and emotional control. These books not only encourage and promote psychological deception as a strategy to make relationships work, they promote falsehood of the very essence of readers by discouraging them from being real people. Readers are told to reinvent themselves, adopt questionable beliefs, and show up as if Love and life is a performance.

"Love and dominance cannot coexist". - Somebody whose name evades me.

I wonder why. Why are we often so preoccupied with gaining and maintaining control over the people we're in loving relationships with? What high does that ignite or fulfil? Why do we cling to power over others so much? Is it in desperation to keep our loved ones forever bound to us? Do we think that by gaining mental and emotional control over them, we'd be able to keep them desperately bound to us? If this is true, do we realize that in toxically binding people to us in this way, we trap them not as loving partners but as victims in what is merely an illusion of Love?

If we were unconcerned with whether the people we are in loving partnerships with are abased to us, unperturbed by trauma-motivated power dynamics, if we would let ourselves and our partners just BE, offering gentleness and compassion, we'd have, without any doubt in my mind, better, longer lasting and healthier relationships. In being so obsessively concerned with power, we close ourselves off to love.

"The Love of power — This is where I saw Love go from potent to just seriously poisonous. If Love is a response of human beings and our Love is focused on power, there is no love; there is no connection — just a drive for control and no sympathetic real feel of Love." - Unknown

We have to love people enough to let go of our desire/will to have control over them.

In Love, we're directed to the practice of mutual care, respect, and truthfulness. We're kind and patient, making room and effort to understand each other. We're equals; no one person takes the role of a god and the other a subordinate. Love considers the good of everyone involved. Power, on the other hand, centres the good of the self exclusively. In power, one person (or all, in cases where it's a tug of war) assumes and plays the role of a god. This creates an imbalance, in consequence of which our relationships become polluted by a lack of mutual respect and understanding, and a loss of mutual vulnerability key to building healthy and honest bonds. We're robbed of truthfulness, and in its place, mistrust breeds.

Because the pursuit of power requires lots of internal and external displays of falsehood, because we become fixated solely on being the one who makes the rules, because we seek to attain unconsented control over our loved ones, to take something at their expense, subject them to us against their knowledge and will, we become incapacitated from genuinely loving and creating spiritual bonds in which we and others are relaxed and safe. We let go of our unhealthy desire for power when we understand that when we truly love someone, we desire that they be free, subject to only themselves and others as they choose.

I recently read a short piece that more concisely presented the odds of Love and power in these exact words: "Love is about affection and respect; power is about control. The pursuit for power is absolutely corrupting. If Love is a factor in such instances, it's more likely Love of one's self than Love of others".

"… power leads man towards arrogance, … power narrows the areas of man's concern, … power corrupts, poetry cleanses..." - a really cut-out version of a quote credited to JFK found on Pinterest

The pursuit of power eats at the core of our relationship because power is, at its core, a crooked thing. It narrows the areas of our concerns. Shifting the dynamic of our relationships from one of mutual Love, mutual respect, and shared responsibility to a place of imbalance where we obsess over why we need to have our partners under our control and how we can manipulate them to achieve this and other selfish outcomes. It makes us suspicious and cynical of our partners' intentions and actions toward us— assuming that they are ill-intentioned because we assume that they, like us, must also have an agenda to take control and rule over us. It makes us arrogant because when we reach the consensus that we've achieved this goal, we get lazy about being loving— why try when this person is now under our rule, and we have dominion over them. Following this, mutual respect and responsibility fly out the window. We play god, our relationships are built on lies, we're in an imbalanced affair where Love no longer is the order of the day, our resting place is made out of a war zone, we're out of Love's grasp and on a battlefield.

Our preoccupation with attaining power messes up/redirects our focus, and we become less concerned with building healthy bonds and more concerned with attaining dominance over our loved ones. Whether it's economic, psychological, or physical power, our obsession with power uproots and takes us further from true Love's bosom.

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Definition of Key Phrases (used in the context of the piece).

1. Love: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. Love is as Love does. Love is an act of will- namely, both an intention and an action. To truly love, we must learn to mix various ingredients- care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust as well as honest and open communication. True Love involves more than a mere fixation on another person; rather, an individual’s orientation towards the world as a whole becomes altered when they are able to find this feeling within themselves. [Insights from: Erich Fromm, M Scott Peck, and Bell Hooks]

2. Power: Unconsented and forceful control over a person or thing attained through deception and psychological (also physical and material) manipulation. Also interchangeable with domination and subjugation.