So interesting.
Firstly:
When violent quarrels take place.
They don’t take place the way thunderstorms or solar eclipses take
place.
This should read:
When people quarrel violently.
That simple rewording changes everything.
If it’s happening, it’s because it’s perceived as beneficial. The perception
may be wrong, but why else does a person ever do anything? Because it seems
the best of the available options.
The thing about violent quarrelling, when I’ve done it, it’s because I love
it. It’s not my problem. It’s my solution to my powerlessness.
Until quarrellers recognise how much in love they are with quarrelling,
and repudiate that love, the quarrelling will continue. The real love affair is
with being right, and using that rightness to defeat the other person, as if
salvation resides in their demise.
Second point:
... their intense involvement with each other ... is what interferes
with the relationship.
There is a pathetic fallacy that, to have intimacy with a person, you have
to be up in their business, and they, up in in yours. Checking each others’
phones, questioning each other’s motives, thinking about each other the whole
time.
Of course, this isn’t intimacy with the person: it’s intimacy with
delusional fantasies about this other that is the source of all rescue and,
when that fails, the source of all woe. Each person has constructed an
avatar, and the avatars are fighting. Meanwhile, the people are trapped, on
their own, behind the avatars, in utter, desolate solitude.
When I’ve been deeply involved in this way, I’m always lonely, even
when I’m with them. Because what we have is not intimacy. It’s ego
entanglement. The actual person is left out in the cold, back of the
entanglement.
If you want to understand the road layout of a city, you have to fly above
it. To appreciate a statue, you have to stand back from it. To love a person,
you have to stand back from them. Then you can see them.