Could a person who's crashing out do this? [quotes Žižek]

Short reflections on love and being a whole person without it

As I type this I’m sitting on my couch, back home after a 2-cigarette night walk after sobbing my eyes out over my intimacy issues and fear of abandonment. It was brought about by a podcast episode about Carrie from Sex and the City and her relationship with money, which obviously ties into her complicated personal relationships in the show.

The past few months for me have been defined by heartbreak, alleged recovery, relapse back into anguish, actual (?) recovery, realizing I was using intimacy as an escapism from my reality, and realizing I was lacking in love for myself. I used to think the adage of “you can’t love anyone else until you love yourself” was bullshit but I’ve come around on it. It’s not as simple as it sounds on the surface, and I think it carries a fundamental truth.

One person who helped a lot with my understanding of love is, believe it or not, Slavoj Žižek. He believes that love is a catastrophic, violent event. Here we use the word “event” in the precise way that Žižek defines it in his book called Event,

“… something shocking, out of joint, that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things; something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation.”¹

Žižek continues to define “events” as miraculous and sublime events, stating that Christianity is evental as it requires belief in a single event (resurrection of Christ) and creates a circular relationship between believing in the religion and the reason for believing, “It is only when I believe that I can understand the reasons for belief.”² And then comes love:

“The same circular relationship holds for love: I do not fall in love for precise reasons (her lips, her smile…) — it is because I already love her that her lips, etc. attract me … [love] is a manifestation of a circular structure in which the evental effect retroactively determines its causes or reasons.”³

Now back to the catastrophic violence of love. Love is something that comes for you when you’re not looking for it, and when it hits it will completely disorient you, quite often make you feel insane, and change you fundamentally. And while you obviously don’t have to be perfect to find love, nay, part of loving someone is loving imperfections (as per Žižek), you do have to have things about you that another person can love. Another person won’t love a person who lacks substance in all areas but is desperately seeking a “better half,” someone with no hobbies or interests and who can’t talk about anything with you. To have someone fall in love with you, you need to be a whole person. Being a whole person basically requires some form of self-love. Part of loving yourself is leaning into the things you love or the things you want to achieve, be it a hobby, your work, whatever passions you have that aren’t necessarily romantic or sexual relationships.

That’s where I think the truth comes in with being unable to love others until you love yourself. How are you supposed to truly love another person and foster a loving relationship if you don’t have the self-respect and self-love to occupy yourself with things other than finding love? Love can’t be the ultimate goal of ones’ life, no matter what romance novels and romantic comedies try to sell you on. Romantic and sexual love, while important for many, are not the most important things out there, because they work in tandem with love for the self, love for ones passions, ambition and passion for the things that make you whole. Who on earth would want to have a conversation with someone who has nothing to say other than how much they like you? And if you can’t even have a profound conversation with a person, can you ever really love them, or can you only ever idealize them?

In my own desperation to escape from how unfulfilled I felt, I have often leaned on relationships and finding love or intimacy as a way of filling that void (no pun intended), rather than finding purpose and fulfillment in things that are much less fleeting and dependent on another’s feelings for me. When I got dumped a few months ago I realized I was lacking in so many areas that I had been ignoring in pursuit of love, affection, attention, etc., that when I was completely alone without this person to lean on in any way, I felt empty, alone, and hopeless. Not only was I deeply invested in a very one-sided quasi-romantic relationship, but my obsession with making it work and with rationalizing my staying in it kept me from being a whole human being worth loving. And in retrospect, I idealized them, maybe I didn’t even truly love them.

I am still struggling a lot with my dating life and my feelings despite understanding all of this, trying not to get deeply invested in people or jump into things too fast because I’m afraid of being alone, and trying to make sure I am focusing more on things I love like reading, writing, drawing, music, friendship, community, organizing, my career goals, planning a stable future that isn’t dependent on anyone but myself. I may know all the things I know in a rational way but I am, as all humans are, deeply irrational. All I can hope for is that those moments of intense fear and anguish, this fear of being hurt, a fear of being abandoned, a fear of losing my sense of self and purpose in pursuit of love, become less frequent as I actually work toward the things that truly matter the most to me.

1. Žižek, Slavoj. Event. Penguin Books, 2014. p. 2

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.