BIPOLAR LOVE
10 NOVEMBER 2022 (19 MIN READ)
In everyone’s love journey there exists a commonality which is too often ignored: a battle between choosing someone whose love you need to earn versus someone who already deeply loves you as you are. In terms of an example, consider the women who repeatedly go for men who are notoriously assholes, while secretly, with some shame, romantically engaging with a nice guy who adores them behind the scenes, sometimes even marrying the nice guy once they feel burned out from all the assholes. Now take the men who chase women over and over again who treat them terribly and don’t make them a priority. Eventually, after multiple broken hearts and exhaustion, they find a nice girl who loves them as they are and ride off into the sunset. For my LGBT folk out there, you can find similar situations in almost every possible relationship, with any combination of sexuality or gender. My man is really trying not to get canceled.
On the surface, as you can see through these examples, human beings have a tendency to split between needing to feel loved by proving something and feeling loved for existing as they are. This reality manifests as a woman proving to the narcissistic asshole that he really loves her, or the man proving to the crazy bitch that he’s what she needed all along, while also deeply craving someone who loves them for exactly who they are at the same time. All that for nothing… canceled! This is what I call bipolar love: feeling the need to prove worthiness for love, while also desperately needing to feel loved as one is. And unless you had a perfect childhood, there’s a chance that all of us find, or have found ourselves, engaging with this form of affection. But what exactly causes it?
ADDICTION TO PROVING WORTHINESS
Let’s begin by unpacking why we possess this addiction to needing to prove ourselves to receive love. At some point in our childhoods, whether it be with a parent or peers, we learned that our authenticity, or who we were deep down, was not enough to receive love, so we started to create a certain persona in order to get the right dose of what we needed as children. In terms of this split stemming from a parent, if one of our parents pushed us away for being ourselves and only showed us love when we suited their emotional needs, such as being playful when they were depressed or becoming invisible when they were stressed out, then we developed the habit of associating receiving love with needing to split from our authentic selves. Similarly, if we did not fit into our group of peers at school, then we learned to adapt ourselves to present a version of self that was more appealing. The girls at my school would laugh at me for being fat, so I once drew a six-pack on my stomach with a sharpie. For some reason they laughed even more… This presentation becomes more costly, in terms of love, when the person you’re attracted to does not accept your authenticity. As you can see, our need to feel loved by putting on a persona stemmed from a childhood experience where one’s authenticity did not get them love, breeding a mind that has a hard time associating love with unconditional acceptance. Portraying this experience with brutal honesty, consider Kanye West’s words in his masterful song, “Runaway” (I do not condone West’s recent, deeply hateful sentiments. I am merely using these lyrics to shine a light on the reality of a wounded soul):
“See, I could have me a good girl
And still be addicted to them hoodrats…
Baby I got a plan
Run away fast as you can”
Without delving into the racial connotations of “hoodrats,” what does Ye really mean by that word? In my eyes, it suggests a certain type of female who is chaotic, unpredictable, and is easily enchanted by status and money. In contrast to “a good girl,” who predictably loves a man as he is, without needing him to be something outside of himself, the “hoodrats” require a man to scrap his authenticity and create allure off of a persona that isn’t in exact alignment with his core. In other words, “a good girl” loves a man for all that he is, while “hoodrats” only deliver affection based on a mask of success, which at best is also unpredictable and filled with drama. In the song, Kanye is describing this split between having a good woman at home who loves him unconditionally, but also possessing a deep desire to go out and engage in the dance of receiving love for a persona that does not derive from authenticity—potentially reflecting his split childhood experience of having a loving mother who fed his grandiosity and female peers who were probably put off by his awkwardness and symptoms of being a savant. This split is so extreme that Ye concludes with the fact that good women should “run away as fast as [they] can,” since he knows that this addiction to receive love for a performance will never leave his mind. Or maybe the fact that he once said, “My greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.”
What makes this mindset interesting is that real bipolarity, in my opinion, stems from needing to split as a child between two people to receive love. And as Ye is famously attached to the disorder, it makes perfect sense that his degree of bipolar love is on the extreme scale. But how can it be that someone like Ye can have the person of their dreams waiting for them and still want to destroy that? Part of the answer is reflective of childhood experiences, but the whole truth goes much deeper than that.
TOLERATING DIVINE LOVE
Regardless of whatever religion you follow, or lack thereof, everyone should agree that love is a magical force that anyone can breathe in at any moment, if they choose to do so. Just a simple twenty minutes of deep breathing while feeling your heart and thinking of people you love can land you in a transcendental state of complete bliss and gratitude. To me, this is divinity at work. And no, I’m not talking about a man in the sky barking orders. Rather, I am referring to a universal state of love that any of us can tap into. However, this tapping in requires surrendering from how you think something should be going, into loving whatever is. And unfortunately, as egoistic and stubborn human beings, we can never surrender and breathe in the love that already exists as life is. Sounds like me when my dog farts. Instead, we settle for only feeling love when everything is going exactly the way the egoistic “I” wants it to go. But why am I rambling on about all this? Because our inability to surrender to the unconditional love provided by the divine transfers to our inability to tolerate a magical person who shows up in our lives and loves us for everything we are. Hence, a rejection of this sort of lover reflects a habitual rejection of the divine.
I don’t think we fully understand how rare it is to find someone who loves everything about us. Sure, they may suggest we work on a specific part of ourselves at times, but no matter what stage of our life we reside in within the present moment, their unconditional love is always a constant. Being the love nerd that I am, having talked to many people about being in a relationship with someone like this, almost all of them say that this person was a one in a billion, yet many of them lost that person through either cheating or getting “bored,” later regretting those decisions deeply and living in misery. Maybe blame the soppy romantic in me, but in my heart, I know that for every one of us out there, there is someone who loves us unconditionally. And a big part of our mission on this plane is allowing that person to find us and surrender into their love. Why?
Their unconditional love serves as a symbol of the love of the divine: a power so strong that any of us can surrender into it at any given moment and feel the beauty of being alive. If we boil down our moments of feeling connected to everything that is, whether it be people or nature, we are in a state of complete love. Or, maybe taking in a state of, “I just took three tabs of acid.” Thus, love is the energy that feeds into our true interconnected nature that we have lost touch with. By feeling loved for everything that you are, that force can allow you to return home—towards a state of complete connection with everything that is. So, for each of us, that lover who embodies divine love is allowing us to return home to the source of everything, which in my eyes is the mission of this life. As Ram Dass says, “We’re all just walking each other home.” And that home is a state of complete love, which our soul mate will hold our hand and get us to better than anyone or anything else. But what exactly is getting in the way of us surrendering to this divine beauty?
The projections of our ego and suffering create a state of identity that wants everything to go a certain way to overcompensate for that pain, making it impossible to surrender into a state of love, where we accept everything as it is, not in the way we want it to go. As explained in the previous section, if you learned to receive love by having to play a role outside of yourself as a child, then you learned to associate love with scrapping your authenticity, creating a reality as an adult where you feel compelled to chase people who don’t love you as you are. This chasing involves repeated attempts of manipulation, where you keep trying new appearances to see which one will get you the love you so badly need. Attempting to try a new appearance, I once went to a club wearing my new fedora and ordered a cosmopolitan, but all I got were a couple of gay guys smacking my ass. Thus, this way of loving becomes synonymous with control, where you want everything to go in the way you are attempting to make it go, which involves no surrendering at all. When surrender is thrown out the window in our venture for love, we begin to reject the love in the air that loves us as we are, and opt for attempting to create love from a state of control instead. This contradiction creates a split between receiving divine love versus love manifested from the egoistic “I”. We cannot tolerate the love of the magical person who finds us and loves us for all that we are if we feel the need to control for love, acting from the ego instead of the heart. That person is asking us to surrender to their love and all we can do is run away because it seems so foreign. Given that this habitual fleeing from divine love becomes so costly, such as cheating on an amazing partner and ruining a family, how do we learn to return home to a state of unconditional love? Where we cannot only tolerate it with a smile, but learn to perpetually bathe in its beauty.
THE JOURNEY HOME
The first step in learning how to unconditionally love is to learn how to surrender to the unconditional love in the air. Has this guy gone insane, or is it me? Contrary to the beliefs of the religious zealots, this surrender is not as simple as throwing your hands to the sky and yelling, “Praise Jesus!” I wish it was that simple, but the reality is a lot more demanding and challenging. There are three components to learning how to surrender to the divine: gratitude, embodiment, and fixing expectations. The first one is the easiest on the list. To start practicing gratitude, you must have a daily committed practice, while also nurturing a guiding voice in your mind. The daily practice consists of getting in a state where your ego is running the show as little as possible, such as being deep in a meditation or flow state while creating, and speaking out everything in your life that you are grateful for, but make sure to focus on the energetic vibration of that gratitude more than the words themselves while you do so. And you don’t need to do this while thinking of a white man in the sky, but rather a loving energy that fills the air and grants us the ability to create magic from our consciousness. In terms of nurturing the guiding voice of gratitude, notice how your brain often focuses on what’s lacking in your life versus what you have. When you catch a thought of lack, hear it with kind compassion, but also add something you are grateful to have. The more you do this, the more you will feel like some inexplicable energy in the air has your back, making you more likely to surrender into its love.
Next, and this is the hardest one, you must learn to surrender to your body over your mind. If we live at the mercy of our thoughts, then we will be continuously pulled in multiple different directions every minute, resulting in a life of chaotic confusion. However, when we learn to live as the observer, where we can watch our thoughts float into consciousness, we are less reactive and can remain neutral throughout the day. The key way to become this observer is to live through the consciousness of the body, away from the mind and its survival-based thoughts. A mentor of mine would tell me “be where your feet are.” What started off as a weird statement that could have reflected a foot fetish gradually became a way of life for me, where a grounded connection with my body became the ideal place to live my life from. If you have ever taken psychedelics or gotten pretty drunk, you know this blissful feeling of living from the body, but you can learn to cultivate it naturally.
The first way to do this is to start communicating with it, such as noticing the sensations in your body and tending to those needs. That crazy lady on my corner who kept yelling at her vagina to smell better had it right all along! This relationship could look like feeling your lower back tighten and stretching it out, or noticing your stomach is unhappy and shifting your diet to soothe it. This may sound simple, but you would be surprised as to how much we live in complete ignorance to the needs of the body. Once the body starts feeling cared for and not forgotten, it will begin opening up to you and offering its safe embrace. To actually capitalize off this warm invitation, you must sacrifice time to snuggle into its cocoon, which entails doing a meditation with your feet grounded and breathing deeply into its caring love, away from the nagging of the egoistic mind. The main reason this embodiment is so crucial for learning how to surrender is that it pulls you away from the egoistic calls of the mind and into a state of embracing the present moment—a state needed for surrender.
In terms of the third step—fixing your expectations—how can you surrender if you’re always trying to control how things will turn out? No matter what we plan on doing, our minds will always talk to us about how it should go. This mental conversation could look like playing out scenarios of certain interactions before a dinner party and what could happen if a certain person goes off on a triggering belief system they possess. Before every family dinner, I pray that my great-grandpa doesn’t talk about Hilary Clinton eating babies. On a more mundane level, before we go off to the supermarket, thinking of what foods they might run out of or if the butcher will give us attitude that day. Even though this may seem harmless due to how often our minds do this, it is anything but. When we are constantly playing out how things could go and preparing for the danger that may come, we are living life from a place of fear. Essentially, if we follow this train of thought, our brains believe that every situation has the potential to threaten our safety, so we live with our guards constantly up.
When we lose these expectations and walk into life events without all the mental stories, it means that we feel a certain safety within us, suggesting that what drives the mental machine of constant expectations is mass anxiety buried deep into our unconscious. Since we cannot surrender if we always live in fear, learning to live life away from this conscious anxiety is a step one needs to take. And one of the biggest stepping stones is trying one’s hardest to not live life in the future, time-traveling in their minds to how things could go and how that potential reality may threaten their livelihood. To escape the future tripping, a gentle reminder to go into the body and surrender to the divine, loving intelligence in the air will go a long way, especially when repeatedly stated to the mind over and over again. (A personal investigation into one’s trauma stuck in the body is also essential to overcoming anxiety. To learn how to do this, check out this article I wrote).
It may be easy to start practicing these three pillars—gratitude, embodiment, and expectation shifting—but how do we make sure they become a reality, and not just a week-long adventure you take on and forget about. Like that gym membership you got on New Year’s and never used. Don’t lie! Once these pillars become a reality in your personal ecosystem, surrendering to the divine love in the air, and consequently the unconditional love of our one and only, becomes an easier feat to accomplish.
STAYING HOME
Although the phrase is repeated by way too many “spiritual” narcissists, you really do have to learn to love yourself before you can soak in the love of others, especially the love of the divine and your partner. Albeit the steps above are important to immediately implement, they should coincide with a practice of building up one’s worthiness, where you can be in a state to receive love because you feel genuinely worthy of it. With a higher level of worthiness, the steps above will have a much higher chance of staying implemented, as the loving feelings elicited from the practices will not seem so foreign and undeserving. The fastest and best way to develop this feeling of worthiness is to learn to love yourself as you are, not as you do. Or, telling yourself, “You go girl,” whenever you do absolutely anything. Due to the hyper-capitalistic structure of society we find ourselves in, we are fooled to believe that all our worth is tied to what we produce. Furthermore, as our parents grew up in this system, they unfortunately showed us more bouts of love when we did things well, such as getting a good grade or putting on an amazing athletic performance. Or if you were me, wearing High School Musical pajamas and dancing to Gwen Stefani. This teaches us at a young age that the highest forms of love come when we do things. This habitual seeking of love out of our production makes us believe that we are unloveable as we are. In other words, we think that we are unworthy of love by just being. And if you feel unworthy of love for just being, you feel unworthy of love for who you really are: your authentic self. Shifting this unfortunate aftereffect of being raised in a toxic culture is a must for developing a sense of unwavering worthiness, where you can accept the divine love in the air and the divine love from your one and only for just being yourself.
In terms of what to do to actually feel loved as you are, a consistent meditation practice where you can sacrifice at least twenty minutes to just breathe and accept yourself is essential. When we can put all our doingness aside and not only just sit with ourselves, but also feel completely ok with that, we gradually teach ourselves that our inherent value does not have to be tied to external activities, as our essence stays with us no matter where we are. A meditation practice will help you feel that essence and learn to love it as it exists. Alongside this practice, learning to identify and detach from the thoughts and sensations that come with feeling the need to do something to feel loved are important as well. And lastly, tolerating the painful feeling of needing to do something to be loved, without any distractions, will help clear that energy from the body. In action, this could look like observing a thought on your day off that says, “You should do unnecessary work, so you can feel appreciated.” Although you can choose to do the work eventually as you have free will, investigating the sensation underneath that thought is crucial before you do anything. Sitting with that feeling of unworthiness and having compassion for that inner child who bred that learned feeling will set you free, in the sense of allowing that stuck energy to be seen and heard, which is a prerequisite for allowing it to dissipate from your body.
Once you are doing the three practices as well as learning to love yourself as you are, you will inevitably hit a dip, where all the past feelings and thoughts that caused you harm will resurface and tempt you like that cupcake on your kitchen counter. If one’s mind has repeated the same stories and feelings for so long, when those feelings and thought patterns shift, it will freak out, have an identity crisis, and try to bring you down with it. Kind of like a Karen when they have to wait in line for longer than five minutes. This chaotic downfall can look like intense feelings of unworthiness, ingratitude, pervasive negative thoughts, and terrible expectations of the future. To avoid these painful sensations and accompanying thoughts, you may get tempted to go out and engage in your old destructive habits, such as flirting with the “hoodrats,” as Kanye says, engaging in workaholism, or taking a drug to soothe the pain. These moments are when we are really tested. I like to imagine these tough times as the boss stage of a video game, where all your skills are put to the test and you have to defeat the angry dragon. To defeat this fire-breathing dragon—going back to your old, destructive ways of rejecting internal and external love—you must remove all your distractions, go inside yourself, and lovingly be with all the pain that is coming up. This beingness entails fully feeling the negative emotions and observing the crazy thoughts that come with them, but also feeling your heart and coating those thoughts and feelings with extreme compassion. Although this will be one hell of a challenge, there is no way you can avoid it and defeating the dragon will deliver you peace and love like you have never felt before. To mitigate the risk of future similar dragons, keep these practices perpetually going, especially when things are going well, which is when most of us throw them out the door.
Lastly, and sorry to pile on to the list, once you start feeling like you can surrender to the divine love in the air and to that of your partner’s, you need to be able to return the favor. My friend’s girlfriend always tells him to return the favor in bed. When he tells her he’ll do the dishes in the morning, she just takes out her vibrator. I didn’t know women loved dishes that much… In actuality, your ability to feel as much love as you can is only so you can give it right back to the world, creating a powerful cycle of give and take. And this ability to give it right back should apply to your romantic partner, who deserves your unconditional love more than anyone else, as they have been so giving with theirs to you. Similar to your romantic partner, giving love back to the divine energy that handed it to you is also a beautiful and necessary experience. This can look like walking out in nature, feeling your heart expand, and sending that energy to the divine beauty all around you. The more you engage with this act of receiving and giving love, the more you will feel blessed and grateful beyond your wildest dreams.
