Adult Relationships: Love, Lust and Everything in Between.

I posted this as a comment to Ary Nunez's Love/Lust post. I feel so strongly about it that I've posted it as an independent blog entry:
Hi, Ary. I admire the honesty and passion with which you wrote your post. You carried me away with you as I read it. I've been there before.
Love and lust are powerful. A lot of hurt and interpersonal atrocities have been committed in the name of love and lust; nations have gone to war over them (much like religion). If love is supposed to be this uplifting, magical state, then why does it leave so many people feeling inadequate, emotionally eviscerated and scarred, lonely, angry and resentful? Perhaps what so many people call love isn't really love at all, but some warped definition of an unrealistic romantic ideal that can only exist in fairy tales and brooding 19th-century literature?
I've only had two relationships in which I felt like I "couldn't live" without the other person. Both were in my early 20s. Every now and again, I read my journals from back then and always ask myself the same question, "What the f%#k was I thinking?" The answer, of course, is I wasn't thinking. I so easily surrendered my late adolescent/young adult identity to these two guys because I didn't know who I was yet. It's easier to seek your identity in another person then it is to develop one of your own. You're absolved of personal responsibility and choice if everything you are and everything you do is contingent upon another person.
Living through those two relationships was like going through a crucible. It was incredibly painful. I went through bouts of depression, too, and avoided relationships altogether for quite a few years after. Unlike you, I didn't experience total surrender as exhilaration; I experienced it as annihilation.
Nothing is forever. What happens when the relationship unravels and you've completely surrendered your identity to another person? Psychologically speaking, you don't exist anymore. At this stage in my development, it strikes me as a largely unhealthy proposition. I am who I am and I like who I am. I don't want to "lose" myself in another person.
I hear clichés like "there's no you and me; only we" and "two hearts beating as one" and I roll my eyes and shake my head. Don't get me wrong. I wholeheartedly believe in full physical surrender. The bedroom (or where ever else the spirit moves you) is the right place to completely merge and meld; outside of sex, probably not. A relationship is between two people; not "one" heart and mind. Sounds a little schizophrenic, doesn't it?
One heart and mind translates into: "You have to have the same dislikes and likes as me; you have to feel the same things at the exact same time as me; you have to want to spend all of your time with me; you can't have other friends; if I want to go shopping and you want to watch football it's the end of the world; I can't function on my own without you." In psycho-speak, that's co-dependence.
I'm a strong personality and highly individualistic. What others think generally don't sway me. I'm not a "people pleaser." I do what I believe is right, even when it flies in the face of popular opinion. The "two hearts beat as one" view of relationships in an unrealistic, adolescent one. Many people never progress past this belief of how love "should be." It's is an unattainable ideal, which leaves many people forever disappointed and in emotional ruin.
Passion without reason is chaos. Reason without passion is robot-ville. I want both and believe it's possible in an adult version of a love relationship. I'm me and you're you and together we're you and I. It's okay to disagree, to have different interests, to do your own thing and be your own person. The relationship is a secure base from which two strong individuals operate. It allows for freedom and independence of thought for two people who are passionate about these matters and serves to strengthen the relationship. It enriches the relationship because individual differences are accepted and embraced rather than perceived as a threat. You grow together instead of apart.
Of course, as with everything in life, it's easier said than done, but one lives in hope...
TJP