When I first met him, I was lulled by euphoric waves of MDMA but it was better than a pill because I was sober and awake. In the mountains of Northern Thailand, we spent every night together. Our words allowed me to meet dormant parts of myself I'd willingly neglected. Our sex brought me to the fifth dimension. Our joy was a dirty fantastic holiness.
He was a world traveler with a youthful boyish energy. He wore all black and rode a 400cc motorcycle. He hired a professor for private philosophy classes and had an ex Marine teach him jujitsu. He was embodied and primal in his movements with an eight pack and biceps the size of my head. He read Aristotle and wrote up his own theory of ethics which we debated.
He fed stray dogs on the street. He called his Russian mother every night to check on her. He was contemplative and non-emotive in his suffering. He taught himself how to code during the afternoons and enjoyed solitude even more than I did. Most importantly, he was kind and soft spoken.
From these small pieces of information I concocted an image of him as a demigod. I knew all images were static and my mental snap shot wasn’t reality, but I wanted this fantasy desperately. My mind filled in the spaces between us and imagined the appropriate colors to fill in the gaps, attempting to neatly close it. I wanted perfection.
He was part himself, and part what I hoped for him to be. He could do no wrong because he was the truest figure of what a man could amount to. I loved him madly and stupidly within the span of two weeks.
The father of psychoanalysis, Stephen A. Mitchell says this idealization is necessary at the start of romance. The reason for the idealization phase is to allow the couple to move forward into the relationship without being weighted by the other's flaws. It gives the lover blind faith to go on because love is asking for just that. If we saw one other fully from the start, it would be too paralyzing to continue.
So it was okay that I paid no attention to the potentially irritating way my beloved was fifteen minutes late to dinners. Idealization allowed me to overlook his chaotic indecisiveness for future plans. My idea of him let me ignore his messy bedroom and unkemptness. Love let me fixate on all that I loved in him.
In the book Can Love Last? Mitchell states that idealization becomes dangerous if the relationship stays in that dreamy place. It can become a delusion, not seeing a person in their wholeness. This turns into a projective dance and a fundamental argument against reality. We suffer because we demand something that the beloved can't give to us, for it isn't within them, we created it in our minds.
When the illusion finally shattered, I saw that my beloved was not a God, but a painfully confused, yet totally beautiful man. Lust made him shiny, but love made him real.
Over time, his flaws became apparent, and the real effort of love commenced. It was easy to love a man I perceived as better than me, but could I love someone who was as broken and faulted as I was?
All I could do was try, and the trying has no ending point.
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