Oskar Holzberg: What love really means

Oscar Holzberg
what love means

In short: There are simpler remarks about love, but few wiser. Our reality is full of illusions, also in love.

Now in detail: “Helga, please tell me what you think Catarina found so attractive about you that she entered into a relationship with you. And you, Catarina, please tell me what you think makes Helga so attractive You thought she chose you!” We couples therapists like to ask questions that remind a couple of their better days and the overwhelming feelings they had for each other back then. But these questions also remind us that we don’t live with the people who are so close and familiar to us, but with the image we have of them.

This already explains the second half of Lacan’s quote. The partner with whom we live does not exist.He or she only exists in our imagination. He or she is an image that we have made. A fantasy through which reality breaks through again and again like sunbeams through a cloud cover. Or vice versa: in which the clouds of our inner images keep pushing themselves in front of the sunlight of reality – depending on whether we benevolently idealize our counterpart or ascribe terrible qualities to him/her.

Of course it’s a two-way process: I have an image of you, you have an image of me. What we perceive in it is essentially determined by our longings, desires, expectations and needsthat we have to have a love relationship. And they’re not exactly small, and they all follow the tune “You are my whole life”.

The Dilemma of Love

We all want to live with our great love. With the person who loves us unconditionally and who we can love unconditionally. This puts us in a dilemma. Because it means that in order for us to really be loved unconditionally, we have to be pretty awesome ourselves, which means we have to be the most beautiful, the smartest, the sexiest, and the most empathetic. We would also like to be, but we are not. On the contrary.

If we look at ourselves honestly, shouldn’t we strongly discourage anyone we truly love from getting involved with such an imperfect, contradictory, flawed individual as we are? Instead we do our best. Superman and Superwoman try to be for each other. Some Botox here, a portion of six-pack there and always a cannon in bed. Who’s the fairest of them all? Who is the greatest who has it right? You and me!

We know it’s not true, but we fulfill it anyway. We give each other what we don’t have. The all-encompassing love that doesn’t exist. But which we long for because we may have felt it as a unit in our mother’s womb or because we came close to it in the self-sacrificing love of our parents.

Would you like to feel a little more reality? Then ask each other questions like: what four qualities do you think I appreciate most in you? You may find that you don’t have to work so hard because you give what you don’t have.

Oscar Holzberg has been treating and writing about couples for almost 30 years. He says: “Love is not an illusion, but we have too many illusions about love.”

Bridget