Love is Universal Migraine ~ by Chris Yeomans

There are many different kinds of love – romantic, physical, spiritual, universal – each kind prompting a connection with something both inside and outside of ourselves. But love can also be ‘tricky’, requiring a certain groundedness and insight, as Chris Yeomans explores in her piece, Love is Universal Migraine

“Love is universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.”

I found myself recently quoting this poem by Robert Graves to a friend and it set me pondering. Love, being ‘in love’, seems to cause more problems than it solves.  Nigel Slater recently said in a radio interview that the thing he most didn’t want to be was ‘in love.’

Like so many I guess, I fell in love and got married (albeit at an unusually advanced age!) and slowly, or not so slowly, the shine wore off.  It became possible to see how far I was projecting qualities onto someone, based on the flimsiest of evidence, that I couldn’t possibly know for sure.  And that in its turn leads me to the thought that we can’t possibly know anything for sure, least of all the shifting and changing realities of another person.

I am ‘in love’ with Stanley Tucci. I am ‘in love’ with Monty Don.  I was once ‘in love’ with Inspector Morse and he is a completely fictional character. All of this is fantasy, based on an idea of what those people would be like if I were to meet them or marry them.  I am inclined to be hard on myself and dismiss it all as rubbish, but the same friend referred to above suggested that it would be more helpful to look at the triggers behind these thoughts.  What is it that hooks me in to certain individuals and what might it show me about myself?

The same can also  happen with spiritual teachers, particularly those who wear robes or other garments that signal their spiritual authority and the promise of some form of ‘enlightenment’. All sorts of different feelings get conjured up (robes being much like uniforms and we know that “every nice girl loves a sailor.”).  But when we see these scarlet and gold robed beings in their slightly old-fashioned, brown,‘going out’ clothes, we sometimes get a very different idea.  There is a balance of course, a middle way.  Awareness must, as with most things, be the key.

But how much does this happen all the time in daily life?  We meet someone and we decide instantly whether we would get on with them or not.  John Cleese in his book ‘Families and How to Survive Them’ says that we pick up tiny signals that give us clues about what we might have in common with a person, even ‘across a crowded room.’  If this is true, then our reactions might not be so random.

But the interesting part is discovering what can be relied upon and what cannot in the picture that we have built up of another person.  Years of friendship uncovers what seems genuine and real.  A brief acquaintance may never reveal any truths, relative or not.

So the moral to all this?  We will probably always judge a book by its cover, but it’s worth reading a few chapters before we are sure of what we are dealing with.