I'm Changing My Mind about Love

A meandering journey into love, trauma, and personality disorders, told by an unreliable but healing narrator.

Last week I was musing on Instagram about the different attitudes to love we can see in the Four of Cups versus the Page of Cups. In the first, a man sits under a tree in meditation, his arms defensively crossed at his chest. His gaze is turned inward or lowered on the three golden cups at his feet, and so he is missing (or actively resisting) the fourth cup being handed to him by fate or divine intervention.

The second card tells a completely different story. Here we see a youthful figure holding up a cup with gusto and leaning closer towards the fish inside it. The fish itself appears just as keen, lifting its body towards the Page. It’s a playful scene; they look like they’re about to share a secret: psst, I’m not supposed to tell you, but the Princess from the kingdom next door has a crush on you!

“Naming love too early is a beautiful but harrowing human difficulty. Most of our heartbreak comes from attempting to name who or what we love and the way we love, too early in the vulnerable journey of discovery.” (David Whyte)

The Cups speak of emotion and our capacity to hold ourselves as well as to receive others into our hearts. And in sitting with these two cards, I realised how most often we find ourselves in the first one: we tend to have a good idea of what love needs to look like for us. We walk around with these moulds that filter who we get to love and how much love we get to receive from them. Maybe they need to have a certain type of curly hair, a specific taste in books or film, a certain faith or lack thereof, or a certain way of making us feel small and undeserving. The moulds are ancient and complex, and some of the details escape us–like how our ideal love needs to ache in a specific way that’s painful enough to keep us interested, but familiar enough to seem safe.

And then there’s the relationship itself. The mould will dictate how much intimacy we can bear, how much reassurance we need, how much of ourselves we’re willing to reveal. It feels safer this way because the mould keeps most of our anxiety at bay. If we hold them close enough they won’t leave us. If they’re far enough they won’t see how empty we feel inside. And if we keep this dance going for long enough, we’ll never have to face ourselves again.

So what happens when the hand of fate offers us an invitation to grow, guised as a someone who might love us in an unfamiliar way? What happens when we try to fit them in our mould but they resist it? To ditch the moulds feels too threatening to the internal structure–after all, it took decades to reinforce the intricate maze we built around our hearts in childhood, when the love we got from our parents was absent or worse. The walls of the maze are so tall and overgrown that we can’t even remember what they were protecting. They are all there is to see now. So we avert our gaze and stick with what we know.

I’m starting to think that the mould is a wound.

“Without realising it, most people become deadened to their emotions. Early in their lives they turn their backs on themselves, their real desires and wants, and substitute self-nourishing habits and fantasies that only serve to deaden them. They have ceased to want what they say they want because real gratifications and accomplishments threaten the process of self-nourishment through fantasy. Because they have been depending since childhood upon these fantasies to give them a sense of accomplishment, they cling to these fantasies rather than relinquish them for anything real. They shy away from success, both interpersonal and vocational, and limit themselves in countless ways. They act as their own jailers, and when they project this attitude, they become paranoid that others are depriving or victimising them. They are the victims of their own self-denial and withholding. In a sense, people are at the mercy of the defence system that they originally constructed to protect themselves when they were little.”

(Robert W. Firestone, The Fantasy Bond : Structure of Psychological Defences)